LRS
Low resolution
For the first LRS of 2025, it seemed appropriate to start with a post about New Year’s resolutions. Daniel B, the author of the Substack Soup of the Night, wants to blog more, after finding that he had written only 11 posts over the last year and a half: “I am quite satisfied,” he writes. But nonetheless, it’s “a fairly modest amount of writing.” So he has resolved, in 2025, to up his quantity. But unusually, he has written a resolution with caveats.
He compares two imagined resolutions: Bob’s, “I will not order food delivery,” and Alice’s, “I will not order food delivery or eat out [unless] out with friends. I can… visit a coffeeshop once a week… and the McDonald’s drive-thru is fine.” The first is elegant, sure: But the second may be more effective. It’s harder to create post-hoc excuses — hey, it’s my birthday week! — since the loopholes are explicit. As a result, Daniel will aim for 13 posts in 2025; all except one must be 700+ words; and he will post at least once a month. If he misses a month, the year’s total goes up by one. Check back in 2026 to see how he did, perhaps?
Glass half full, of something
“I’m a cultural pessimist and techno-optimist,” writes the usually gloomy politics and culture writer Ed West. “Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, I believe that it won’t be too long before we’re all living to 300 — and spending most of it drooling into our phones as we gaze at TikTok.” In his last post of 2024 he took a moment to look beyond relentless negative headlines to be uncharacteristically positive. “The 2020s haven’t been entirely perfect so far,” he says, but we are “living in an age of miracles and wonder,” particularly when it comes to medicine.
In recent years, gene editing has rendered previously intractable diseases such as sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis treatable. In 2024, huge breakthroughs were made against killers such as nut allergies, HIV, lung, cervical, skin and other cancers, and diabetes — the latter in which a woman was apparently cured using genetically edited stem cells taken from her own body. He quotes Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and says “be thankful to live in such a time of miracles and magic.” He promises that his “normal doom-mongering pessimism will return” after the holidays.
Bob’s your uncle
Robert Peel was home secretary of Great Britain just before Queen Victoria’s reign, in the early 19th century. At that time, Britain was changing fast — rapid economic transformation and population growth, plus falling real wages. Predictably, the former British civil servant Steven Webb writes, “disorder and rapidly rising crime” resulted. Peel, though, changed things, and his record “was nothing short of extraordinary.”
He created London’s Metropolitan Police — to this day, police officers are known in Britain as “Bobbies,” and in Ireland as “Peelers” — along lines that still form the basis of policing around the English-speaking world. He inherited a criminal justice system which “combined savagery with randomness,” and both simplified and liberalized it, removing the death penalty for many crimes. He reformed the civil service and moved to end the nepotistic patronage system. He was arguably, says Webb, “the most radical and consequential reformer of the entire nineteenth century,” a fact made all the more remarkable given that his department had just 17 staff.