Each week, the Sunday Post highlights just a few things we loved reading and want to share with you. Settle in with a cup of coffee, or tea, if that's your pleasure — we saved you a seat! Read an essay or an article online that you loved? Let us know at submissions@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Need more browse? You can also look through the archives.

This week found me reading a series of bleak but thought-provoking pieces on growth, decline, and political posturing in U.S. society.

The Age of Decadence

Ross Douthat, in an excerpt from his book, The Decadent Society, sketches a portrait of the U.S. as a nation not in decline, but in stagnation. In his view, our politics, technical innovations, art, and culture are all signs of a decadent society, canaries in a coal mine that warn not of impending disaster but of a steady state of ineffectualness and gridlock. Things are fine-ish but they feel horrible partly because progress has not kept pace with expectations based on the breakneck speed of innovations and improvements in the country's past. The piece dives into many aspects of life, and there's a lot to unpack and argue over, but I found it thought-provoking as a frame to consider some of the disappointments and malaise of the last decade.

A contributing factor, Douthat argues, is that most of the innovation in recent years has been digital, not material. We’ve seen diminishing returns in scientific research and medicine while being flooded with a bubble's worth of apps that help us do everything from chatting seamlessly with our friends to hiring a dog walker. He lists off some of the overinflated promises of the past decade (one of which is still going strong, despite never having turned a profit): Fyre Fest, Theranos, and Uber. Douthat doesn't dwell on the fact that most of the profits go into a rarified set of pockets concentrated in tech hubs, but that was top-of-mind for me while reading this piece.

The truth of the first decades of the 21st century, a truth that helped give us the Trump presidency but will still be an important truth when he is gone, is that we probably aren’t entering a 1930-style crisis for Western liberalism or hurtling forward toward transhumanism or extinction. Instead, we are aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer optimistic about the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we await some saving innovation or revelation, growing old unhappily together in the light of tiny screens.

Can We Have Prosperity without Growth?

Where Ross Douthat's piece focuses on the stagnation plaguing our society and mostly eschews environmental concerns, John Cassidy’s review of recent books and viewpoints on sustainable growth leans into an environmentalist view of growth and engages with questions about whether economic growth can be compatible with environmental policies. Do the U.S. and other wealthy countries need to embrace slow growth to mitigate environmental disaster, and can the economy keep growing forever, decoupled from environmental damage? My instinct is that it’s not possible to have continued growth without paying a price, but the piece explores many sides of the argument and some proposed solutions.

After a century in which G.D.P. per person has gone up more than sixfold in the United States, a vigorous debate has arisen about the feasibility and wisdom of creating and consuming ever more stuff, year after year. On the left, increasing alarm about climate change and other environmental threats has given birth to the “degrowth” movement, which calls on advanced countries to embrace zero or even negative G.D.P. growth.

Passion Isn't Enough: The Rise of 'Political Hobbyism' in the United States

The next piece made me take a hard look at how I consume news. In the newest episode of the NPR podcast “Hidden Brain,” Shankar Vedantam interviews political scientist Eitan Hersh about what he sees as the growth of political hobbyism, or treating politics as a fun diversion without doing actual work to effect change. This episode also dovetails well with the politics section of Douthat's piece about decadence, if you feel like putting them in conversation. Hersh sees it as more convenient than ever to use politics as shallow self-expression rather than as a tool for improving our community. It's easy to follow news that's sensational and tweet about it. It is much harder to slog through information about local housing bylaws and pester your local government to make changes.

What news do political junkies demand? Outrage and gossip. Why? Because it's alluring. What news do we avoid? Local news. Why? It's boring. What do we think of our partisan opponents? We hate them. Do we really hate them? No, but politics is more fun if we root for a team and spew anger at the other side. It's easier to hate and dismiss the other side than to empathize and connect to them. When do we vote? When there's a spectacle. When do we click? When politics can be a frivolous distraction. When do we donate? When there's a cocktail party or a viral video. What are we doing? We're taking actions not to empower our political values but to satisfy our passion for the sport of politics.