R&R: Butterfly effect
What I’m reading and watching.
Happy Sunday and welcome to R&R, a weekly email for paid subscribers with a recap of the news you may have missed from the past week and my recommendations of the best pieces of journalism from across the internet. Plus, a few more scattered thoughts from the past week:
Edward Norton Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist known as the founder of modern chaos theory, first popularized the concept of a butterfly effect with his 1972 paper, “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”
Lorenz suggested that the answer could be “yes,” although more recent research argues otherwise: “The flap of the butterfly’s wings involves a spatial scale close to 10 millimeters, meaning that it is so small that the energy it produces would dissipate nearly immediately and not be capable of causing a tornado,” a trio of academics wrote in a recent Physics Today article.
Nevertheless, whether the poetic image of a world-changing butterfly holds up, a broader truth is there: Tiny events, we all know from our daily lives and observations, can sometimes have epic consequences. On the internet, people often borrow from a related idea (that of a domino effect) to show these chain reactions:
Donald Trump Jr., the former and future First Son, posted one of these memes in 2022, half-jokingly (or half-seriously?) confirming the idea that a seemingly minor slight (Barack Obama mocking Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011) led Trump to run for president, and all that has followed from that decision.
I was thinking about this idea of chain reactions recently (butterflies, dominos, whatever imagery you want to use), as I returned to one of my recommendations for this week: Elaina Plott’s August profile of Kash Patel in The Atlantic, newly relevant because Patel has now been nominated to lead the FBI.
Patel is now best known as a burn-it-all-down Trump acolyte, but in Plott’s telling, he began his career as a charismatic public defender: someone who was a bit more conservative than his colleagues, and rubbed some of them the wrong way, but was far from the right-wing figure we know today. How did that Kash Patel become this one?