Virtually no one in Britain retains confidence in Johnson: Only 18 percent of voters want him to stay, he’s lost the country’s powerful media editors and 148 of his own MPs voted to express “no confidence” in him last month.Īt last count, 37 of Johnson’s ministers and senior officials resigned in 24 hours starting Tuesday night.
The role is barely mentioned in British law - meaning those who occupy 10 Downing Street are merely first among equals in the British Cabinet, and staying there is a confidence game.
Johnson played against type to lock in Britain’s path to net-zero emissions, but after a bungled Covid response - which almost cost him his life - he will be remembered chiefly for something he left (the European Union) rather than anything he built.įor Americans used to the Donald Trump playbook - from Twitter abuse to sexual misconduct accusations and impeachment to insurrection - the details of Johnson’s scandals may seem baffling.īut other democracies don’t hold themselves to the standards of Trump.Īnd though Johnson often acts like he is not bound by political convention or gravity, the British prime ministership is not the American presidency.īritain doesn’t have a written constitution, and the prime minister is not directly elected. He shows us the benefits of decluttering our sonic world.Īs Prochnik travels across the United States and overseas, we meet a rich host of characters: an idealistic architect who is pioneering a new kind of silent architecture in collaboration with the Deaf community at Gallaudet University a special operations soldier in Afghanistan (and former guitarist with Nirvana) who places silence at the heart of survival in war a sound designer for shopping malls who ensures that the stores we visit never stop their auditory seductions and a group of commuters who successfully revolted against piped-in music in Grand Central Station.Ī brilliant, far-reaching exploration of the frontiers of noise and silence, and the growing war between them, In Pursuit of Silence is an important book that will appeal to fans of Michael Pollan and Daniel Gilbert.THE UNPOPULAR POPULIST - There will be no Boris Johnson bust in some future White House.īut like Winston Churchill, the man Johnson styles himself after, he will be dragged from high office amid scandal. Listening to doctors, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, monks, activists, educators, marketers, and aggrieved citizens, George Prochnik examines why we began to be so loud as a society, and what it is that gets lost when we can no longer find quiet. In Pursuit of Silence gives context to our increasingly desperate sense that noise pollution is, in a very real way, an environmental catastrophe. More than money, power, and even happiness, silence has become the most precious-and dwindling-commodity of our modern world.īetween iPods, music-blasting restaurants, earsplitting sports stadiums, and endless air and road traffic, the place for quiet in our lives grows smaller by the day.
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