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| Photograph by Joe Carducci
Reaction Shots Joe Carducci
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Sheep Mountain from Centennial Ridge
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| Photograph by Joe Carducci |
Michael Hurley... and Weber, Stampfel, Sisco, Lightbourne, and Dylan
Joe Carducci
I didn’t know Michael Hurley well or for very long, but I know a few things about him I thought I’d offer here… He’ll certainly be missed by everyone who knew him, saw him perform and heard his music; many have written and expressed that from the perspectives of his uniquely widespread generations of listeners. He and his music and his career in music and art don’t resemble anyone else’s and contemplating it post-Hurley one fears America doesn’t produce such people anymore. Perhaps fatefully, he grew up with Steve Weber in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I came to know Michael through David Lightbourne and I know from David that these pre-boomers were different, born during the war years and plugged into American popular culture before rock and roll and television. No small thing. As kids in the late 40s and early 50s they watched cowboy and sci-fi serials on the big screen, listened to radio for drama, comedy and live music, collected blues, jazz and country 78s, and read comics before the code. Hurley and Weber evidently were each inventing a psychedelic reality for themselves as some sort of advanced juvenilia when they met, recombining music and movies and comics just as rock and roll appeared out of the postwar boom in Memphis. Or, keeping to Pennsylvania: just as Bill Haley’s western swing/country boogie band the Saddlemen were going rock and roll and national as the Comets.
My guess is that Michael came by his temperament naturally growing up in an eccentric family, whereas Weber perhaps more assertively by personal dare. Steve was expelled from high school for selling Michael’s publication, The Underground Monthly. (Jesus, let’s add inventing the fanzine if not the underground itself to Michael’s achievements!) Teenage Steve might’ve been an intimidating salesman but let’s credit him with understanding that Michael needed some help and was worth the trouble. I didn’t know Steve, though I met him briefly at Lightbourne’s Portland apartment in 1978 or ’79. David knew Weber well, sat in with the west coast Rounders on guitar, singing Peter Stampfel’s parts on old Rounder tunes, and starting his own band when Steve told him to. Peter had returned to New York after a Holy Modal Rounders tour ended in the Northwest, whereas Steve stayed. David wrote later, “When the magnum rock quintet Holy Modal Rounders hit Portland in 1973, we all rolled over onto our opposite hip, blinked groggily, and whispered, ‘No shit!’ excitedly…. The Rounders conquered (like a Roman company).” Steve stayed for the spoils, considerable in those days in that town.
David told me once that the only thing Steve ever mentioned being unnerved by was walking with Harry Smith to his Village apartment while Harry snapped the aerials off parked cars. On arrival at home Harry tied them together with string and tagged them with the location and date. Smith of course had been operating even earlier, intuiting his own American psychedelic path via anthropology, technology, collecting, recording, painting, filmmaking.... All of this I mean to stress that Michael Hurley – he came out of some other long-gone place and time...
According to Byron Coley in his 2013 Arthur magazine piece, “On the Trail of the Lonesome Snock,” Hurley began writing and playing songs at thirteen circa 1954, played The Blind Lemon in Greenwich Village as part of The Three Blues Doctors, which included Weber and Robin Remaily, after which Michael and Robin moved to New Orleans playing anywhere they could as a duo. Then Byron has the normally vague and reserved Michael declare that it was March 16, 1961 when his musical approach came to him in a sonic apparition that was very “snocky.” I take this neologism and pen-name to be an onomatopoeic reference to what would be his spiky rhythmic delivery of his winding, often pokey melodies. But wait, Byron writes that the four players (Michael claimed there were four members of The Three Blues Doctors!), each of them played a different song simultaneously in some apparent Charles Ives-ian challenge to Greenwich Village conventions. Those conventions won out. When asked by the The Guardian about the notable folk musicians he encountered in the Village in the early years Michael responded, “That’s a bad question.” Michael wasn’t to be the next big thing, but he sure as hell was the next little thing.
Peter Stampfel says of Hurley, “When I met him in ’63, he looked like a leprechaun… He was a nice, soft-spoken guy. He had written some really cool songs. He actually lived with me for a while on the Lower East Side, in this real slum of a building... We all thought that drugs and music were going to save the world. It all started to go downhill in 1967, but at the time we thought what was going on was miraculous. We thought we were hurtling toward an unimaginably bright future. Ha!” (The Guardian) In Peter’s tribute to Michael at perfectsoundforever.com, he describes Michael suddenly looking terrible and being diagnosed with mono, TB, and heroin addiction yet coming back from the hospital clean and healthy and practicing yoga. In 1963! And somehow Hurley also recorded his debut album in 1963. The Holy Modal Rounders also recorded their debut that year and both were released the next year – “Holy Modal Rounders” came out on Prestige and Michael’s “First Songs” was released by Folkways.
By the 21st century Michael was off the sauce and somewhat reluctant to take up Lightbourne’s offer of playing a gig in the middle of nowhere. Michael must’ve wondered: What was Lightbourne doing in Wyoming? Meth? Michael asked Byron if he knew this guy Joe Carducci that David mentioned as the genius behind the failing Upland Record label and its poorly attended annual Breakdown. Byron was one of the early appreciators of the SST Records roster and vouched for me so the cleaned-up tea-drinking version of Michael understood that to mean that David must’ve cleaned up too if he was hanging with a hardened killjoy like myself.
Lightbourne died, then Sisco died, then Weber died, and now Hurley has died. I warned Paul Tollet at Goldenvoice years ago that it would soon be too late to put on “The Last Waltz Jr” in New York City where the Holy Modal Rounders, Michael Hurley & the Sensitivos, The Freak Mountain Ramblers (Robin Remaily’s band), and David Lightbourne’s Stop & Listen Boys could all still get it up and shut it down the way the original psychedelic blues folkies figured it, but he wouldn’t listen. I was in touch with Paul to write something about the passing of Rick Van Santen in my book, Enter Naomi, about the passing of SST’s music photographer Naomi Petersen. Rick as a kid sold Screamers merch and was still underage when he booked the Roxy in West Hollywood. Anyway, Death be not proud, prick!
Michael Hurley took to calling David Lightbourne “The Informaton” and described him as “mounting his seat of scorn” from which to dispense knowledge and judgments. Michael got used to David’s music history diatribes but at first he seemed to worry he might be tested. But it was clear David thought very highly of Michael. David didn’t do much songwriting but spent his time deducing the playing of country blues masters; he’d play those collections of barely surviving 78 sides louder than I’d play Black Sabbath so he could hear what Charley Patton was up to. David respected Michael’s songwriting though he thought he performed better with his band which came to be rare for economic reasons. One time David and I got going on Robbie Robertson and Michael offered, “I don’t think The Band was that bad.” Weber remarked at news of David’s death, “Alot of people talk a lot, but David always had something to say.”
Over the years I listened to The Informaton talk about Bob Dylan and what all the writers got wrong so I thought I could tie up some loose Dylanological ends while we’re here. Bob was also born in 1941 but he was in rock and roll bands as a young man after Sun Records did its business. Bob’s sell-out was not going electric but going acoustic in the first place! Mike Safran gave CDRs of Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour episodes to David and I listened to them after he did. That radio show was the most generous sharing of musical knowledge Bob ever managed and his focus on songwriters and themes sent the program off into interesting corners of music history. Presumably he’d stopped stealing other people’s records by then and had gotten over having his songs turned down by Otis Redding and Merle Haggard. But much of Dylan’s career involved playing 3D chess with Columbia Records and the media so as to remain the next and future big thing. I don’t doubt that was all quite the magick trick. And it’s not that I expected to hear Bob spin my Minutemen meisterwerk, “Jesus & Tequila”, just as I didn’t expect Rick Rubin to have Johnny Cash cover it, but listening to all those Theme Time Radio Hours it stood out to me when Bob couldn’t make six minutes available to play anything from Michael Hurley and The Holy Modal Rounders. Here, I’m afraid, was that smaller Bob Dylan I was trying to redeem by flushing him out of the woods to appear like Jesus in the wings at The Last Waltz Jr! Hurley and Weber had stumbled into the Village already turned-on while Bob was playing footsie with commies, Mitch Miller, and Peter Paul & Mary. Hey I’m happy to apportion blame on Lee Abrams who had something to do with Theme Time in his spare time after destroying FM radio in the seventies. But in 1963 Dylan was marching on Washington while the Bucks County boys were marching on consciousness itself. True they were just being themselves but that too was a magick trick even in the sixties.
Now today, this is the woebegone unblue day I warned of. Now there can be no last concert, and no panpsychedelic one-ness achieved. Michael Hurley did get discovered anew by a postpunk neo-folk underground as it figured out what had been what and in Michael’s case, what amazingly enough still was what even into our data-driven, large-language, monochrome century. For these youngsters seeing Michael seated on a stage casting his spell was like being able to shake hands with Hank Williams or Tommy Johnson. And so Michael’s late self-released CDRs were augmented by reasonably well distributed new releases on hip labels and he toured all kinds of venues right up to his passing on April 1, 2025.
When the price of gasoline shot up Michael stopped driving and threw in with Amy Annelle and Ralph White who were touring around in a van. He bought a small digital video camera and began shooting video while on tour. When Lightbourne died Michael put together a nice tribute video that is online. Many live performances by Michael are also found on youtube; here’s a short he made in Wyoming: “The Shortwave Stall”.
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Peter Stampfel at perfectsoundforever, Michael Hurley in 14-Part Harmony.
Before I knew any of them, Hurley, Robin, and Weber had a band called the Blues Doctors. It kills me that I never got to hear them, and that they never recorded. They had very few gigs. The only one I know about was at a small club on Thompson Street in the Village called the Blind Lemon (a name used by many small clubs throughout the nation, a nod to Blind Lemon Jefferson). The aforementioned Antonia worked there weekends as a waitress. She was deeply into hallucinogens and had written "You Are All God Behave Accordingly," in very large letters, on a wall of the club. I came across these words while very high on mescaline (we took much larger doses back in the day, doing up enough to provide a nice 24-hour trip. That was, more or less, standard). I added, "Verified on Mescaline" to Antonia's message. This was shortly before we actually met. When the Blues Doctors played there, I was still in transit from California, but I heard about the gig. Post-gig, the Blues Doctors were invited, with several others, to the upstairs apartment of Bob Moore, the Blind Lemon boss, who was generally referred to as Blind Bobby. The BDs ended up playing every song they knew, running dry in the wee small hours. Hurley made up a new one on the spot to round out the evening. The next day, Robin asked Hurley if he remembered the song he had made up. "No," said Hurley, "I forgot it." Robin said, "That's ok. I wrote it down." The song was "The Werewolf."
Byron Coley in ARTHUR, On the Trail of the Lonesome Snock.
In this period, Hurley also made an important connection, meeting up with Perry Miller. Miller was from the Southern part of Bucks County, and he, Michael and a bunch of other wastrels shared a house across the river in New Jersey in the Summer of ’62. When Miller moved to St. Marks Place (where he worked selling mice wholesale to schools), Hurley had a ready place to stay. He moved to Manhattan and took rooms and couches where he could find them, playing gigs at the Fat Black Pussycat, the Cafe Wha and other pass-the-hat establishments. He even secured a booking agent, Peter Outlaw, whose clients consisted of himself, his future wife – Marjorie “Pasta” Sacco – and a street singer named Guitar Slim (no relation to Eddie Jones, the Mississippi-born blues musician who died in ’59). Outlaw took them around to various joints, but the only real success he had with his roster was getting them onto Bob Fass’s ‘Radio Unnameable’ show on WBAI sometime in ’63. Director Paul Lovelace turned up a copy of this tape during his recent work on a Fass documentary (Radio Unnameable, 2012). He got a copy to Michael, whose views were mixed.
[Illustrations: First Songs LP; Have Moicy LP; Hurley, Weber, Sisco Strafford, VT 1979, c. Gary Sisco; Hurley & Lightbourne at Beartooth Pass – photo by Carducci; Upland Breakdown end-jam l-r: Safran, Hurley, Hurwitz, SPOT, Lightbourne – photo by Carducci; Hurley at Tonic flyer.]
Along Highway 130 above Centennial, Wyoming
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| Photograph by Joe Carducci |
Dale Flood (1963-2024)
Joe Carducci
I left SST in 1986 and got back to Chicago where I was working on my book, Rock and the Pop Narcotic. Naomi Petersen left SST in 1989 and moved to D.C. I was asking her for some photos and also about bands she liked I might not be aware of. I was hoping to have my book read almost like a fanzine in its current awareness of music while plugging that day into as complete an historical sense as I could manage. Book publishers take a year or more lead time and the speed music has moved in the punk era leaves their attempts at contemporary coverage history at best.
 
Asylum – Unorthodox discographies: Unorthodox – “Unseen World” Apr 3, 2009 WMUC – Dale Flood, Jon Blank, Ron Kalimon.
[Illustrations: Dale Flood 1993, Silver Springs, MD; Asylum “3-3-88” LP; Dick Flood & The Pathfinders; Unorthodox, circa 1993 - Naomi Petersen Photography]
Westhampton Beach, New York
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From the London Desk of Steve Beeho…
Peter Hitchens in THE LAMP, My Only Honor.
One of the griefs of modern Britain is that it has a semi-official press regulator, in my view a national shame in itself. It is called the Independent Press Standards Organisation (I.P.S.O.). During the Covid panic, this body decided to sanction me for expressing an opinion about the effectiveness of face masks against the virus. It claimed that this opinion was an inaccuracy, but I won’t go into all that again. There is a website where the case may be studied. The great thing is that in all that vast desert of submission and conformism, I have an actual written record of my dissent. So I went to the editors of Who’s Who and asked that, in the bit where my career and achievements are listed, and where my medals, knighthood and peerage would be listed if I had any, they would place the words “sanctioned by IPSO,” and the date. They hummed a bit and hawed a bit, but to their credit they agreed, and now, as of a few weeks ago, there it is in the book, my only honor. It is better by miles than an Order of Lenin, but it won’t help me if I am found drunk in a gutter by the police.
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Harry Gillow at unherd.com, Starmer’s Chagos deal risks his life’s work.
And it’s here that the real problem with the Government’s approach to the dispute over the Chagos Islands comes into focus — it seems determined to collapse any distinction between a useful system of rules governing day-to-day interactions and what Britain’s vital interests are. Instead, we’re stuck with an establishment that seems obsessed with the idea that the grubby business of national self-interest can be determined by dusty submissions and dry legal clarity, even as the rest of the world becomes ever more confused and chaotic. It seems to believe that questions of national sovereignty can be as dependent on arcane rules as the finer points of taxation treaties. And the answer, of course, is that they can — but only one way. No other country is going to follow suit. We can provide a beautiful role model for the rest of the world in our determination to adhere to every bit of the spirit and letter of international law, but it’s farcical to think that anyone else will do the same. Yet this attitude — if only we follow the rules one more time, everyone else will realise how wonderful they are — has hamstrung British policy for decades now. Our conviction that the ongoing dispute over Chagos was what was preventing Russia from realising the error of its conquering ways in Ukraine, or China abandoning its nine-dash line, is of the same artless innocence as our insistence on not only following, but gold-plating to the hilt, every new EU directive during our membership, even while other EU members smirkingly ignored the inconvenient aspects. The unworldliness of our governing class would be comical were it not such a betrayal of our interests.
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John Gray at the NEW STATESMAN, Curzio Malaparte, The Proust of Violence.
Why read Malaparte today? The answer cannot be only for the unnerving brilliance of his postmodern prose. A cruel and perverse nature enabled him to access an ugly truth. A propensity for inhuman violence is integral to European civilisation. He rightly dismissed the notion that totalitarianism originated outside of the West – Russian communism in “oriental despotism”, for example. Twentieth-century fascism, Nazism and communism were all quintessentially European projects. The impulse to remake the world on a new model, often seen as a mark of the superiority of the West, is the source of its passion for mass killing. Malaparte understood the allure of evil because he was bewitched by it himself. The celebration of violence and destruction in his work betrayed a contradiction in the European mind. Judged by liberal standards, liberal societies are irredeemably flawed; but when they are rejected because they flout their own values, the result is tyranny and bloodshed on a grandiose scale. Excited by this paradox, Malaparte embraced the most anti-liberal forces of his time. Here he anticipated 21st-century hyper-liberals, who – without any of his self-awareness or lacerating irony – seek a remedy for inner emptiness by identifying with terroristic anti-Western movements. In a turn that would have gratified and entertained him, this demonic jester must be read as one of the most penetrating writers of our age.
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Kathleen Stock at unherd.com, How women won the gender wars.
Aside from these personnel issues at the top, another big problem for transactivist campaigners was the restricted arsenal of argumentative weapons at their disposal. They couldn’t rely on reason or evidence as these concepts are commonly understood, because no good arguments for transubstantiation by means of lip gloss existed. This left only three options: intellectual misdirection, emotional blackmail, and aggressively shaming opponents into silence. The result of the first of these was fancy-sounding obfuscation about spectrums, social constructs, and the supposedly close relation between trans-identified and so-called intersex people. But this was only ever likely to work with the young or dull-witted, while cleverer minds watched and learned from the mistakes. Equally, as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to maintain heartrending fictions about the unique vulnerability of the trans-identified cohort as a whole. Over and over again, men claiming womanhood kept featuring as perpetrators in court reports. So that left only the tactic of terrifying critics into silence. We on the gender-critical and sex-realist side were called harpies, transphobes, bigots, Christian nationalists, National Socialists, and white supremacists; and that was just by Guardian writers.
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Tom Jones in THE CRITIC, Dying to save the NHS.
For people like my parents, who are conscious of protecting their assets in order to provide me with a stock of their hard work — the natural impulse of any parent — the financial realities of the welfare state as currently constituted will impel them, inexorably, towards assisted dying. If one is diagnosed with dementia, the financially rational decision is to plump for assisted dying so that your estate, carefully built up for years in order to provide for your children, does not waste away on care home fees. This is all the result of incentives set by the state. […} A generous welfare state is not compatible with open borders, and is unlikely to survive the addition of assisted dying with any degree of legitimacy. Britain’s younger generations face a record-high tax burden. But as lifestyles of the recipients and contributors become further differentiated, the obligations of the contributors generate more hostility. When those with the closest ties to the contributors — such as, in my case, their parents — are most in need, the welfare state will offer them assisted dying instead of unconditional support.
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Ed West in THE SPECTATOR, Lucy Connolly is in prison because of her politics.
Without wishing to become a bore on the subject – and perhaps it’s too late – Britain has a real problem with speech laws. This shouldn’t be a right-wing talking point, but it goes against human nature to defend the rights of people whose opinions horrify you. Laws such as the Communications Act (2003) are used to harass people making basic statements of belief, while hateful online language is policed excessively. Connolly’s tweet may well have merited a criminal record and a fine; the question is whether a jail sentence represents justice or anarcho-tyranny. It was certainly interesting to witness the anarcho-tyranny of the British state at close quarters; before Connolly’s case was heard in front of three judges, we sat through discussions of two previous cases, one involving a man who had run down and killed a 16-year-old boy. The murderer, we heard, had 22 previous convictions for 39 offences at the time of his offence, including robbery, affray and assaulting a police constable. The British state is filled with endless compassion for habitual criminals, always ready to give them ‘once more chance’ to turn their life around – but utterly ruthless against those who breach its speech codes and transgress its sacred values.
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Julie Burchill in THE STANDARD on Edward White’s book, Dianaworld: An Obsession.
Generally when I’m reviewing a book on a subject I’ve written about, I turn to the index as soon as I’m bored to see if I’m quoted, so I can skip to the scintillating bits. No need to, here; I rock up in the very first paragraph of the introduction: “Of the various titles that Diana Spencer collected during her life, it is the unofficial one of ‘the People’s Princess’ that has most come to encapsulate her reputation. The origins of the term are contested. Many have claimed that Tony Blair’s spin doctor, the shrewd, calculating Alastair Campbell, invented it. Others have said it derived from Anthony Holden, a royal biographer and translator of ancient Greek poetry and Italian opera. Julie Burchill, a republican iconoclast perhaps best known for her writing about pop music, asserts that it was in fact she who bestowed the title upon Diana in a laudatory article about the princess published in 1992.” No one should be expected to be sensible when they’re in the grip of passion and when I occasionally peep inside my 1998 book Diana (pre-loved £2.50 to £75.88 on Amazon — isn’t wishful thinking a wonderful thing?) I get a slightly shocked thrill. Such a whole-heartedly fan-girl tome is it that once, when challenged about it in an interview, I claimed to have been possessed by the spirit of a really bad writer! Here, Edward White calls it “One of the strangest books ever written about Diana, but also one of the most enlightening: it reveals a strain of thought that hums in the background of so much coverage of Diana but is rarely articulated so explicitly or entertainingly.”
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Gareth Roberts in THE SPECTATOR, Will Gary Lineker please take the BBC with him when he goes? .
One of the many oddities I noticed when working for [the BBC] was that the freelancers they hired in to make programmes for them churned over far less often than the layer of actually directly employed BBC staff. You’d rarely encounter the same person twice and almost never a third time. So long-standing ‘issues’ never got resolved but were pass-the-parcelled to the next one in line. Strangely, this constantly shifting workforce would fret about the institution and its reputation – and its ‘compliance’ with often very stupid regulations – as if they were old-time company men. This, despite the fact that their feet barely seemed to touch the ground before they melted away like summer clouds, never to be seen again. Nothing and nobody sticks there, giving the place a Kafkaesque atmosphere, of a self-replicating bureaucratic machine with only incidental human parts. This lack of continuity inevitably makes its output tend towards slush.
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Oscar Mardell at 3ammagazine.com, on Ted Kessler’s book, To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish.
His output is so large, so single-handedly inducive of Museum Exhaustion Syndrome, that any one part of it feels less like a true confession, less like the ultimate or definitive revelation of some authentic self, and more like spit in the ocean, a meaningless drop in the bucket (a single instance of self-expression has the potential to possess integrity, but a multitude, as Sigmund Freud said of doubles, places ‘the subject…into doubt as to which his self is’). In addition, much of Childish’s oeuvre has the estranging quality of excessive repetition: his songs seldom feature more than three chords and his writing constantly returns to the same subjects and themes (‘My favourite criticism of what I do…’ he explained to Uncut in 2020, ‘is that I only do one thing and it’s all the same’). It altogether eschews Realism and repeats none of that movement’s pretensions to objectivity, preferring instead to flaunt its own constructedness: his records are riddled with hisses and crackles – that is, with the defects of the recording tech itself (he does not perform live anymore, precisely because modern PA systems have too few of these defects); his paintings, meanwhile, are impasto-thick with the excess physicality of the paint itself. Plus, his work has an unapologetically palimpsestic or derivative quality, bearing too many traces of too many bygone movements: his woodcuts could be Kollwitz’s, his photomontages Höch’s, his poster and book-cover designs are Dadaist pastiches, his poetry reads like Bukowski’s, and his music often sounds like the Troggs or early Kinks (when the White Stripes’ Jack White accused him of plagiarism in 2006, Childish retorted in an open letter, ‘I always stay well within the music industry recommended guideline of never plagiarising more than 50% of my material).
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Stuart Berman at pitchfork.com on Black Flag – My War.
At the time, Black Flag weren’t the only underground rock band surrendering to sludge, but where Bay Area freaks Flipper delivered their dirges with absurdist art-prank irreverence and L.A. doom prophets Saint Vitus faithfully embraced the majesty of ’70s metal, Side 2 was less Black Sabbath than Bleak Sabbath, an unrepentantly ugly union of skull-crushing riffs and soul-crushing rants—the sound of fear and self-loathing in Los Angeles. As well as an abrupt musical break from Black Flag’s past, Side 2 was the endgame manifestation of a thematic thread that ran all the way back to their very first single, “Nervous Breakdown.” Long before mental health became a talking point, Black Flag were burrowing deep into the darkest corners of the psyche: Amid Damaged’s rabble-rousing anti-authoritarian anthems were unflinching examinations of depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. On My War’s Side 2, the music slowed down to more accurately reflect the paralyzing angst and animus coursing through Rollins’ free-associative diatribes. If the cover of Damaged was Rollins punching his fist into a mirror, here, he’s punching himself in the face. “I want to make you feel like you make me feel,” Rollins declares. Mission accomplished. All the while, Ginn and Stevenson trudge forward like unsympathetic bystanders to his anguish, offering no relief or resolution. One oppressive, cement-shoed song ends and another one just like it begins with cruel, clockwork efficiency, a doom-metal Groundhog Day. The closest thing to a moment of levity comes when the haunting, multi-vocal-tracked madness of “Three Nights” (the one where Rollins compares his life to shit stuck on a shoe) comes to an end and “Scream” commences with the exact same dripping-faucet drumbeat, like some perverse practical joke.
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Joe Banks at thequietus.com from his book, Sideways Through Time: An Oral History of Hawkwind in the 1970s.
In September 1974, the band embarked on their third US tour in twelve months. But after their show at the Civic Center in Hammond, Indiana, the band were surrounded by police and served by IRS officers with an $8,000 tax bill owing from their last visit. Unable to pay immediately, their equipment was impounded and the band were effectively placed under house arrest in their hotel. Taking a break while the problem was sorted out, the story blew up back in Britain, with excitable headlines about Hawkwind being thrown in jail. Drummer Alan Powell remembers himself and Lemmy taking full advantage of this downtime: “There was a two week gap halfway through that American tour because some gigs had been cancelled, so Lemmy and I went to Los Angeles, ostensibly to do PR for the band, but in actual fact, it turned into a mid-70s ten-day debaucher! We were staying in the Hyatt House, which was notorious for its rock & roll milieu, and that’s where Lemmy wrote ‘Motorhead’. He’d been up all night, and he came in at five in the morning, and said, ‘Hey Al, listen to this!’ And he knocks this song out, “Sunrise, wrong side of another day…” And I thought, ‘Good song that…’”
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Ian Penman in HARPER’S on Daniel Rachel’s book, Too Much Too Young, The 2 Tone Records Story: Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of a Generation.
Dammers’s eureka insight was to combine the urgent velocity of the Clash with the more layered elasticity of reggae, although the Specials were never just copycats. Bass, drums, and keyboards did emphasize the offbeat, but as the band’s lead guitarist, Roddy Byers, put it, there were also “disco basslines, heavy metal passages, rock riffs, and all sorts coming out over the ska.” This wasn’t a lazy appropriation in the manner of the Police or the Rolling Stones, but something that drew on the spirit of the original to create its own surprising alchemy. It took a bolshie U.K. vernacular and married it to a cool Jamaican aesthetic. Punk was a cocktail slammer of shock, alienation, and spite, but such a hard-line aesthetic could last only so long. A new post-punk spirit opted to navigate other sound worlds. Name-dropping started to be far more inclusive: jazz, musique concrète, Africa, Germany, Jamaica. This new regime was far more polymorphously perverse, accommodating the noise-art experiments of the Pop Group, Wire, This Heat. Public Image Ltd put out a dub album of 12-inch singles. The Slits picked reggae maven Dennis Bovell to produce their debut album.
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Sylvia Patterson interviews Angela Jaeger in THE GUARDIAN on her book, I Feel Famous: Punk Diaries 1977-1981.
Growing up in New York’s East Village with older, musically passionate siblings, for her it was right place, right time, right age and the right kind of creative, searching spirit. A music and poetry-loving kid by the age of 11, she’d grown up in a liberal family appalled by the Vietnam war and was, by 16, beguiled by the beatniks and misfits strolling by her family home. The iconic CBGB’s nightclub was a brief walk away. Initially her friends weren’t interested, so she’d go alone, drawn to Talking Heads, Blondie. “This young girl walking along Bowery, in little high heels,” she recalls, “into CBGB’s with full-on rock’n’rollers, Stiv Bators, Dee Dee Ramone.” …I Feel Famous tracks her adventures from fascinated onlooker to ardent devotee, becoming friends with Lydia Lunch and following the noise and the clothes to London in autumn 1978. She would return many times, the diaries a compelling zigzag between the punk/post-punk cultures of Manhattan and London: hanging out with the New York Dolls’ flirty frontman David Johansen, a sarky Johnny Rotten and a complimentary Patti Smith, who approved of Jaeger’s ponytail.
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Jon Savage interviewed at groovy-times.com, The Art of Compilation.
Did you realise at the time how important Nuggets would become? It was very niche. Nobody else I knew had it, but I used to play it to people and they really loved it. I just like the directness of it. I’ve always liked direct, loud guitar noise, which is why I liked punk. And I like the sound of these records because they remind me of my ’60s favourites, like the Yardbirds, who American garage bands took from. Them were big favourites of mine as well. I talked about this recently with Rob Symmons, who was in Subway Sect and now The Fallen Leaves, and is a real aesthete of the pre-punk period. He talks not just about Nuggets, but also other compilations that happened in its wake, such as Hard-Up Heroes (1974), which was a Charles Shaar Murray and Roy Carr-compiled double LP they made for Decca, which had stuff like The Poets and Joe Cocker’s first record. Also Andrew Lauder did a compilation for United Artists called Mersey Beat ’62-’64: The Sound Of Liverpool. These mined this energetic, fast ’60s feel and that really went into punk. When I first saw The Clash, they reminded me of The Who and The Kinks for a different time. Or it was almost like seeing The Birds sped up for a decade later.
^^^
Danny Fields & Gillian McCain interview Peter Wolf in INTERVIEW on his book, Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters and Goddesses.
FIELDS: Okay. David Bowie came to New York with a double mission, to meet Lou Reed and to meet Iggy Pop. Iggy was living with me because he had nothing going for him at that time. David said to Lisa Robinson, “Look, I’m coming to New York. Please bring me Lou Reed and Iggy Pop.” She and Richard Robinson took David and Lou to The Ginger Man for dinner and later that night, Iggy and I were at my apartment on 20th street where he was crashing, and I was, you know, “How long is this going to go on?” You love someone very much, but everything was being squandered. He had no life. And this was Iggy! I think we were watching a black-and-white Western on TV, and the phone rang. It was about 2:30 a.m., and it’s Lisa. “I’m with David Bowie. He wants to meet Iggy. We’re at Max’s. How soon can you be here?” “Very soon. Iggy!” “Yeah?” “Get up! Remember when Melody Maker did a poll asking musicians, ‘Who’s your new favorite singer of the year?’ And someone in London mentioned you and we all wondered how anyone could have heard of you over there? Well, that person is very rich and famous and he’s around the corner and he wants to meet you, so get up!” So we walked to Max’s and David was there with his manager who gave gold bars and color television sets to everyone, Tony Defries. We walked in and it was like old friends, sort of. Iggy could really lay it on. “Oh my god! It’s you!” Meanwhile, I had to remind him who it was. David was genuinely in awe of meeting Iggy. And two days later, Iggy was on a plane to London. And that began that. David was brilliant and wonderful, but he was a vampire.
Quarry Pond, Naperville, Illinois
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| Photograph by Joe Carducci |
From the DuPage Desk of Joe Carducci…
Gregg Turner in FAUX WOOD PANELING on Roky Erickson.
That was at the Troubadour, which at the time in 1975 when he emerged from the mental institution, Doug Sahm brought him back to LA for his first gig since the Elevators, and he was backstage being Roky, explaining to this woman why he was a Martian. And I had never met him before. I was just watching him, had brought some records for him to sign backstage, just listening to him saying why he knows he’s an alien from Mars, and this woman’s going, “oh my god, I can’t believe you!” and Roky goes “I couldn’t believe it either!” And we were thinkin’ oh my god, every story I’ve heard is probably true…. The audience wasn’t rock and roll or pop fans. It was cowboys and C&W guys that would just chow down steaks and drink. So they never had rock and roll there. And Sahm was about the rockiest that they probably had experienced…. Sahm does like three or four songs. He says, “I’d like y’all now to listen to a good friend of mine who’s had some rough times, but he’d like to play you some new songs he just wrote. This is Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor Elevators” ...and no one knows him except me and a few friends, over there… and Roky starts walking to the stage with his head bowed down and hunched over, looking just so hapless. And I thought, “oh, man, this is gonna be pitiful.” But the minute he stands on stage, he gets erect, turns everybody’s amp up to like 15 when the feedback is so loud you can hardly stand it, and he slams down the first four chords of “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and starts screaming into the mic, and my jaw just dropped, like, oh my fucking god, this is amazing. And I was looking around and all the cowboys stopped eating. I mean, they were just freaked out, like, “what the hell?” And he did four songs: He did “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” he did “Don’t Shake Me, Lucifer”… if I remember right. He did “Two Headed Dog…” and I mean… you know, “Two Headed Dog, Two Headed Dog / I’ve been working in the Kremlin with a Two Headed Dog…”
***
Gary Floyd in DIRT MERCHANT on The Dicks “Kill from the Heart” album.
Originally I had wanted to be a blues singer, but I hated the “white blues” where it’s like “is everyone feeling alright tonight? Put your hands togeher!” I always hated that shit. But you have to be really careful that you don’t end up trying to copy, copy in a way that’s not giving credit to the old blues folks, like… so I didn’t know anybody that could play that kind of music, that I knew, that weren’t trying to overplay like ZZ Top. I wanted to play like Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker. So, it was the blues and the punk rock thing that made me know that I had to sing. And I always, when I say that I don’t want to be like a big head… whether I can sing good or bad, I sing honest. That was what it is.
***
David Chandler in DIRT MERCHANT on the Saint Vitus album.
So we needed a bass player, and a guy that worked with Mark’s nephew – or it was a friend of his or something – this young guy Michael Corsio, he ended up being in The Three O’Clock. He was in The Salvation Army, but they had to change the name… He was a bass player and he was into punk rock... And he lived down the street from two of the guys in The Dickies and they rehearsed in their garage. So he’d go see them all the time. So he goes “Oh, come on, I’ll take you to a show.” So he took me and Mark to the Whisky to see The Dickies and The Bags and some guy named Max Lazer and the Space Rats who really weren’t punk. It was some surfer guy and they were all booing him and throwing shit at him. Se we were like, “What the fuck? What the fuck is this?” But that blew our minds. We were immediately hooked. That was the first time that we actually heard punk, and then we got a singer later on who was Armando’s friend named Howard and he played “Nervous Breakdown” for us. We had never heard that before. That was even, “Oh, okay. There we go. That’s the fucking shit right there.” But we didn’t hear the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, none of that was on the radio in southern California.
***
Paul Draper interviewed by Will York at WCA Podcast,Seventh Episode.
Sleepers bassist and founding member Paul Wendell Draper recounts the rise and fall of (for my money) the best band to come out of San Franciscco in the late 1970s… even if they technically came from Palo Alto/Mountain View/Menlo Park.
***
Benoit Faucon & Michael Phillips in WSJ, Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Recast as al Qaeda Leader.
Back in the day, Iyad ag Ghali wrote lyrics for a flamboyant blues-rock band from the heart of the Sahara. He jammed with the guys in the group, pounding out the beat on metal jerrycans, and frequented West African nightclubs. The group, Tinariwen, went on to tour the world, win a Grammy and play with the likes of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and U2’s Bono. Ag Ghali went on to become the leader of one of the most dangerous al Qaeda franchises in the world, banning music in a swath of West Africa the size of Montana and commanding an army of extremists responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Ag Ghali’s gunmen even ambushed Tinariwen band members and abducted the guitar player. “I could not believe it,” said the band’s former manager, Manny Ansar, who went clubbing with ag Ghali in Mali’s capital, Bamako, 30 years ago. “It was a huge shock when I saw footage of him walking over corpses.”
***
Edgar Garcia in AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Song Gatherer.
The Cantares Mexicanos, one of the major works of Indigenous American literature, is a codex that preserves 91 songs for musical performance in Nahuatl, the language of the people of central Mexico, including the Mexica, the group that later came to be called Aztecs. Dating from around 1580, the manuscript is a document of the period directly following the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the destruction of the Aztec empire. John Bierhorst, the first scholar to publish an English translation of the songs (in 1985), held that most of them were composed in the post-Conquest period by “warrior-singers” who used poetry to “summon the ghosts of ancestors in order to swell their ranks and overwhelm their enemies.”In trouble straits; and, speaking straight, I said less than manly things: to hell With empire and its overgrowth; to hell With the flowers that conurbate; To hell with the south and east; Goddamn Them that injunct our ease with commands To obtain without cause, to siege, To bring bloody rain on neighbors’ walls. You wanted all that but not for itself. The problem is: though war we might hate, It’s in war we learn whom to celebrate. Ah! Hence this: Tetlepanquetzanitzin!***
Matthew Schmitz in FIRST THINGS, Clint Eastwood’s Law.
Eastwood’s rejection of liberal sentimentalism and hatred of bureaucracy have led conservatives to celebrate his work and to overestimate his agreements with them. In an essay on Eastwood published in Commentary in 1984, the film critic Richard Grenier connected “the extraordinary reluctance of many on the Left to use U.S. military power anywhere in the world, even in self-defense,” with liberal opposition to “harsh penalties” for criminals. Eastwood’s films, he went on to say, suggested that the star “has never had the slightest doubt as to the legitimacy of the use of force in the service of justice.” Writing in the same magazine ten years later, Grenier concluded that somewhere along the line, Eastwood had succumbed to political correctness. One of his complaints was that Eastwood’s character in In the Line of Fire (1993) had spoken to a CIA agent insultingly: “What are you up to now? Running coke for the Contras? Running arms for Iran?” But Eastwood had not changed. His suspicion of large institutions had always been directed not only against those staffed by liberal lawyers, but also against the police, the military, and the intelligence agencies. Police malfeasance was a prominent theme in Magnum Force (1973) and The Gauntlet (1977). The Eiger Sanction (1975), a cynical espionage thriller, presented the U.S. as no better than its unnamed opponent. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), one of Eastwood’s finest films, presents men in uniform as villains, except insofar as they disregard orders. Conservatives were not alone in thinking that Eastwood had changed. Mainstream film reviewers came to credit Eastwood with dismantling his own myth, critiquing the vigilantism of Dirty Harry in mature works like Unforgiven (1992). Here, too, a mistake had been made.***
Clint Eastwood in METROGRAPH.
NP: It took a while for highbrow critics in the United States to warm to you and your films with a few exceptions: Dave Kehr, Tom Allen in The Village Voice. But early on you had an ally in France in the person of Pierre Rissient, who I got to know at the end of his life, and Olivier Assayas, I know, was very active in promoting your work as a critic for Cahiers du Cinema…
CE: I think Pierre was interviewing me for something when we met. He got me interested in what the French audiences liked in feature films, and it was interesting, a little different. Pierre liked Don’s films a lot; they were friends. Pierre was interesting because he was extremely knowledgeable about film. You know, French audiences looked at film much differently than those in America did. Americans would go to a film to be entertained. French audiences would study a film, and whether it’s pseudo or otherwise, eventually, it’s intellectualized. It was [for them] a necessary way to look at film.***
Chris Cotonou in A RABBIT’S FOOT, The Searchers – John Ford’s Uncanny Valley.
The Searchers was one of his last truly romantic films, made by a disillusioned romantic who was haunted by the failure of his dreams. Perhaps Ford had expected more from it. The film earned a decent but not groundbreaking $5.9m worldwide, was overlooked by critics and audiences for now forgettable movies like Around the World in 80 Days and Giant, and hadn’t earned a single Academy Award nomination and was the only modern American masterpiece to be spared an Oscar nod – a crime when we consider Ford’s direction and Wayne’s portrayal of Ethan. There were early warning signs. While The Searchers was still in post-production, Cooper – who was Ford’s most committed champion – had decided to dissolve Argosy Productions for good. Investors earned a 30% return almost entirely due to The Quiet Man.***
Devin O’Shea in NATION, The Sage of Moberly.
Jack Conroy was not above agit-prop, but he was also a committed artist who wanted to develop a proletarian literature that would raise class consciousness. It was a trend that was on the rise. In the early 1930s, with the appearance of New Masses—a publication edited by the irascible Mike Gold, and with contributors that included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Ralph Ellison, and Dorothy Day—Conroy found a link to a strong Marxist literary institution in New York. New Masses became a stepping stone for Midwestern writers to reach the Union Square coffeehouses: Conroy became a contributor and recommended his fellow Rebel Poets—drafting from the hinterland in the aesthetic war against Ezra Pound’s occult modernism. “You may yet return triumphantly, Ezra, to a Fascist America,” Gold wrote, “and lead a squad that will mystically, rhetorically but effectively bump off your old friends, the artists and writers of the New Masses. Always ready, but hoping to see you in hell first.” Pound became more and more aligned with fascism in Europe, but high modernism itself was a threat. Proletarian writers saw it as a bourgeois form that made art too difficult for the everyday person. Rebel Poet Ruth Lechlitner observed that modernists like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Jean Cocteau “may be known to a few students of language; but the small-time gangster, or the factory worker…may do more to vitalize a language than any dozen big-time cultish ‘experimental’ writers…. The ‘revolution of the word’ would undermine their purpose, which was the revolution of the world.”***
Dean Kissick in HARPER’S, The Painted Protestants.
But as faith in the liberal order began to fall apart around 2016, this conception of art no longer seemed relevant. As concerns over identity, social issues, and inequalities intensified, there was a sense that the art world had grown frivolous and decadent, that the proliferation of forms and approaches over the decades had reached its limit. Art, which had previously been a way to produce discursive polyphony, aligned itself with the dominant social-justice discourses of the day, with works dressed up as protest and contextualized according to decolonial or queer theory, driven by a singular focus on identity. This turn was a consequence of the art world’s own exhaustion and overexpansion; here was a new direction for art, a belief system to follow that might restore some of its meaning and relevance, perhaps even a grand narrative and a purpose. The ambition to explore every facet of the present was quickly replaced by a devout commitment to questions of equity and accountability. There was a new answer to the question of what art should do: it should amplify the voices of the historically marginalized. What it shouldn’t do, it seemed, is be inventive or interesting. The philosopher and critic Arthur Danto believed that art ended in the Sixties. From the late nineteenth century onward, there had been a churning succession of modernist movements, each reacting against the last and proposing its own answers to fundamental questions about what art should be. By the end of the Sixties, however—following the convulsive leaps forward of Pop Art, with its erasure of the distinction between artworks and everyday objects, and conceptualism, with its dissolution of objects into ideas—there was nowhere left for modern art to go, Danto wrote:At first only mimesis was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. . . . It is the end of the story.***
James Panero in NEW CRITERION, Beyond Grosz.
“Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity” has been curated at Neue Galerie by Olaf Peters, a professor at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, who last organized the Neue’s “Max Beckmann: The Formative Years, 1915–1925,” which I reviewed in this space in January 2024. The timing of the exhibition pays tribute to another historian and curator, Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, who helped coin the term “Neue Sachlichkeit” and organized a historic survey of representative paintings a century ago at the Kunst halle Mannheim. Germany’s new objectivity, which might better be understood as a new frankness, reflected a larger, international turn away from what were seen as the excesses of abstraction and expressionism in favor of a renewed commitment to representation. In his “Introduction to ‘New Objectivity’” of 1925, Hartlaub wrote of artists “disillusioned, sobered, often resigned to the point of cynicism having nearly given up on themselves after a moment of unbounded, nearly apocalyptic hope,” ones who “in the midst of the catastrophe have begun to ponder what is most immediate, certain, and durable: truth and craft.”***
Samuel Medina in NEW YORK REVIEW OF ARCHITECTURE, on Deyan Sudjic’s book, Stalin’s Architect, and Vladimir Sedov’s book, Stalin’s Architect – The Rise and Fall of Boris Iofan.
There existed no definitive plan for the Palace of the Soviets, only accumulating plans, each “definitive” in their turn yet destined for the same fate: the trash heap. (As in a scenario straight out of Platonov, it was likely the builders did not know the full ends of their labor.) Luring Frank Lloyd Wright to speak at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects in 1937, Iofan escorted the elder man around the changing capital. A flattered Wright held off for as long as he could before gently chiding his host about the profane “Work Palace” he had seen propagandized everywhere. Espousing a distinctly Bolshevik optimism, Iofan is said to have shrugged off the reproval: “Never mind, Mr. Wright. It will improve as we go along. We are studying it continually.” In another version, his retort almost swaggering. “Never mind,” he says to Wright, “we will tear it down in ten years.”***
Kabir Chibber in NYT MAGAZINE, Hollywood’s New Fantasy: A Magical Colorblind Past.
You might call this kind of defiantly ahistorical setting the Magical Multiracial Past. The bones of the world are familiar. There is only one change: Every race exists, cheerfully and seemingly as equals, in the same place at the same time. History becomes an emoji, its flesh tone changing as needed. And yet something is off, something that makes these stories impossible to get lost in. You can never fully envision the Magical Multiracial Past without having to mentally take apart the entire scaffolding of world history. Bridgerton is set before Britain abolished slavery, an institution that apparently exists, largely unmentioned, in the world of the show. What, precisely, are the rules of a world in which a Black queen reigns over a British Empire that sanctions the enslavement of Black people?***
Becca Rothfeld in WASHINGTON POST, Nellie Bowles thinks you should outgrow progressivism.
Her new book is a kind of ideological autobiography, tracking her development from bratty liberal to freethinking what-about-er. It begins with her origin story. Bowles was once “a successful young reporter at the New York Times, a New Progressive doing the only job she had ever wanted.” She gleefully toed the party line, canceling wrong-thinking colleagues and basking in her righteousness. “When Hillary Clinton was about to win,” she recalls, “I was drinking I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar.” Then, she fell in love with former Times opinion editor and writer Bari Weiss, to whom she is now married. Bowles grandiosely characterizes Weiss as a “known liberal dissident,” as if she were a renegade in a Soviet prison – not a canny businesswoman who left the Times vocally but voluntarily in 2020 so as to earn a purported $800,000 from an aggrieved newsletter the following year. In the gulag that is life after the New York Times, the pair founded the Free Press, an outlet that designates itself as a stronghold of “fierce independence” and that specializes in sneering at the alleged excesses of progressivism. With Weiss’s help, Bowles suggests, she abandoned her youthful follies and entered true adulthood.***
Joe Kahn interviewed at semafor.com, “The newsroom is not a safe space”.
Ben: Do you think the Times let the inmates run the asylum for too long? Joe: I wouldn’t use those words. I do think that there was a period of peak cultural angst at this organization, with the combination of the intensity of the Trump era, COVID, and then George Floyd. The summer of 2020 was a crazy period where the world felt threatened, people’s individual safety was threatened, we had a murder of an innocent Black man by police suffocation. And we have the tail end of the most divisive presidency that anyone alive today has experienced. And those things just frayed nerves everywhere. Ben: Do you think you made mistakes, or just that it was very hard to navigate that moment. Joe: I think it was very hard to navigate that moment. Everybody’s remote. We’re dealing with this political upheaval. We still did good journalism through that moment. But I think we’ve looked back at that and learned. Unlike James Bennet, who sees that as emblematic of what the Times and maybe the news media in general has become, I think it was a particular moment. I think it was an extreme moment. I think we’ve learned from it. I think we found our footing after that. Ben: You see why James takes that one particularly personally. Joe: James has a singular take on it. I can see why it has become the single defining moment for him. But I think it is not as a single, defining moment for The New York Times [or] for journalism as he thinks it is. Ben: Do you read The Free Press, Bari Weiss’ publication? Joe: Yes.***
Judd Legum at popular.info, The real cancel culture-police.
Later in the lengthy piece, Rufo admits there "is no way to discern whether Maher was an agent, asset, or otherwise connected with the CIA." But Rufo claims this is irrelevant because Maher "was undoubtedly advancing the agenda of the national security apparatus." Having acknowledged that his core claim about Maher's connections to U.S. intelligence is pure speculation, Rufo then turns his attention to unsubstantiated gossip about Maher's personal life. In her 30s, Rufo writes, Maher "had her sights on powerful men in the tech sector." But Maher "considered finding someone lesser as she approached 40." This, according to Rufo, somehow helps prove that Maher is "a vessel for power, with few original thoughts." The incoherence of the argument underscores the reality of the political moment. There is a relentless right-wing operation seeking to inflict pain on their ideological adversaries. Some, like Rufo, are the political equivalent of street brawlers, willing to say or do anything to achieve their objective. Others, like Weiss and The Free Press, give the movement a more journalistic and professional sheen. But no one involved is a supporter of free expression or an opponent of cancel culture. Rather, they are the cultural force aggressively pursuing cancellation.***
Marty Baron interviewed at mediaite.com,, Jeff Bezos, The Washington Post, and Trump’s Crackdown on the Press.
How are you enjoying retirement? Good. I spent two years writing the book, a year promoting it, and now I go around talking about the kinds of things we’re discussing here: journalism, politics, our role in the country, and what I think the standards for journalism should be. I don’t have to get up at 5:15 in the morning, and I don’t have to work 24/7, so that’s good. Do you miss it, though? I was a top editor for 20 years at three different news organizations. I worked in the business for 45 years. I was 66 years old at the time that I retired. I was exhausted after 2020. It was a really difficult time for a variety of reasons. I thought a lot about it and was really ready. I felt like I’d done what I needed to do. I was proud of what we had done at The Post, at the Boston Globe, and at the Miami Herald, where I was also editor. I felt I had achieved what I wanted, and I needed more freedom and flexibility in my own life. I needed to take care of some health issues at the time. It was also a good opportunity to write a book, and with Trump out of office, it felt like the right time. I still feel engaged, but I don’t have to work 24/7 every minute.***
Clare Malone in NEW YORKER, All the Billionaire’s Mentally.
On a cold evening in March, a month and a half into the second Trump Administration, a crowd gathered in the Terrace Theatre at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C. Warren Buffett, the billionaire C.E.O. of Berkshire Hathaway, was hosting a screening party for “Becoming Katharine Graham,” a new documentary celebrating the career of the Washington Post’s legendary publisher. Guests included Bill Gates, Bill Murray, the former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar, and Bob Woodward, who, along with Carl Bernstein, broke the stories of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal that came to define the paper’s golden age…. After the film, guests drifted to a reception in a large gallery, where Woodward soon confronted Bill Murray. Murray had recently said on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he was so dismayed after reading “like, five pages” of “Wired,” Woodward’s 1984 book about Murray’s old friend John Belushi, that he thought, Oh, my God. They framed Nixon. At the reception, Woodward interrupted a conversation Murray was having with Klobuchar to defend his work. “Sometimes we learn by talking,” Woodward said. Murray turned away; Buffett’s publicist quickly intervened. Afterward, more than one attendee described the reception—which featured hot appetizers, white orchids, and a roomful of septuagenarians—as a wake for the Graham family’s Post.***
Charlotte Klein in VANITY FAIR, Meet “the Inspector General” of the New York Times Newsroom.
Today the Times newsroom is a different place than it was 10 years ago. It is larger than ever and harder to manage, with no shortage of avenues—social media, Slack, various open letters—for increasingly vocal employees to express concerns and grievances about Times coverage and practices. Management feels they have to provide more guidance across the board and take concerted moves to protect the institution. Charlotte Behrendt’s evolved role seems to be one such mechanism. As one former senior editor put it, “The fact that she has internal investigations in her title is a character change of astonishing order.”***
Elizabeth Nickson at substack.com, A Global Censorship Prison Built by the Women of the CIA.
Grant's network of independent regulators is called the Global Online Safety Regulators Network. "We have Australia, France, Ireland, South Africa, Korea, the UK and Fiji so far, with others observing. Canada is coming along,” she preens, “and is about to create a National Safety Regulator." Canada's proposed censorship program is so draconian you can be jailed for something you posted online years ago. And the government proposing it is so unpopular, it will be lucky to hang onto 20 seats in the next election. There are literally hundreds of these women. Why? Why? At a meeting this year of the World Economic Forum, ,Věra Jourová from the European Commission, outlined just how exciting she and her team found the tools she is being given. "We can," she said, "influence in such a way the real life and the behavior of people!” She sighed with excitement after this sentence. Jourova was caught last September trying to spread yet another Russia hoax. You have only to hear censorship plans uttered in a central-European accent to really understand what is happening here.***
David Dunlap in NYT, Exploring an Artifact from the Archives.
“Hillary Clinton is our next president. How do you think the founding mothers would feel if they heard the news?” So began an essay by Gail Collins for a special section of The New York Times that was to have been published Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016, two days after the election. Under the rubric “Shattering the Ceiling,” the 16-page section was a celebration of what Ms. Collins called the “amazing moment” in which a woman had been elected president. Had all gone according to the editors’ preparations, the banner headline on Page A1 the previous day would have been “Madam President.” Times journalists were so persuaded of Mrs. Clinton’s impending victory that they were already writing as if it had happened.***
Benjamin Mullin in NYT, New Editing Layer Adds Angst Inside NPR.
The initiative will also include an expansion of NPR’s standards and practices team, off-the-record editorial briefings with newsmakers and a content analysis of NPR’s journalism. In a smaller staff meeting earlier in the week, Ms. Chapin said that the initiative was supported by Katherine Maher, the company’s chief executive, NPR’s board of directors and external funders, according to a person familiar with the exchange. She did not specify the source or amount of external financing, adding that she could not provide more specifics until the funding agreement was finalized. When Ms. Chapin was asked in the meeting about how she would separate the decision to add a new editing layer from Mr. Berliner’s critique, she said that it was about journalism and that she felt lucky to get the additional resources. “We ought to view that as a good thing,” Ms. Chapin said. “We’re not playing defense and having things imposed upon us that make zero sense and are put upon us by people who know less than zero about journalism.” Another point of contention among NPR employees is the move to add a panel of editors less than a year after the company laid off roughly 10 percent of its staff.***
Stephen Baskerville in CHRONICLES, The ‘Marxism’ Narrative Has Gone Too Far.
This “empowerment” of single mothers, and especially of female government functionaries, was expanded dramatically as feminist social workers acquired police powers that originated to administer the chaos of welfare communities and single-mother homes: child protection, domestic violence programs, and child support enforcement. These programs elevated the functionaries into plainclothes police and displaced fathers by usurping their roles of protectors and providers for the women and children. Indeed, fathers became the principal targets of the new police powers and were demoted in status from merely superfluous to villains. They were transformed from protectors of women and children into “batterers” who abused them, and from providers into “deadbeats” who owed them child support and alimony.***
Alan Woolfolk in SALMAGUNDI on Philip Rieff’s book, Fellow Teachers.
The first of these themes is the death of culture, as opposed to the death of a culture. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Rieff wrote, with the failing liberal-Christian culture of America and Europe foremost in mind, that “the death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.” Where the institutions of church and family had once transmitted demanding, militant ideals, now the hospital and the theare were rapidly becoming the putative normative institutions of a permanently remissive therapeutic culture. In Fellow Teachers, Rieff returned to this argument with a vengeance, driving home his thesis that not only had normative institutions failed but that there was little prospect that the renewal of any bnormative institutions that could generate and instill the militant self-ideals necessary for a genuine culture: the primary interdictory motifs of Christianity were dead (though transgressive energies against the Jews persisted); the constitution of the United States was the creation of an interdictory culture that no longer existed (but therapies of sexual expression and violence grew in the name of freedom). If the hospital had been the most compelling institutional model in The Triumph of the Therapeutic for an emergent society preoccupied with assuaging hurt egos, in Fellow Teachers the theatre became an even more compelling model for a society that seemed to be engaged in endless role-playing and public expressions of transgression….***
Lee Siegel in NEW STATESMAN on David Rieff’s book, Desire and Fate.
As a result of Black Lives Matter, more black people appear in adverts than ever before – an innovation not lost on legions of economically struggling white people who were abandoned, first, by an insular, self-infatuated neoliberalism, and then insulted by an insular, self-infatuated regime of diversity, equity and inclusion. Yet the reading and maths scores of poor black children remain as low, or lower, than they have ever been in the modern age. Everyone at the bottom still loses. Welcome to a stronger, nimbler status quo. Rieff rightly cherishes this quote from the “hard left” writer Adolph Reed: “The real project of Woke was to diversify the ruling class.” The idea that fate weaves a counter-motion to our desires as we pursue them is the double helix of the moral imagination. Oedipus unwittingly marries his own mother; Lear’s smug and arrogant exercise of his power destroys his kingdom. Desire and Fate is a study in the often sordid counter-motion behind idealistic certitude. Using DEI as a sort of palimpsest of human folly, Rieff demonstrates how the road to a repressive hell of emotional cluelessness, surreal precepts, philistinism, intolerance and retribution is paved with a public style of “kindness”, “caring” and “healing”. He writes that in the name of “a secular vision of the religious idea of redemption… [of] a society from which all human cares have disappeared”, an “irate fragility” softly whispers its domination. But, then, Rieff tells us that the vision of “a society from which all human cares have disappeared… is the form of a utopianism that I have spent most of my long life as a writer trying to call into question”.***
Ian Buruma in HARPER’S, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of wokeness.
Douthat and McWhorter have both drawn on the work of the Catholic commentator Joseph Bottum, who argued in his 2014 book An Anxious Age that the moral fervor of contemporary progressivism should be understood as a secularized inheritance of the Protestant Social Gospel. (Bottum also prefers the term “elect”—in his case, as an improvement on “elite.”) Understanding wokeness as an essentially Protestant phenomenon helps us to recognize the logic behind some of the rituals that have become customary in recent years: specifically, the public apology. One element that distinguishes the Protestant tradition from the other Abrahamic religions is its emphasis on public avowal. Catholics confess to priests in private and are absolved of their sins, until it is time to confess once more. Many Protestants are encouraged to affirm their virtue by making public confessions of faith.***
Patricia Snow in FIRST THINGS, Taylor Swift’s Sexual Revolution.
Nearly a century ago, in a small classic called The Eternal Woman, Gertrud von le Fort pointed out that the so-called emancipated woman was not actually more masculine in her behavior, as many assumed and feared, but more extravagantly feminine, repeatedly abandoning herself to men to the point of throwing herself away. Every culture worthy of the name, recognizing in its women’s gift for self-donation the essential guarantor of its future, has striven, with greatly varying degrees of sensitivity and success, to guard and guide the consequential gift into fruitful channels. Our current culture, by contrast, not only tolerates but actively encourages the gift’s squandering. Rightly horrified by the practice of genital cutting, which mutilates women physically as a way of discouraging their straying, we in the West have our own coming-of-age rituals to answer for. Rather than desensitizing women sexually, our smiled-upon rites of passage oversensitize them emotionally, ushering them into Swift’s world of “calamitous love and insurmountable grief,” an underworld of disabling emotionalism that Jung called the shadow of the feminine and Swift sums up as “all this cryin’ in my room.” Von le Fort’s larger point is that the fate of a civilization always rests in the hands of its women, because its fate is always bound up with questions of religion—whether it will live by true or false creeds—and it is to women more than men that the sphere of religion has been entrusted. Her book is preoccupied, in other words, with an even more fundamental marker of femininity, one that struggles to express itself even in the very different register of Swift’s music. In a world without God, women haven’t ceased to be zealous for right and wrong. They are still trying to adjudicate morality, but in frustrated, often self-contradictory ways. No longer the angel in the house, or the keeper of religion’s flame, they have been reduced, by the low horizon of the world in which they find themselves, to an ineffectual morality police, demanding behaviors from men that the larger culture, and their own complicit behaviors, disincentivize.***
Marilyn Simon in HEDGEHOG REVIEW, Redeeming Jealousy.
That one’s own sexual identity is found not within the self but rather in a desiring, uncertain, even jealous relationship with another is anathema to contemporary sexual politics, where one is held to discover one’s truth within. It is also offensive to those who entertain notions of an egalitarian sexual commons, and would therefore view this kind of proprietorial investment as mere possessiveness. The possibility of sexual infidelity holds within it the potential of the goodness in what is not seen. Reconciling oneself to sexual jealousy requires keeping one’s eyes wide shut, not out of a cowardly obstinacy by avoiding something that may prove painful but out of a courageous hope that comes with accepting uncertainty and trusting anyway. There is potential grace as well as a potential menace in what cannot be seen, and a dreary lifelessness to what can be objectively observed. Overcome with sexual jealousy, Othello murders Desdemona, suffocating her on their matrimonial bed. “She’s dead,” he says. Quite. Surely an experienced military general such as Othello knows when one lives and when one is dead. And yet twenty-five lines later Desdemona speaks. She speaks again seven lines after that. And then she dies. When Shakespeare does something this strange, it is worthwhile to pay attention. Othello does not demand proof of Desdemona’s faithfulness. He demands proof of her unfaithfulness. “Ocular proof.” Seeing isn’t believing; it is knowing..***
Alisha Gupta in NYT, The Pill Makes Some Women Miserable. But Are They Really Quitting It en Masse?.
So if more women are relying on the pill, why does social media seem to tell a different story? One explanation, Dr. Bartz said, is what’s known as a negativity bias. Consumers are “much more inclined to complain and say ‘oh my gosh, let me tell you about all this bleeding that I’m having on my pill’ or ‘let me tell you about my weight gain,’ ” she said, and far less likely to post positive reviews. She’s seen something very different in her clinical practice: Patients valuing their birth control options more than ever. “Post-Dobbs,” Dr. Bartz said, “there has been a heightened recognition of the need to be very proactive in preventing pregnancy.”***
Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman in NYT, Liberal Narratives Leave Little Room For Having Kids.
For progressives, waiting to have children has also become a kind of ethical imperative. Gender equality and female empowerment demand that women’s self-advancement not be sacrificed on the altar of motherhood. Securing female autonomy means that under no circumstances should a woman be rushed into a reproductive decision — whether by an eager partner or tone-deaf chatter about ticking biological clocks. Unreserved enthusiasm for having children can come across as essentially reactionary. Over the past four years, we’ve conducted interviews and surveys with hundreds of young Americans about their attitudes toward having children. These conversations revealed that the success narratives of modern liberal life leave little room for having a family. Women who want kids often come to that realization belatedly, at some point in their early 30s — the so-called panic years. If they are lucky, their partner (if they have one) will fall in line. If they are not, they face a choice of returning to the dating pool, freezing their eggs (if they haven’t done so already), single parenting or giving up their hope of having kids of their own. In this way, the logic of postponement that has been promoted by liberals and progressives — and bolstered by overblown optimism about reproductive technologies — robs young people of their agency. How many children they have, and even whether they have them at all, is increasingly a decision made for them by circumstance and cultural convention.***
Jennifer Szalai in NYT on Andrea Dworkin’s book, Right-Wing Women.
You might expect that Dworkin would have been wholly unsympathetic to the right-wing women in her book. But no: She credits them with seeing a stifling, male-dominated world as it really is. She suggests that the optimistic liberal woman, who holds out hope that the patriarchy can be reformed through incremental tinkering, is the delusional one, clinging to a faith that feminist demands could be anything short of revolutionary. The right-wing woman, by contrast, is a realist to a fault. She notices how men oppress women, and she doesn’t believe in the possibility of transformative change. And so she acquiesces to male authority as a matter of survival: “She conforms, in order to be as safe as she can be.” By way of example, Dworkin offers the Christian self-help of Ruth Carter Stapleton and Marabel Morgan, as well as the conservative activism of Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly, who campaigned against abortion, gay rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. Dworkin shares their assessments of the world as a menacing place, even if she objects to their fatalism about changing it. She gives an unexpectedly respectful hearing to Bryant, who called homosexuality “an abomination,” explaining how Bryant grew up “in brutal poverty” and married a domineering man who made her feel “guilt over the abnormality of her ambition.” “Bryant, like all the rest of us, is trying to be a ‘good’ woman,” Dworkin writes, in a startling bit of identification. “Bryant, like all the rest of us, is having one hell of a hard time.”***
Abigail Favale in FIRST THINGS on Judith Butler’s book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?.
Butler bemoans how American public discourse has become a “phantasmatic scene,” in which “fear and hatred have flooded the landscape where critical thought should be thriving.” I agree. But instead of resisting those corrosive dynamics, Butler has written a book that exemplifies them. Who’s Afraid of Gender? does not offer a meaningful contribution to cultural debates about gender, but rather demonstrates how polarized and feverish those debates have become, how thoroughly the arts of performative sophistry have supplanted actual argument. If this book is not meant to propose a cohesive theory of gender, or to represent and refute her opponents, what is its true purpose? Perhaps, more than anything, it is a display of tribal allegiance amid a precarious scene in which one false step can turn the mob against you. Butler seems careful to avoid offering anything too novel here. Instead she hides behind the ideas of others, while reassuring her reader that she disdains all the right people, uses all the right terms, and has modulated her former theories to align with current dogmas. This means abandoning anything resembling a coherent account of gender. Perhaps, though, this failure will ensure the book’s success. As Butler herself notes: “The more contradictory the movement, the more influential its discourse.”***
Mary Wakefield in SPECTATOR, The kids aren’t ‘trans’ – they just don’t want to grow up.
We grind our terfy teeth in fury at Dylan’s parody of ‘womanhood’, but we stay glued to his social media, and so his popularity grows. In one clip I saw, Dylan said to camera that ‘I recently told my parents that I might be a little bit interested in women and that was a big shock for them considering the past ten years of coming out as gay then queer then non-binary then trans.’ Dylan laughed hysterically and I looked at his post-op face, his shaved jawbone and flat Adam’s apple, the expensively softened features, and thought: it’s not a woman that Dylan wants to be so much as a child. Look at his hunger for attention; the delight in shocking his parents. He’s not 26 so much as six. It’s often pointed out that a trans woman’s idea of femininity is an ugly stereotype, all overdone make-up and peachy frills. Dylan does love a party dress. But isn’t that pretty childish too? Girls love sequins and unicorns. Then they grow up…. Girls who want to be boys now account for the vast majority of trans kids. Many of them are autistic, almost all suffer from anxiety. But given the ubiquity of violent porn and all the talk of choking and slapping, given the drag-queen aesthetic, is it really any wonder they want to beat a retreat? All the breast-binding and the mastectomies look to me more like an attempt to back out of puberty than to be masculine. The dream aesthetic for girls who want to transition seems to be Justin Bieber when he was 16, but looked ten. In all my scuttling about online I’ve never found a genderqueer teen girl who aims to look like Clint Eastwood.***
Jere Longman in NYT, New Study Bolsters Idea of Athletic Differences Between Men and Trans Women.
A new study financed by the International Olympic Committee found that transgender female athletes showed greater handgrip strength — an indicator of overall muscle strength — but lower jumping ability, lung function and relative cardiovascular fitness compared with women whose gender was assigned female at birth. That data, which also compared trans women with men, contradicted a broad claim often made by proponents of rules that bar transgender women from competing in women’s sports. It also led the study’s authors to caution against a rush to expand such policies, which already bar transgender athletes from a handful of Olympic sports. The study’s most important finding, according to one of its authors, Yannis Pitsiladis, a member of the I.O.C.’s medical and scientific commission, was that, given physiological differences, “Trans women are not biological men.”***
Christopher Harding at aeon.co, Alan Watts, on knowing who he was.
It is tempting to believe that the intellectual and cultural backlash against thinkers of the counterculture era like Watts has now peaked, and is being replaced by what the philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls the ‘meaning crisis’. From wellness and yoni eggs through to Jordan Peterson and a roster of new and often socially conservative Christian converts, we seem no less interested now than Watts in his day about how we might foster a society more in tune with natural and even cosmic realities. Watts himself remains an inspiration, enjoying a busy online afterlife thanks to the uploading of his talks as podcasts and YouTube videos. His gift for the pithy one-liner turns out to be perfect for the age of X/Twitter and Instagram. And his books, like The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), still enjoy the status of classics. Given the somewhat unexpected role of Christianity in this new moment, the time has come to include Watts’s much underrated stint as an Episcopal priest in our assessment of him. His view of Christianity’s potential in the modern West, and his cautions about the ways in which it can go wrong, feel as relevant and psychologically astute now as ever. As we negotiate religion in the 21st century, Watts can help us understand some of its great tensions: between pride and grace, insight and morality, spiritual renewal and nostalgia for an idealised Christian society of the past.***
James Vincent in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Jerry Brotton’s book, Four Points of The Compass.
Sun worship and a reverence for the eastern horizon was widespread for millennia, but such tendencies became problematic with the arrival of Judaism and Christianity. As Brotton notes, ‘the theology of monotheism meant that the east soon became caught in a shifting language game between condemning the direction of Sun worship as negative, while defining its role in Creation as positive.’ The Book of Ezekiel, for example, decries the idolatry of those who worship ‘with their backs towards the temple of the Lord, and their faces towards the east’, yet Genesis locates Eden in the east, and it’s from the east that Adam and Eve must journey after the Fall. The Gospel of Matthew tells the faithful they should look to the east for the second coming: ‘For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.’ Such symbology combines the geographic and the temporal: the daily journey of the Sun is taken to mimic not only the brief span of human lives but the grand Christian timeline of judgment and redemption, the clock that goes round just once. This cardinal preference came to be enshrined in architecture. Early Christian churches were built so that the altar, congregation and priest faced ad orientem (literally, towards sunrise), a decision that was eventually a focus of theological controversy.***
John Gray in NEW STATESMAN, The realism of religion.
The fundamental fact of the age is the passing of liberal humanism, whose dwindling adherents grimly hang on to their mouldering creed for fear of something worse. Their fears are understandable. Secular liberals have always been cultural Christians. When they rejected Christian belief, they did so in the innocent certainty that Christian values would be preserved. The canonical liberal John Stuart Mill believed Christianity and his “religion of humanity” were morally equivalent, writing in Utilitarianism (1861): “In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility.” Before Mill, English liberalism – the creed of free expression defended by Milton in Areopagitica (1644) – was grounded in a Christian idea of freedom of conscience. After Mill, liberalism itself became a religion, based, as he put it in On Liberty (1859), on faith in “man as a progressive being”. Like liberals today, Mill could not conceive that rejection of Christianity would bring a celebration of cruelty and the reinvention of slavery, as it did in Nazism. But once Christianity is rejected, what reason is there for expecting Christian ethics to survive?***
Angus Brown at engelsbergideas.com, Did the Enlightenment fail?.
Surveying the state of philosophical inquiry in the second half of the 19th century in Human, All Too Human (1878), Friedrich Nietzsche concluded that it ‘was not Voltaire’s moderate nature, inclined towards regulating, purifying, and reconstructing, but Rousseau’s passionate follies and half lies that aroused the optimistic spirit of the Revolution’. And, he continued, it was down to the ascendancy of revolution over philosophy that ‘the Spirit of enlightenment and progressive development has been long scared away’. Nietzsche’s characteristically enigmatic remarks have confused historians and philosophers alike, who tend to regard the Enlightenment and the Revolution as manifestations of the same story of philosophical and political progress that gave rise to the modern world. Not so, argues Richard Whatmore in his gripping new book The End of Enlightenment. Instead, Whatmore argues, many of the thinkers we associate with ‘the Enlightenment’ today saw the French Revolution as the nightmarish conclusion of the century-long breakdown of an enlightened social order, and a return to the fanaticism, enthusiasm, and violence of the wars of religion in the 17th century. Contrary to the popular understanding of the Enlightenment as a primarily French movement dedicated to the achievement of democracy, liberalism, and the rule of reason, Whatmore’s Enlightenment was a way of thinking born out of the bloody conflicts of the 17th and 18th centuries, dedicated to toleration, free commerce, international peace, and political moderation. In Whatmore’s telling this movement was led, above all, by thinkers such as Hume and Montesquieu, who preached moderation at home and restraint abroad.***
Orlando Read in FT, The deification of Rene Girard.
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind,” he wrote. The fact that desires are borrowed means they are necessarily competitive…. Girard spent the rest of his career unfolding this “single, dense insight”. He saw it not as a mere theory, but a law of human nature, which novelists had intuited but not made explicit. Over the past half-century, mimetic desire has been Girard’s chief legacy, not only in humanities departments but also, increasingly, among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and east London brand managers. Inducting Girard into the Académie Française in 2005, the philosopher Michel Serres called him “the Darwin of the human sciences”. Unlike Darwin, however, Girard’s studies would lead him back to the church. “Everything came to me at once in 1959,” Girard later remarked. As a young man, he had been an atheist, inspired by the secular existentialism of Sartre and Camus. He had written most of Deceit, Desire and the Novel in what he called “demystification mode”, aiming to reveal the delusions of mimetic desire. Then, one day, commuting from Baltimore to teach in Pennsylvania while completing his first book, he had an experience of the transcendent, observing the sun glinting on the industrial wasteland alongside the tracks. This, and a cancer scare, caused him to return to the Catholic faith of his mother. Girard was reluctant to talk about this experience in detail, but it soon informed his work. He no longer wrote merely to debunk psychological illusions.***
Paul Leslie in SALMAGUNDI, From Philosophy to Power: The Misuse of Rene Girard by Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance and the American Right.
According to Girard, the earliest “anti-PC” voice was Friedrich Nietzsche. Girard notes that the period during which Nietzsche was alive “saw the beginning of political correctness,” which Girard defines as the sentimental or cynical exploitation of the Christian concern for victims. Nietzsche, according to Girard, made the mistake of conflating this concern for victims – which Nietzsche called “pseudo-humaneness” – with Christianity itself. “To Nietzsche… there is no such thing as genuine compassion; there are only the parodies of the ‘politically correct’ schemers,” Girard explains.***
Geoff Shullenberger at chronicle.com on Julien Coupat’s book, Conspiracist Manifesto.
Nearly 20 years ago, the late philosopher Bruno Latour argued that “critique” — that is to say, the mode of thinking associated with “critical theory” — had “run out of steam.” Once upon a time, “masters of suspicion” like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as well as later critical theorists like Foucault, Baudrillard, and Derrida scandalized their contemporaries by systematically dismantling the common sense of their epochs. But, writing in the wake of the September 11 attacks, Latour remarks: “It has been a long time ... since intellectuals were in the vanguard.” In the village where he lives, Latour remarks, it is his less-educated neighbors who look down on him for naïvely believing the official story on the Twin Towers: “Don’t you know that the Mossad and the CIA did it?” Although he wonders whether this is merely a “patrician spite for the popularization of critique,” ...Latour’s alarm over the similarities he detects between critique and conspiracism leads him to distance himself from critique. His aim in “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” is to articulate a more-constructive alternative to critique that eschews suspicion as a methodological imperative. Conversely, the authors of the Manifesto embrace, only partly tongue-in-cheek, the kinship between critique and conspiracism. They retrospectively designate “all the great authors ‘on the Left’” as “uniformly conspiracist”: Foucault, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Adorno, Deleuze, Guattari, and above all Guy Debord (a major influence on the Invisible Committee), whom they dub a “superconspiracist.”***
Martin Gurri in CITY JOURNAL, The Endarkenment.
The digital world, with its subjectivist distortions, has become God and religion for the Zoomers, their source of identity and measure of self-worth. It’s a generation imprisoned in a house of mirrors. Fevered attempts to break out have only led deeper into the maze. Young gays and transsexuals, for example, have been, after the October 7 terrorist massacres in Israel, among the fiercest defenders of Hamas—an Islamist movement that condemns their behavior as a capital crime. “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” warned a Zoomer of uncertain gender at Columbia University’s anti-Israel protests. That chilling mix of self-righteousness and verbal threat is the starting point of Endarkenment politics. Apocalyptic prophecies cast a deep shadow over the future. Each successive year, we hear, is the hottest on record. Every moment brings us closer to climate horror: humanity will end in burning desolation. The only cure to the sickness of industrial society is “degrowth”—a monkish embrace of poverty. Democracy keeps dying on the information sphere—because of Trump, or populism in general, or the Deep State, or social media, or white supremacy. “What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leaves black communities behind?” wondered Biden, who, at the time he spoke these words, was still in charge of delivering on those promises.***
Wrong Side of History at substack.com, Donald Trump is the funniest politician in modern history.
Trump is not a reader, nor an intellectual, but he possesses an almost animal intuition which often proves correct, his warning to Germany over energy dependency on Russia being the supreme example. And, in retrospect, who can fault his 2014 tweet to Katy Perry: ‘Katy, what the hell were you thinking when you married loser Russell Brand. There is a guy who has got nothing going, a waste!’ There is even great wisdom in his words, and one can’t help but ponder Trump’s advice on the subject of worry from 2004: ‘I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn’t matter – like you do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.’ Asked about his legal troubles early last year, he told NBC: ‘If you care too much, you tend to choke. And in a way, I don’t care. It’s just, you know, life is life.’ Wise words, indeed, from the Marcus Aurelius of our age.***
The Vigilant Fox at substack.com, You’ve never seen Bernie speak quite like this.
Schulz brought up how, over the past four election cycles, Democratic voters had little to no real say in who their nominee would be. He flat-out told Sanders that the DNC stole the 2016 primary from him. Sanders didn’t deny it. “In the world that I live in, you got a choice,” he replied—implying it was either let the Democrats rig the process or risk handing the White House to Trump. He even said his wife agrees that the nomination was stolen from him…. That’s when Schulz’s co-host Akaash Singh jumped in and asked: “Could we not also say that if there hasn’t been a fair primary for the Democrats since 2008, are they not also a threat to democracy?” Sanders conceded. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’m not going to argue with that point….” Sanders pulled back on the Democratic establishment, detailing how they despise “DIRTY” working-class people without a PhD. He recalled how thousands of energized, working-class supporters would show up to rallies—only to be met with hostility at official party events. Sanders painted the scene: “There’d be a few hundred people, mostly older, whiter, wealthier. And you saw the clash. The establishment did not want to open the door. They hated the idea that all these people whose hands were a little bit dirty, who didn’t have PhDs or weren’t wealthy…. “Imagine walking in—‘It’s my party, man. You ain’t getting in.’ Yes, we will fight you in the most ruthless ways that we can. And that’s the struggle.” He warned that Democrats either open the door—or go down with the Titanic.***
Andrew Stuttaford in WSJ on Marc-William Palen’s book, Pax Economica.
The book tells the neglected and, to anyone conditioned by contemporary political alignments, somewhat surprising tale of an era, roughly between 1840 and 1945, when notable support for free trade came from a loosely defined political left. This “motley crew,” to borrow a phrase from Mr. Palen, was made up of a cast that varied over the decades, but included radical liberals, radical social reformers, feminists, Georgists, abolitionists, pacifists, anti-imperialists, socialists, progressive Christians and even millenarian Christians. Two very different millenarians, Karl Marx and the inevitable Engels, make an appearance: They assumed that free trade would hurt the working class, but concluded, Mr. Palen recounts, that it would be “a progressive capitalist step along the path toward eventual socialist revolution,” a rationale that would not have thrilled Adam Smith (or, for that matter, workers unconvinced by historical determinism). The 19th century was a time when governments relied on tariffs for a significant portion of their income, and most of Mr. Palen’s free-traders did not envisage sweeping away all tariffs. Instead, they wished them to be set at levels designed solely to raise revenue, rather than for protectionist purposes—levels that would be kept even lower if, as they sought, expenditure on imperial defense and the military was reduced. They were involved in what Mr. Palen calls, somewhat anachronistically, an “intersectional fight for free trade, anti-imperialism, and peace.”***
Michael Pettis in FT, America would be better off without the global dollar.
It is one thing if all coun tries choose to give up the same degree of con trol over their domestic eco nom ies in favour of more glob al isa tion. It is very dif fer ent if some major eco nom ies choose to retain con trol over their domestic eco nom ies. This is because in every coun try, internal and external eco nomic imbal ances must always align. When some nations restrict cap ital and trade flows to main tain favour able domestic con di tions by con trolling their external imbal ances, they can in effect impose their internal imbal ances on those of their trade part ners who retain less con trol over their trade and cap ital accounts. The Brit ish eco nom ist Joan Robin son called these “beg gar-my-neigh bour” trade policies, and said they would ulti mately lead to a rise in global trade con flict. For instance, when a coun try sup presses domestic demand in order to sub sid ise its own man u fac tur ing, in an open global trad ing envir on ment the res ult ing trade sur pluses might nor mally be reversed by mar ket forces. But by restrict ing its trade and cap ital accounts and inter ven ing in its cur rency, that coun try can pre vent such an adjust ment. In this case its man u fac tur ing trade sur plus must be absorbed by those of its part ners who exert much less con trol over their trade and cap ital accounts. What is more, as its share of global man u fac tur ing rises rel at ive to its share of global demand, that of its more open trade part ners must decline. That’s why it is not just coin cid ence that the US, with its deep, flex ible and well-gov erned fin an cial mar kets has man u fac tur ing shares of GDP well below the global aver age, unlike eco nom ies such as China’s with per sist ent sur pluses, who have man u fac tur ing shares well above the global aver age. Indus trial policies aimed at restruc tur ing more highly con trolled domestic eco nom ies also in effect restruc ture the eco nom ies of their more open trade part ners.***
Jonathan Derbyshire in FT, The philosophy behind Trump’s Dark Enlightenment.
In those days, Nick Land described himself as a “delirial engineer” — a follower of marginal thinkers such as the French writer Georges Bataille, who sought to liberate the forces of unconscious desire that the rationalism of the Enlightenment was meant to hold in check. His work was also a celebration of capitalism, or rather of the fearsome power of the market to dissolve settled ways of life. Accelerating capitalism could usher in a new set of social relations, he believed, or hasten the “singularity” in which the biological and technological merge. As the Nineties wore on his behaviour became increasingly erratic. He started living in his office on campus. He eventually left his academic post in 1998 and moved to China. I didn’t hear of him again until 2011, when a small independent publisher put out a collection of his essays called Fanged Noumena. The years spent overseas had left their mark. What once looked like a tactical embrace of the market had turned into veneration of a “globally ascendant Sino-capitalism”. In a breathless paean to the “turbo-charged Shanghai economy” he rhapsodised about a “perfect complicity between radical innovation and profound conservatism”.***
Peter Gordon in BOSTON REVIEW on Philipp Felsch’s book, The Summer of Theory and Irene von Alberti’s film, The Long Summer of Theory.
Felsch is more sympathetic to the many theorists and readers who populate his tale. Their aim, he explains, was “to cultivate Parisian philosophy in the German-speaking countries, not just in translation, but in native assimilation.” Still, the attempt to turn oneself into a French theorist could easily result in “baroque stylistic lapses,” a kind of playacting or mimicry where one adopted the mannerisms, both written and spoken, of les philosophes français. In the eighteenth century, long before anyone had ever heard of poststructuralism or semiotics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had reacted with violent allergy to the affectation and theatricality of the Parisian salons. Those of us who lived through the twilight age of American enthusiasm for French theory in the late 1980s and ’90s could often detect a hint of artifice when colleagues took up the new trend in philosophy with all the zealotry of converts. There were distinctive mannerisms, shibboleths or terms of art, by which the initiates could know their kin. In an era when irony and self-reference became commonplace tropes in literature and mass culture, it was hardly surprising that (to quote Felsch) “theory was becoming indistinguishable from the parody of theory.”***
Beth McMurtrie at chronicle.com, Is This the End of Reading?.
One study published in 2000 found that just 20 percent of students normally did their class reading in 1997 – down from 80 percent in 1981. Another study, published in 2013, found that research papers written by first-year-students largely used sources superficially, often quoting from the first or second page and citing just a couple sentences. But in a widely read essay for Slate magazine published in February, Adam Kotsko argued that the literary crisis he has seen among his students is different. He describes it as a “conspiracy without conspirators.” No one deliberately set out to design a system in which students were not taught the skills they need to become effective readers, critical thinkers, and cogent writers, he believes. But that is the result. Kotsko, an assistant professor who teaches in a Great Books program at North Central College, began noticing changing student behaviors around 2019. “Even students who clearly did the work and wanted to do the work were responding to the reading in a way that was odd and ungrounded in what was said,” he said in a follow-up interview with The Chronicle, “as though they had grabbed onto a couple of points in isolation.”***
Andrew Gelman & Andrew King at chronicle.com, Social Science Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.
To be accepted for publication, replications are often transmogrified into extensions, rather than refutations, of previous work. A prominent journal editor expressed the problem concisely: We say “we welcome replications and then … impose relatively significant hurdles for those replications.” These hurdles often force replications to water down critical findings and frame the research as an expansion, rather than a refutations, of the original work. As a result, the influence of replications is muted. The original often remains better known and better cited, even after a failed replication. After reviewing 10 years of replications in the American Economic Review, a 2024 study concluded “the economics literature does not self-correct.”***
Troy Closson in NYT, The Algebra Problem: How Middle School Math Became a National Flashpoint.
To close those gaps, New York City’s previous mayor, Bill de Blasio, adopted a goal embraced by many districts elsewhere. Every middle school would offer algebra, and principals could opt to enroll all of their eighth graders in the class. San Francisco took an opposite approach: If some children could not reach algebra by middle school, no one would be allowed to take it. The central mission in both cities was to help disadvantaged students. But solving the algebra dilemma can be more complex than solving the quadratic formula. New York’s dream of “algebra for all” was never fully realized, and Mayor Eric Adams’s administration changed the goal to improving outcomes for ninth graders taking algebra. In San Francisco, dismantling middle-school algebra did little to end racial inequities among students in advanced math classes. After a huge public outcry, the district decided to reverse course.***
Clyde McGrady in NYT, At Black Colleges, a Stubborn Gender Enrollment Gap Keeps Growing.
Before stepping foot on Howard University’s campus, Skylar Wilson knew she would see more women there than men. But just how many more stunned her: Howard, one of the most elite historically Black colleges and universities in the nation, is only 30 percent men — 19 percent Black men. “I was like, ‘Wow,’” said Ms. Wilson, a 20-year-old junior. “How is that possible?” Howard is not unique. The number of Black men attending four-year colleges has plummeted across the board. And nowhere is this deficit more pronounced than at historically Black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s. Black men account for 26 percent of the students at H.B.C.U.s, down from an already low 38 percent in 1976, according to the American Institute for Boys and Men.***
Justin Driver in ATLANTIC, Was Integration the Wrong Goal?.
As recently as midway through the first Trump administration, Noliwe Rooks would have placed herself firmly in the traditional pro-Brown camp, convinced that addressing racial inequality in education could best be pursued through integration. But traveling a few years ago to promote a book that criticized how private schools often thwart meaningful racial integration, she repeatedly encountered audience members who disparaged her core embrace of integration. Again and again she heard from Black parents that “the trauma their children experienced in predominately white schools and from white teachers was sometimes more harmful than the undereducation occurring in segregated schools.” The onslaught dislodged Rook’s faith in the value of contemporary integration, and even of Brown itself. She now exhibits the convert’s zeal. Brown, she writes, should be viewed as “an attack on Black schools, politics, and communities, which meant it was an attack on the pillars of Black life.”***
Jason Riley in WSJ, Trump’s Triumph and the Death of Racial Tribalism.
Let’s be absolutely blunt about it,” said Democratic strategist David Axelrod on election night. “There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country.” Does Mr. Axelrod believe that racism and sexism were nonexistent when Mr. Obama was elected? When I phoned Mr. Steele this week for his reaction to Donald Trump’s victory, he told me it could be evidence that the country had “evolved” politically since the Obama presidency. Ms. Harris couldn’t rely on blind racial loyalty from minority voters or guilt from white voters to the extent that Mr. Obama had in 2008. “White guilt is a kind of unexamined force in American political life,” Mr. Steele said. “Whites do a lot of things—entertain a lot of things—not because they believe them but because it buys them innocence, political innocence from all the evils of Western civilization.” If fewer whites were shamed into voting for Ms. Harris based on her ethnicity, bravo. Similarly, he said that if the link between skin color and political preference is severing—if more blacks are starting to vote based on something other than racial identity—“I think it’s progress because it’s breaking up this idea that race is in itself meaningful, that it has some truth to deliver in political contests.”***
Brandon Harris in WHITNEY REVIEW OF NEW WRITING on Odie Henderson’s book, Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras, and Elvis Mitchell’s film, Is That Black Enough for You?!?.
Blaxploitation is a term, like selling out, that has long lost any salient meaning it once held. We used to know what we meant when we said it – specifically 60 or so genre movies made between 1970 and 1977, popular Black-cast actioners, thrillers, policiers, prison, vigilante, and gangster pictures in which Black audiences, whom whites had ceded their urban movie palaces to during a decade and a half of flight to the suburbs, saw characters they could “identify” with – but alas, no longer. After all, even though she isn’t a movie starring someone in an Afro fighting “the man” with a gun and a dream made in 1972, who is Kamala Harris if not a sell-out and what is her campaign if not blaxploitation? Daughter of a Jamaican Marxist who runs for office tits out as a Blaaaaaaack woman™ while throwing anti-fracking and single-payer health care stances under the bus to wrest control of the Genocide Machine on behalf of Goldman Sachs while explicitly having zero Black agenda.***
Vivian Gornick in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Tricia Romano’s book, The Freaks Came out to Write.
In the mid-1960s, the Village Vanguard jazz club in Greenwich Village held Monday night speak-outs. At one of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the Vanguard expecting to make common cause with the speakers, but Jones did not look kindly on us. In fact, he quickly told us we weren’t wanted in the civil rights movement, that we were just an interference, only there to make ourselves feel good. Then he pointed his finger and roared: ‘Blood is going to run in the seats of the theatre of revolution, and guess who’s sitting in those seats!’ The place erupted with people yelling and screaming, denying the charges laid against them. One man in particular seemed to lose his mind, crying out repeatedly: ‘I’ve paid my dues. LeRoi, you know I’ve paid my dues.’ Jones just shook his head, as though amazed at the depth of our shared self-deception, and then said: ‘You people have fucked the whole thing up. When we get there we’re going to do things differently.’ I remember sitting there thinking, ‘He’s confusing class and race. To get “there” he has to become us, and us is not so much white as middle-class.***
Evan Goldstein at chronicle.com on Glenn Loury’s book, Late Admissions.
There is no such thing as free speech. “You always pay the price thatyou’ve been heard to say what you said,” Loury explains. “Now, the gendarmerie aren’t coming to cart you away,” he continues, “but as John Stuart Mill and many others have understood for a long time, there are social-conformity pressures.” But even if speech isn’t free, Loury has been unique in his willingness to pay any price, and zealous in his refusal to conform. He is the Ivy League professor who rubbed shoulders with the downtown hustlers, the Black scholar who ran with the Reaganites, the reformed Reaganite who broke ranks with former friends, the repentant progressive who stands in opposition to Black Lives Matter, and now, he is the eminent scholar dishing the sordid details of a complicated life.***
Glenn Ellmers in NEW CRITERION, The Soul of Strauss.
In a coruscating passage from an essay titled “Perspectives on the Good Society,” Strauss takes aim at the impotent rage that is the inevitable consequence of this flight from all authority. The self, Strauss explains, “is obviously a descendant of the soul”—meaning “it is not the soul.” The soul “is a part of an order which does not originate in the soul.” Those who believe in the self, however, see it as sovereign. It “does not defer to anything higher than itself; yet it is no longer exhilarated by the sense of its sovereignty, but rather oppressed by it.” Finding no purpose within or without, the self becomes “nothing but the accusation or the scream.” Strauss certainly seems to anticipate the oppressive negativity of today’s ideologues of systemic racism, who “constitute themselves by this condemnation; they are nothing but this condemnation or rejection.” Rather than leave the matter there, Strauss connects the psychological to the political (and the philosophic). Those who can only scream about cosmic injustice behave as if they are in hell, and for them, Strauss notes, hell is “life in the United States.” They act as if they are rebelling against “a holy law; but of this they appeared to be wholly unconscious.” Strauss’s reference here to law, and especially holy law, is critical. Human beings, when not deranged by ideology, do in fact find their purpose in and through a community that sees itself as holy. Every premodern society was grounded in a sacred law that insisted, as Strauss explains, that “not everything is permitted.” ...Modern liberalism’s attempt to create the rational state repudiated all such holy laws as superstition. Methodological science, it was presumed, would bring universal enlightenment and a global order of liberal democracies. But this conceit, as Strauss showed, has instead given us the nihilistic rage of the hollow self.***
Theodore Dalrymple in CITY JOURNAL, Britain’s Long, Hot Summer.
One of the riots’ ironies was that liberal intellectuals rediscovered the social value of punishment, which they had previously denied, both on pragmatic and philosophical grounds. Punishment did not work, they had long argued: it neither deterred nor reformed. Besides, it was unjust, merely cruel and vengeful, for wrongdoers were the victims of their circumstances. What they needed was a moral form of physical therapy, or rehabilitation. Nothing like this was heard during the riots. What was needed in response to them, the liberals maintained, was severe and rapidly administered punishment. If rioters could count on a few years’ prison time, there would be fewer of them in years to come, no matter their feelings of resentment. There was no talk of rehabilitation. No psychologist was consulted as to how the rioters should learn to reorder their thoughts so that they became good citizens or to manage their anger so that they did not act on it. No one, as far as I noticed, suggested that rioters were the victims of their circumstances, and therefore the true victims of their own behavior. But neither did anyone explain why the principle or principles of punishment should not apply to the kind of people—burglars, robbers, and violent criminals—upon whom so much liberal, anti-punitive theorizing had been expended during the long period when Britain went from being a low- to a high-crime society. On the contrary, while the state will imprison the rioters, it will release other criminals from prison to make way for them. The general tenor of criminal-justice policy of the new Labour government is that of the now deeply entrenched liberal penology. Throughout the riots and their aftermath, the epigraph of the late Richard Pipes’s history of the Russian Revolution recurred to me often: “The paralytics in the government are struggling feebly, indecisively, as if unwillingly, with the epileptics of the revolution.” This was originally said by Ivan Shcheglovitov, the czarist minister of justice, in 1915.***
John Gordon in NEW CRITERION, Chance & history.
While it was close enough to Europe for considerable interaction, England was, after the Normans, largely safe from foreign invasion behind its watery walls. So the country could develop as a low-tax economy where the king largely left local matters to local landowners. With such a governing system made possible by geography, England proved fertile soil in which the modern concept of liberty could begin to grow, beginning with Magna Carta in 1215. When England, with relatively small Crown revenues, began to found American colonies in the early seventeenth century, to keep costs down it did so by means of proprietors and joint-stock companies rather than the government itself. Thus, at first, the Crown had little interest in them and they were allowed largely to run themselves. Virginia had its own legislature as early as 1619. Even after some of the colonies became Crown colonies, the mother country’s hand was still very light compared to that of other European nations. The colonies of France, Spain, and Portugal, founded by increasingly absolute monarchies, were run with very little local input. So when the colonies of the latter two empires became independent in the early nineteenth century, the people of these new countries, political novices, had only the top-down model of governance from their mother country to use as a template. The result, despite constitutions that had been largely modeled on the American one, was a series of caudillos who greatly impeded economic growth, as concentrated power always does. The United States, blessed with both effective low-tax government and liberty, was able to expand economically and geographically at a furious pace, far outstripping its Latin American neighbors. Even further, because England had limited interest in its American possessions, it didn’t care who went there. That was very unlike the Spanish and French governments, which tended to vet immigrants to their colonies carefully. Indeed, Britain used the American colonies as a convenient dumping ground for troublemakers, religious dissenters, criminals, and others who marched to the beat of a different drummer. This immigration pattern, along with the arrival of those ambitious souls who just came to improve their lives and fortunes, produced a peculiarly feisty and creative mix.***
Quoth the Raven at substack.com, Australia’s Unrealized Gains Tax Will Be A Lesson In Economic Suicide.
For as long as economies have existed, the deal was simple: you sell an asset, you make a profit, and then you pay tax. You know, after you’ve actually made money. Because taxing cash that doesn’t exist yet is the kind of thing you expect from crackheads playing Monopoly, not national policy. But here we are. Australia is now sprinting headfirst toward a future where you get billed for wealth that isn’t liquid, isn’t realized, and, if the market tanks tomorrow, might never even exist. It’s like being forced to pay income tax on the raise your boss almost gave you but didn’t, or footing the bill for the lottery jackpot on the billboard on the side of I-95 that you didn’t win. The fallout is not rocket science. People will be forced to liquidate assets—probably the wrong ones, at the worst possible time—just to scrape together enough real money to cover taxes on their fake money. Don’t have the cash lying around to pay that bill? Sounds like a you problem. Better start liquidating. And this isn’t just stocks we’re talking about. Real estate? Private businesses? Long-term investments you hold precisely because they’re supposed to be safe and stable? All fair game in a fire sale.***
Janan Ganesh in FT, The lesson of the great American boom.
Perhaps what US politics lacks in manners, then, it makes up for in creative tension and churn of ideas. This is a country that has executed a world-changing switch from trade to protectionism at light speed. Or it might be that the causal relationship between politics and economics goes in the opposite direction: that voters have felt liberated to dabble with the extremes because growth is so strong as to be taken for granted. Trump is affordable. Like woke-ism, he emerged during a long economic expansion. Whatever the answer, it needs explaining, this coexistence of economic success and political failure. It isn’t enough to say that a reckoning will come in time. US public life has been deteriorating since the end of the last century, when Newt Gingrich set fire to congressional norms and the death of the so-called Fairness Doctrine gave rise to brute partisanship in broadcast media. No doubt, economic damage is a lagging indicator of this kind of political damage, but 30 years is some lag.***
Andy Kessler in WSJ, Can the Left Do “Abundance”?.
Mr. Gilder noted, “The scarcest resource is time, which always becomes scarce as other things become abundant. It is human genius that transcends the scarcity of time.” That’s economic productivity in a nutshell. From what I can gather, the left’s version of their so-called abundance era isn’t to encourage a further digital revolution, but instead to tap the power of big government. Rather than subsidizing demand—talk about waste—this neoabundance crowd suggests that big government should magically create abundance by edict. Build green energy systems, more housing, vertical farms, more healthcare infrastructure. Easier said than done.***
Jennifer Szalai in NYT on Quinn Slobodian’s book, Hayek’s Bastards.
The title of Slobodian’s book is an explicit echo of Voltaire’s Bastards (1992), John Ralston Saul’s bravura work of intellectual history. Saul posited that technocratic elites had fetishized the Enlightenment ideal of rationality to the point of extremism. Slobodian sees a similar dynamic at play with the ideas of Hayek and Mises, and the “intellectual free-for-all” among their epigones on the far right. Hayek, for instance, claimed that in his critiques of immigration he was assuming not innate differences in people’s genes but, rather, cultural differences — a notion that his “bastards” would stretch, warp and deform. “The point is not to salvage the honor of the Austrian school sages,” Slobodian writes, “but to show how ideas are instrumentalized, adapted and weaponized.” Hayek’s Bastards demonstrates how a history of ideas can be riveting. Slobodian grounds intellectual abstractions in the lives of the people who espoused them. The cast of hard-right thinkers in this book include the economist Murray Rothbard; the financial writer Peter Brimelow, who founded the anti-immigration website VDARE; the political scientist Charles Murray and the psychologist Richard Herrnstein, who together wrote The Bell Curve (1994), the notorious treatise on race and I.Q. that described affirmative action as “leaking a poison into the American soul.”***
Matthew Schitz in NYT, This Is Why Conservatives Turned Against Foreign Aid.
To understand why American soft power became so politically vulnerable, it helps to understand the damage progressives did to its broad legitimacy over the past decade and a half. They did this by implicating soft-power institutions in domestic political controversies, especially on issues of sexual politics. They conflated American interests overseas with progressive priorities, using taxpayer money to advance a set of claims over which Americans strongly disagree. As a result, Americans, far from laying aside their differences when they look abroad, now see foreign affairs as yet another arena for prosecuting domestic disputes. It’s no wonder foreign aid became a ready object of partisan attack. Much of the right’s changing attitude toward institutions like U.S.A.I.D. can be traced to 2011, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech announcing that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” On the same day, the Obama administration issued a memo directing that all foreign aid and diplomacy be conducted in a way that promotes and protects the human rights of L.G.B.T. people. Of course, certain elements of this project — such as opposing the brutal practice of “corrective rape” for lesbians in South Africa — are not only likely to command wide support; they are also hard to view as anything other than an honorable attempt to stop injustice. But others have a less obvious justification. How does including a third gender in the Bangladeshi census further U.S. foreign policy? What American interest is served by making it possible for people in Kosovo to change their sex on government documents?***
Nicholas Shrimpton in NEW CRITERION, Eastern Approaches.
Current events, both abroad and at home, may have had something to do with this preoccupation: except for the Buddhist Dunhuang show and the modern Indian art at the Barbican, the exhibitions were all concerned with the Islamic world and its persistently uneasy relationship with the West. The Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 and the “grooming scandal” in Britain (in which groups of predominantly Muslim men raped and prostituted young white women) are the unstated backdrop to these shows, with their irenic wish to present Islamic culture in the best possible light. The root cause of the preoccupation, however, was intellectual. Edward Said’s Orientalism, first published in 1978, was dismissed as an amateurish polemic by most professional students of the Far and Middle East (a “caricature” in the view of two such commentators). In humanities departments, by contrast, it was received—not universally, but very widely—with reverent enthusiasm, spawning a new practice of “postcolonial studies” and inspiring what Said himself regretfully described, in 1993, as a “rhetoric of blame.”***
Andrew McCarthy in NEW CRITERION on Neil Gorsuch & Janie Nitze’s book, Over Ruled.
A century ago, all congressional law fit into a single volume. Today, the authors report, the U.S. Code encompasses fifty-four volumes and around sixty thousand pages, to which Congress adds well over two million statutory words annually. And that’s not the half of it. In the FDR-driven ascendancy of progressivism, the Federal Register was born in 1936—a consequence of the “Hip Pocket” incident, in which the Justice Department prosecuted companies all the way up to the Supreme Court based on oil-production quotas that didn’t actually exist (the only copy of the relevant “executive order” ever seen came from “the hip pocket of an agent sent down to Texas from Washington”). The register, sixteen pages long at its start, adumbrated the dawn of a new governing regime: by 2021, it spanned around two hundred volumes and more than 188,000 pages. And that’s just the published rules and regulations; it doesn’t account for the informal “guidance documents” (around thirteen thousand of them over the last decade) with which agencies transform entire sectors of society by implicitly threatening enforcement action. Guidance from how many agencies? No one really knows. The authors report there are so many that the federal government itself cannot agree on the number: a sourcebook of the Administrative Conference of the United States lowballed it a few years back at 115, but the Federal Register seems to identify around 436. And that’s just at the federal level—state and municipal governments are metastasizing, too.***
Kerry Howley in NYT on Barrett Brown’s book, My Glorious Defeats.
The reader may be forgiven for losing the thread. This is a book in which the stakes are both incredibly high (a state throws you into prison) and very low (a “Hobbity-looking” fellow writes a piece you don’t like in Gizmodo). Brown’s looping, musical sentences are flirtations, bending reason toward satire, hovering always on the fine edge between absurdity and profundity, as if Thomas De Quincey (another fan of opium-derived compounds) had taken upon himself the problems of the post-9/11 military-industrial complex. The state is an afterthought here — a litany of absurdist horrors too stupid to appall. Of course Brown would be denied his constitutional right to a lawyer after a thin-skinned prison official decided to punish him for talking to a journalist. Of course Brown, newly released from prison, would find himself holding a “Cops Kill” sign that somehow gets rearranged to “Kill Cops” such that he is once again incarcerated. Brown plays up the impetuous narcissism for comedic effect, but how many revolutionaries, softened by history into noble bores, were precisely the self-promoting, self-centering semi-narcissists their societies needed at the time? We’re left with a man who refuses to look away from the deep structure of the world, an unstable position from which there is no sanctuary. My Glorious Defeats is deranged, hyperbolic and as true a work as I have read in a very long time.***
Ephrat Livni in NYT, ‘Degrowth’.
The first documented use of degrowth in the economic and ecological context was in 1972, when the French social philosopher André Gorz asked whether production should be scaled back for environmental balance. He used the French term, décroissance. It took off only in the new millennium, shifting from academic circles to the mainstream as people became more concerned about consumption’s toll on the environment, said Tilman Hartley, a researcher at the University of Cologne who studies how societies deal with resource constraints. He noted that some people now talk about “post-growth,” and last year, members of the European Parliament held a conference called “Beyond Growth.” Whatever the name, the underlying concept is likely to gain acceptance, degrowth proponents say. “It’s almost certain that growth will come to an end in the future,” Mr. Hartley said. “The idea is to plan for it.”***
Quoth the Raven at substack.com, The Dark Secret Behind Democrats’ Economic Policy.
Make no mistake about it—the Biden administration did not give a single solitary fuck thought to how fast we were running up debt. The deficit under the Biden presidency propelled the debt to unprecedented levels that put us on an extremely dangerous trajectory. There appeared to be zero discretion or care in how the Biden administration spent. This is pretty much par for the course for Democrats, who generally believe there should be no ceiling on how high taxes can go and how big government can get, and nothing is off-limits to tax, regardless of how regressive. The topic of government ever getting too big or taxes getting too high is never broached. As policy, Democrats fight for their right to push the economy to the brink. Economists on the left have supplemented this asinine policy with the complex-sounding bullshit jargon of modern monetary theory, which, without getting into the intricacies of it, posits that the Fed can print as much money as it needs without any consequence, and we have through the miracle of academia, in essence, unlocked some Game Genie-like cheat code for the nation’s economy. Again, both parties embrace monetary policy as it exists today (i.e. Trump calling for rate cuts this week) but only one party believes that spending can be unlimited and that there are no consequences to poor economic decisions.***
Judge Glock in WSJ on Marc Dunkelman’s book, Why Nothing Works.
To those outside the progressive camp, Mr. Dunkelman’s claim will
sound odd. Did President Biden’s record-breaking regulations or progressive governors’ efforts to shut down their states for months during the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrate inordinate squeamishness about government? The modern progressive movement has not shown itself untutored in the uses of power. Yet when Mr. Dunkelman focuses on a particular type of power—the power to build things—it’s clear that something has changed. Progressives once considered the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a public corporation that built dams and provided cheap electricity, the crowning achievement of the New Deal. Despite FDR’s supposed Jeffersonian inclinations, his big Hamiltonian dams became the model of government building for the common man. The Marshall Plan was sold in part as a TVA for Europe. President Lyndon B. Johnson thought a TVA for the Mekong Delta could help end the Vietnam War. Beginning in the 1960s, progressives became ever more suspicious of big projects and their threats to individuals and local communities. New York’s highway and bridge builder Robert Moses, once hailed as a progressive reformer, became instead an archvillain. Moses argued that the “individual has to yield . . . to the advantages and needs of the majority of people.” If self-interested individuals didn’t bow to government demands, he said, “we wouldn’t build anything!” For many new activist groups on the left, that was just fine.***
Jennifer Szalai in NYT, Trump vs. the Bureaucrats.
Conservative denunciations of the administrative state have continued to couch objections in terms of the Constitution and bureaucratic treachery. In “Unmasking the Administrative State” (2019), the conservative political scientist John Marini warned that the growth of government bureaucracy “had opened up the prospect of the greatest tyranny of all.” Two years later, Trump’s 1776 Commission published a report that compared President Woodrow Wilson to Mussolini: “Like the progressives, Mussolini sought to centralize power under the management of so-called experts.” Fears of an undemocratic, overweening bureaucracy haven’t only served as a right-wing talking point. Some of the administrative state’s most pointed critics have been intellectuals on the left, like the anthropologists James C. Scott and David Graeber, each of whom has argued that a domineering bureaucratic state is hostile to local ways of living. But anarchist critiques like theirs are harder to marshal into a mass political movement. In 2015, a time when the Tea Party, a MAGA precursor, was already well underway, Graeber lamented that the right had figured out how to politicize antipathy toward the bureaucracy, deploying the rhetoric of “anti-bureaucratic individualism” to push through a free-market agenda that guts social services while bolstering business interests.***
Nikil Saval in NEW YORKER, Enemy of the State.
It’s an irony of Scott’s career that, though he pleaded for respecting local knowledge, his own writing began to take on imperial proportions in the later decades of his life. The last major works that he published before his death, “The Art of Not Being Governed” and “Against the Grain,” both cover centuries of history, confidently summing up many shelves’ worth of research and surveying wide tracts of geography. Scott examines how ancient states formed around sedentary agricultural practices—growing rice in medieval Southeast Asia, and wheat in ancient Mesopotamia—not because such farming had any intrinsic or inevitable value but because it was an important step in creating a “legible” and “manageable” state. Outside the rice “padi-state” and “grain states,” in Scott’s view, intrepid rebels engaged in more mobile, nomadic forms of agriculture, trying to escape taxation and forced labor. Scott saw each step in the civilizing process, from farming cereals to working on an assembly line, as a loss of complexity, a diminishing of the “great diversity of natural rhythms” to which our ancestors were attuned. “It is no exaggeration to say,” he writes, before arguably risking just such an exaggeration, “that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal-grain farming as cereal-grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work on a modern assembly line. Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks.” From this perspective, a civilization’s collapse, rather than something to be lamented, might be experienced, at least by those at the edge of a state, as “an emancipation.”***
Alexander Nazaryan in NYT, on Christopher Lasch’s book, The Revolt of the Elites.
“There has always been a privileged class, even in America, but it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings,” Lasch wrote in the first of the 13 essays that make up this lacerating indictment of the United States published posthumously, a year after his death. The book’s title alludes to The Revolt of the Masses, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s 1929 excoriation of “mass-man.” The rebellion Lasch bears witness to is the obverse of Ortega y Gasset’s, because it has been carried out by scornful elites who see the rest of the country as “a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy.”***
John Carney at breitbart.tv, Trump Should Award Pat Buchanan the Medal of Freedom.
The great advantage Trump had, really, is that he didn’t have to warn people about what was going to happen. We had seen it. We knew Iraq was a disaster. We saw the American industrial base destroyed by allowing China into the WTO. So, what Pat was doing was, in a way, lighting the signal fire to say, Mordor is coming, beware. And people said, no, we’ve heard this warning before, nothing bad will happen. It was here when Trump came. And so, Americans were awake to the fact that something needed to be done.”***
N.S. Lyons in CITY JOURNAL, The Foundation of American Folly.
Bundy may have funded black nationalists and anticapitalist revolutionaries, but he was no Communist. He and his cabinet represented a who’s who of the era’s centrist, bipartisan national security establishment. And the foundation’s guiding obsession was not Marxist dialectics but the statistics-worshipping “systems analysis” of Ford Motor president, defense secretary, World Bank president, and Vietnam War–bungler Robert McNamara. It was McNamara whom Henry Ford II brought in, along with his storied Ivy League “Whiz Kids” and “organization men,” to kick-start the foundation after 1947. Their passion for abstract planning would remain ingrained in its activities. What the Ford Foundation has always most abhorred is the democratic will of the common man. As early as 1949, the authors of a key report setting the foundation’s core priorities were openly disdainful of democratic self-government, dismissing the “grotesque” “myth” that “any citizen of reasonable character” was qualified to make important decisions.***
Christine Rosen in COMMENTARY, The Elite War on the American Middle Class.
The moral universe of the elite is different from the rest of the country, and they view these beliefs as important markers of their status. “Today, luxury goods are more accessible than before,” Henderson writes. “This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.” What kind of beliefs? One study cited by Henderson reveals, “Upper-class individuals cared more about status and valued it more highly than working-class individuals.... Furthermore, compared with lower-status individuals, high-status individuals were more likely to engage in behavior aimed at protecting or enhancing their status.” Henderson coined the phrase “luxury beliefs” to describe some of the things his classmates believed are harmless (defunding the police, decriminalizing drugs, abandoning monogamous marriage) because their privilege protected them from the impact of such choices—even as the poor and middle class suffered from those same policies.***
Stephen Wilmeth in RANGE, The Unequal West.
Leadership after the Revolution still had contact with the Founders who were raised under the tyranny of King George. That was important. Initially, the process to statehood was hit and miss, but in 1787 a writ for a minimum population of 60,000 was set. The populous needed to be capable of managing a state government, they had to create a constitution, and they had to enlist federal legislators to carry the action through Congress. In an era that abhorred debt, the demand was to create an economy, grow it to support themselves, and then contribute to the reduction of debt. This concept elevated the citizenry to sovereign status with their freedom being manifested by the accrual and rights of private property. Land transfers in various forms were critical. When Congress attempted to alter course and withhold lands to the citizenry of the Northwest Territories (consisting of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin as well as part of Minnesota), the people stood their ground and declared they would go on their own if that breach of promise was upheld. Washington blinked and those territories became free and equal states…. In 1864 all promises were ended when the Republicans needed three electoral votes to secure another Lincoln term. Perhaps more sinister was too many congressmen learned that silver was discovered in Nevada. Such treasure could never be entrusted to mere citizenry, and the state was welcomed with hooch and banners into the Union with fewer than 40,000 free and willing souls. The United States further incubated the Silver State’s wealth by withholding 81 percent of its lands from private ownership. The floodgates were opened, and all pretense of free and equal states ensued in the formation of all other states west of the 100th meridian. That included Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. Whereas governments in states east of the 100th meridian own about 4.5 percent of the land surface, the conditional territorial and unequal states of the West can boast only 39 percent of their footprint in sovereign private ownership.... It is a breathtaking betrayal. As a result, the American model and its framework has evolved from originality to a collage of free and equal versus territorial and unequal states.***
Simon Kuper in FT, A new who’s who of the global elites.
Once a family cracks the elite, it can often stay in it until wars or revolutions destroy the existing order. The west’s “long peace” since 1945 has allowed elites to reproduce themselves, recruiting their own sons. The French elite, for instance, is increasingly born in central Paris. That reduces the space for ambitious provincials. Stable elites tend to be old. The median age for economic elites in 15 countries ranged from 55 to 60. In the US, it was 62. Why does a country known for economic dynamism have the oldest elite? One explanation comes from the economist Thomas Philippon. Big US corporations have captured the political system and regulators, blocking new entrants and establishing monopolies and oligopolies. Think of Facebook buying its rising competitors WhatsApp and Instagram. That’s how the US tech elite that emerged between 1995 and 2004 has largely stayed on top. By contrast, Poland and China, which entered global capitalism late, have the youngest economic elites, especially as regards bosses and asset-owners. China’s elite has other unusual characteristics. Its members are more likely than any other national elite to be rural-born, while 34 per cent of them studied engineering, the highest proportion after Chile.***
Mark Lewis in WSJ on Lyndal Roper’s book, Summer of Fire and Blood.
The next year Luther made his famous and fearless trip to the meeting at Worms, where he appeared before the Holy Roman Emperor and the imperial assembly, and it was a martyr’s walk. Everyone, including Luther, expected that his fate at Worms would be similar to so many others who had dared to challenge the Church hierarchy. After surviving Worms, and dumbfounded to still be alive, Luther found himself in a new position of needing to think along practical lines. From the beginning Luther’s movement had depended on the protections of a well-armed German nobility; now he was being protected by a noble and hidden in a castle. He went incognito, changing out of his monk’s robe and choosing “noble not peasant dress,” as Ms. Roper keenly observes. In his writings after Worms, Luther began to envision a theocratic “German nation” in which priests would not be a special caste. Wir alle gleich priester sein—we’re all priests. This is the well-known “priesthood of the believer.”***
Lucy Hughes-Hallett in NEW STATESMAN on Simon Ings’ book, Engineers of Human Souls.
The author is Gabriele D’Annunzio – poet, playwright, serial seducer, aviator, war-mongering orator and, briefly, small-scale dictator. The large-scale dictator is Benito Mussolini. D’Annunzio declared that when he temporarily laid aside “scribbling” for violent political action he was working in a new art form whose material was human lives. He seized the Croatian port city of Fiume (now Rijeka) in 1919, and made himself its “Duce”, using it as the setting for a 15-month-long piece of spectacular street-theatre. Parades, marching bands, anthems belted out by volunteers with piratical hair-dos and black uniforms – all in celebration of a greater Italy, of soldiers as sacrificial victims offered up on the altar of the patria, and of D’Annunzio himself. Mussolini took note. He later called D’Annunzio the “John the Baptist of Fascism”. As Ings writes, “All Mussolini’s ritual, symbolism, mystique and style can be tied back to D’Annunzio. The young Mussolini was a dogged and voracious autodidact. Ings praises his early journalistic essays as “deeply thought-out” and summarises the texts he was reading – by Georges Sorel, Gustave Le Bon, Roberto Michels. Lightly skimming where Mussolini dug deep, Ings gives his readers a concise round-up of the intellectual ground in which the 20th-century dictatorships took root. He has a talent for succinct statements so well turned that they immediately ring true. His summings-up are forceful. He can make sense of syndicalism (something many historians struggle to do) and explain how attractive it seemed to early-20th-century thinkers from each end of the political spectrum, and why it lent itself so conveniently to totalitarianism.***
Dominic Green in WSJ on Eric Cline’s book, After 1177 B.C..
The Mycenaean and Minoan societies of mainland Greece and Crete ended by the late 1100s B.C. Contact with the Near East dwindled, writing stopped and only “survivors or squatters,” Mr. Cline writes, lived amid the mainland’s ruined palaces. The Bronze Age was remembered in Homer’s oral legend, and Greek civilization took centuries to rebound. As everywhere, the collapse of large sociopolitical units gave space to city-states. The polis, which the Greeks would export across the region, was born from this power vacuum. The cities of Bronze Age Canaan were reborn as a mishmash of Phoenician cities, an Israelite state in the southern hill country, and, after a Sea People called the Peleset had annexed Canaan’s coastal strip, a league of Philistine cities. The Phoenicians and the Cypriots were the most “resilient” and successful of the new groups. While the seafaring Phoenicians laid the foundations of a Mediterranean empire, Cypriot advances in iron-working, Mr. Cline writes, rank with the alphabet as “one of the great innovations of this age.” Were the Cypriots the middlemen in the alphabet’s mercantile passage from Semitic script into Greek? And were the Israelites, like their Phoenician allies, “resilient and innovative” Canaanites adapting to the “new normal,” or, as Exodus records, newcomers exploiting a regional collapse? This engaging book raises many such intriguing questions.***
Robert Sullivan in NYT on William Taylor’s book, Hoof Beats, and David Chaffetz’s book, Raiders, Rulers, and Traders.
Sociability was another asset that likely carried horses safely through the Cenozoic Era’s global climate fluctuations. It’s better to have more than one pair of eyes watching for those now-extinct saber-tooth cats and dire wolves. “Modern horses have sophisticated social awareness,” Taylor writes, “even eavesdropping on interactions between other horses within their group.” Early humans socialized too, banding together to trap horses in canyons, push them to shorelines and kill them. These horses had grown to around four feet in height and met us, Taylor estimates, first in Africa or maybe on the part of the Eurasian steppe that is today Georgia. Before this time, horses were also in North America, a point that several North American Indigenous traditions have long made and that, through collaborations with Indigenous scientists, Western science now concedes. (Horses declined faster in America, only to return in the 1500s, via colonizers’ boats.)***
Thomas Meaney in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Pekka Hamalainen’s book, Indigenous Continent, Ned Blackhawk’s book, The Rediscovery of America, and Nick Estes’ book, Our History Is the Future.
Why suggest the Lakota were self-sufficient, peaceable buffalo hunters in the Black Hills for a thousand years, when they stalked buffalo for less than a century and were so thoroughly connected to international trade that, on entering the homes of their chiefs, visitors found New England carpets, French soap, African coffee, Haitian sugar and knives from Sheffield? What does it mean that the Oneida Nation still celebrates its supporting role in the American Revolution and reveres George Washington, or that a Mohawk man wears a laminated copy of the Fort Laramie Treaty around his neck? Are these signs of freedom or captivity? Nothing could be more patronising to Indigenous peoples than to deny the cost of their survival or pretend that their consciousness exists outside modern time, on a reservation outside history.***
Greg Afinogenov in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Victor Serge’s book, What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression, and Stuart Finkel’s book, Revolutionary Philanthropy.
In 1918, along with the writer Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Novorusskii, a veteran of People’s Will, he set up the Museum of the Revolution in Petrograd, which gave him access to the archives of the Okhrana. ‘For the first time,’ he wrote, ‘the entire mechanism of an authoritarian empire’s police repression had fallen into the hands of revolutionaries.’ Not only would this help militants in other countries, it would also be useful to the Bolsheviks if the party were defeated and forced once more to go underground – not an unlikely potential outcome of the civil war. The archives contained identifying information on tens of thousands of police infiltrators and agents provocateurs, many of whom remained active in Soviet Russia. In November 1918, the most famous of them, Roman Malinovsky, a former Bolshevik Duma deputy and ally of Lenin, presented himself at the Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny and – in Serge’s telling – demanded to be shot. He was. Serge wrote up his findings in a series of articles for the French Bulletin communiste in 1921, and in 1926 expanded them into a pamphlet called Behind the Scenes at a Secret Police Organisation: What Every Revolutionary Should Know about State Repression. It has been republished dozens of times, in many languages, in part because the general character of state repression has not changed.***
Alex Newman in RANGE, Open Season.
This writer first noticed something sinister was going on with respect to farmers in 2012 upon hearing then-South African President Jacob Zuma singing, “Bring me my machine gun, we are going to shoot the Boer.” The Boers, of course, are a specific ethnic group descended mostly from the Dutch. But Boer in Dutch means farmer. And plenty of leaders such as Julius Malema, then leader of the ruling party’s youth league, regularly chanted songs such as “Kill the farmer.” ...The situation got so bad that the world’s top expert on genocide, Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch, warned that genocidal forces were at stage six of eight on the genocide scale. Stage seven is slaughter and stage eight is denial after the fact. “There is direct evidence of SA [South African] government incitement to genocide,” Stanton said after a fact-finding mission. The next year, authorities in Brazil began displacing entire farming villages across some of its most productive agricultural areas. Brazilian troops, some of them wearing U.N. insignia, ordered the residents—at gunpoint—to dismantle their ramshackle homes and load everything into trucks. No compensation was offered to property owners as multiple towns were wiped off the map. Officially, the far-left government’s operation was designed to return lands to native tribes that supposedly lived on or at least passed through it centuries ago. Ironically, leaders of the Xavante tribe who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of the landgrab denounced it, saying their ancestors had never lived on that land or even in that ecosystem. Around half a million acres of prime farmland were taken out of production—a precursor to similar schemes that would be pursued later. In Communist China, meanwhile, government officials are already moving peasants off their ancestral lands and farms at gunpoint. Dubbed the “National New-type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020),” the scheme aims to move 250 million people into tightly controlled cities by 2026. Countless villages have already been razed as the regime promises that government-controlled corporate megafarms will be more productive.***
Tripti Lahiri, Austin Ramzy & Krishna Pokharel in WSJ, Tibetan Woman Travels Rough Road to Freedom.
Street cameras, police checkpoints and increasingly sophisticated monitoring of digital devices have helped enforce Chinese rule and tamp down on even the faintest hint of support for Tibetan independence. Firsthand accounts from Tibetans about what is happening there, such as those provided by Nam Kyi, have become increasingly rare because of China’s expanding clampdown. Since 2020, fewer than 100 people have escaped to India, the most common destination for people fleeing, according to Tibetan exile leaders. Nam Kyi’s descriptions of the surveillance provide fresh evidence of how Beijing is tightening the screws. Many Tibetans are made to download an antifraud app, according to Human Rights Watch and other rights groups, which gives authorities sweeping access to their phones and communications…. Nam Kyi’s region, which Tibetans know as Amdo and part of which falls in China’s Sichuan province, was home to a monastery at the center of many self-immolations, a form of protest adopted by some Tibetans following a 2008 uprising against Chinese repression. Locals called the road leading up to Kirti Monastery “Martyrs’ Road.” ...In 2015, she participated in a brief protest that lasted a matter of minutes, walking down a street carrying the Dalai Lama’s photo, and was arrested by police. It was a bold act, given that China has criminalized the possession of the religious leader’s image. For nearly a week afterward, police beat and interrogated her about where she got the photo and whether she belonged to separatist groups. They were horrified when she said she had seen Tibet’s red, blue, white and yellow flag, which is also banned, and described it to them. She was convicted of separatist acts against the nation and sent to prison. Authorities pressed her to disavow the Dalai Lama, and again she refused. “He knows all about the beatings you give us here,” she said she told her captors. “The way you can look through security cameras, the Dalai Lama can see things.”***
revolver.news: Internal docs Internal docs reveal the South African Air Force is falling to pieces….
Now, as we watch South Africa crumble, the latest brick to fall is the Air Force. It has literally collapsed. As of now, they’ve got two fighter jets, one helicopter, and three jet trainers left in working order. That’s it. Out of 330 aircraft, only six can even get off the ground. The rest are collecting dust, rust, and taxpayer resentment.Martin Plaut: The South African Air Force has only two fighter jets, one helicopter and three fighter jet trainers as operable military aircraft…”The SANDF [defence force] has deteriorated to such an extent it cannot defend the country,” said Kobus Marais, a recently retired member of Parliament who was the DA’s shadow defence minister. “Major equipment is not working. There is no air force and no navy.” The South African Air Force has only two fighter jets, one helicopter and three fighter jet trainers as operable military aircraft. More than 330 fighter jets, helicopters and planes used to rescue wounded soldiers have been lying idle for years awaiting repairs.***
Helen Sullivan in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS Diary.
What is called ‘informal’ mining is in fact a highly organised, if extremely dangerous, business. Many of South Africa’s abandoned gold mines are huge, interconnected systems, with shafts at multiple levels. Some of the miners work in small groups, but there are also teams hundreds-strong that are controlled by armed gangs. The miners sell to the gang bosses, who sell to the syndicate bosses, who arrange for the gold to be taken overseas – often through the United Arab Emirates or India, which have lax gold-carrying laws. Gold is desirable not least because it is untraceable…. Many of the miners are forced to work at depths of two kilometres or more for months at a time. They bring picks, hammers, headlamps and on occasion explosives to extract small amounts of gold. The ore is sometimes partially refined underground, the pieces crushed in a pestle and mortar, and then the fine dust mixed with water and mercury. This produces a mercury-gold amalgam, which can later be heated to make pure gold. A doctor at Johannesburg’s Baragwanath Hospital told me that she had treated local children for mercury poisoning caused by gold refining: mercury fumes are densest in the air a few feet above ground. Each shaft in a mine will have a shop – or shops – selling food and supplies, such as batteries for headlamps, which the miners pay for in gold or amalgam. Each shaft also has a hierarchy. At the bottom are those who dig. Above them are those who sell supplies, who guard the ropes that are the only means of getting back to the surface and who organise for the bodies of miners who die underground to be pulled back up. Those higher up the chain, the underground bosses, are often armed. To leave, miners have to ‘buy a rope’; that is, they must pay one of the bosses a given amount of amalgam, usually between 25 and 40 grams. Thirty grams of amalgam could take three months to mine – or a week, if you’re lucky.***
Mindy Belz in WSJ, The Hunting of Nigeria’s Christians.
For 48 hours last Christmas, seemingly coordinated attacks struck 37 communities across a 250-mile stretch of Nigeria’s Middle Belt. Fulani terrorists reportedly killed at least 160 people, set more than 220 homes ablaze, burned vehicles and churches. “What ought to be a night of glad tidings turned out to be that of horror,” wrote Dawari George, a former member of Nigeria’s National Assembly. Gaza and Ukraine are deadly, but if you’re a Christian, the most likely place in the world to be hunted and killed is Nigeria—a diverse country with a constitutional federal government and one of Africa’s largest economies. According to the monitor Open Doors, during the year ending in September some 4,100 Christians were killed and 3,300 kidnapped in raids across the country. From December 2023 to February 2024, 1,336 people were killed in Plateau State, Amnesty International reports. At least 750 churches and other Christian sites were reportedly targeted, many forced to close…. At a meeting in February, Plateau State’s Baptist conference president, the Rev. Koeleh Saleh, said 62 members of his church had been killed in the preceding eight months.***
Chigozie Obioma in FT, The war elsewhere.
Despite this shift in tone and mood, I was still unsettled. The wagon was moving slowly now, climbing over several speed bumps. “You see,” he began, his voice low. “Two weeks ago we were inside Tac HQ inside Sambisa. Around 2am, some of our boys were on alert, but most of us were sleeping. Our mumu sergeant major was smoking, listening to sermon. And, next thing, we hear gbom!” ...He pulled down his shirt and I saw the healed wound – a scar still bearing faint marks of its stitching. The bullet had pierced cleanly through the “bulltetproof vest he wore – the new one the Nigerian army had issued them. “It was fake!” he cried, his fist in the air, his eyes reddening. “We are out there fighting – out there dying like fowl! But our government supply us fake bulletproof!” Under his breath, the officer was cursing the politicians, Nigeria. “E no go better for all of them!” He pulled me again towards him as if unaware of the force of his arm around my neck. I sat wondering what I had provoked in him, wanting only that the man forget that I had asked any questions. But then he said in a quieter voice, “Don?” “Yes, sir.” “Write your book… write it.” He put his face between his palms. He was sobbing. I wanted to say something, but I was stunned with fear. “Don,” he said. “Yes,” I said. “Sambisa is hell… hellfire. Pray that nothing can bring people like you there. If na me be you, I will remain in that US jeje. I will not even come here at all. I will not-”***
John Halstead at worksinprogress.co, The prehistoric psychopath.
The defining characteristic that drives high rates of violent death in our species is not our proclivity for lethal violence but rather our capacity for it. Human beings are unusually vulnerable to violence. We have massive heads, thin skin, puny muscles, little to no protective fur; we can’t fly, swim, or burrow away, and we’re not even very good at running away. Our children are even more fragile, particularly as babies, and take ages to mature. At the same time, our offensive abilities make us the most lethal species on the planet. Violent attacks in a hunter gatherer context are essentially undefendable. We have abilities to collectively organize, plan, and deceive far in advance of any other species. Even lions are afraid of us. Our stone-tipped tools, poisons, and projectile technology appear to have killed off almost all of the planet’s megafauna, like mastodons, giant kangaroos, and saber-tooth tigers. Put together, these factors make human intra-species conflict extremely deadly. It is not that we have an unusual proclivity for aggressive violence. On the contrary, most other species are far more aggressive than humans. Chimpanzees, for example, are over 150 times more likely to initiate violence against each other than we are. Rather, our species is characterized by low rates of aggression and conflict but extremely high lethality rates when conflict does arise. Hunter gatherers prefer restraint because they understand that violent aggression inevitably exposes them to retaliatory violence. In one study of Amazonian societies, 70 percent of killings were motivated by revenge, and Paul Roscoe reports that his database of over 1,000 military actions in New Guinea small-scale societies shows that 61 percent were revenge based. Our violent proclivities are largely retaliatory rather than aggressive.***
David Pilling in FT, Blair urges west to engage with dictators over Sahel terrorism.
“Almost all the Sahel, from Guinea to Sudan, the Atlantic to the Red Sea, is now under some form of post-coup-d’etat military rule,” the report said. Unwillingness to engage with these regimes would result in an increasing outflow of migrants to Europe and “the influx of predatory actors”, particularly Russian paramilitary groups, with “security implications far beyond the porous borders of the region”. Crowds poured on to the streets of Niger’s capital Niamey this week to call for the withdrawal of US forces only days after the arrival of dozens of Russian military instructors. Niger is the third post-coup country to expel French troops, with Mali and Burkina Faso, and to strengthen military ties with Moscow, including with Africa Corps, the new name for the Wagner Group once headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin.***
Farnaz Fassihi in NYT, Iranians Confront Their Leaders Over Syria Debacle.
While opponents of the government have long bristled at the money Iran has sent all over the Middle East, the sentiment now seems to have spread. Even some who fought on their government’s behalf in Syria or lost family members in the civil war there are asking if it was worth it. The Assad regime, some noted, was not the only loser to emerge from the uprising. Ebrahim Motaghi, a professor of international relations at Tehran University, said on a talk show that Iran had been reduced from regional power to merely another country. Some questioned the very foundation of Iran’s strategy over the past decades for making itself a dominant regional force that would confront Israel and its main backer, the United States: Tehran’s support for the array of militant groups across the Middle East that it called the axis of resistance.***
Koert Debeuf at euobserver.com, What does Iran want?.
Some suggest that Iran's foreign policy is aimed at bringing back the Persian empire. Not only that of the Safavids, but also that of its founder, Cyrus the Great (600-530 BC). Cyrus' empire covered the area from what is today Uzbekistan to Turkey and thus what we call the Middle East. Cyrus himself was admired by the Greeks (the historian Xenophon wrote a book about him) and even by the Israelites. He put an end to the Babylonian exile, had the Temple rebuilt and was therefore even called the Messiah by the prophet Isaiah. It seems logical that this is why Iran is today interfering in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and even Palestine. Yet it is not the Persian empire that drives the ayatollahs and mullahs. Quite the contrary, in fact. In 1979, they ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in a revolution, eight years after he had celebrated 2,500 years of Persian empire with great grandeur…. Iran's current regime hates everything that had to do with the Shah, and hence all imperial ambitions. What has been driving Iran since 1979 is not the Iranian state. It is the revolution against everything that state stood for 200 years. It was a country that had to listen to Russia, Britain and later the United States. The Shah himself was the best example, considering his father Reza Shah Pahlavi had been put on the throne by the British. In return, the Shah gave the British and others concessions over the country's wealth, especially then on oil…. Under the Shah, Iran was also westernised and secularised. The 1979 revolution, under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was therefore not only against the Shah, but also against colonisation, Western imperialism and secularisation. The goal, therefore, was complete independence from the West and re-Islamisation.***
Bahram Salavati in FT, Iran’s brain drain is happening at an alarming rate.
Many often settle permanently in host countries, contributing to a near-permanent loss of talent, the detrimental effects of which are already evident. Skill shortages are hobbling key industries and stalling innovation, while the outflow of trained professionals weakens capacity for scientific and technological advancement. The flight of skilled Iranians is complicated by the influx of Afghan refugees into Iran since the return of the Taliban in 2021. Plans to deport an estimated 2mn Afghan workers by March 2025 will make it more difficult to stabilise the labour market and manage development challenges.***
Abdi Latif Dahir & Justin Scheck in NYT, Why Maids Keep Dying in Saudi Arabia.
Autopsy reports are vague and contradictory. They describe women with evidence of trauma, including burns and electric shocks, all labeled natural deaths. One woman’s cause of death was simply “brain dead.” An untold number of Ugandans have died, too, but their government releases no data. There are people who are supposed to protect these women — government officials like Fabian Kyule Muli, vice chairman of the labor committee in Kenya’s National Assembly. The powerful committee could demand thorough investigations into worker deaths, pressure the government to negotiate better protections from Saudi Arabia or pass laws limiting migration until reforms are enacted. But Mr. Muli, like other East African officials, also owns a staffing company that sends women to Saudi Arabia. One of them, Margaret Mutheu Mueni, said that her Saudi boss had seized her passport, declared that he had “bought” her and frequently withheld food. When she called the staffing agency for help, she said, a company representative told her, “You can swim across the Red Sea and get yourself back to Kenya.”***
Seth Cropsey & Joseph Epstein in WSJ, Azerbaijan Is Israel’s New Friend in the Muslim World.
State-affiliated news sources have reported the U.S., Azerbaijan and Israel strengthening ties. And last month a senior adviser to the ayatollah expressed concern to Mr. Hajiev over Israeli activities in Baku. Iran sees the prospect of a strong Azerbaijan as an existential threat. An emboldened Azerbaijan would give competitor Turkey and nemesis Israel more regional power. It would also exploit one of Iran’s vulnerabilities. Ethnic Azerbaijanis make up roughly a third of Iran’s population. Like other minority populations in Iran, the Azerbaijanis have been cruelly repressed and pressured to assimilate. Iran’s minorities, which also include Kurds, Baluch and Arabs, are more likely to be executed or “disappeared” by the state than their Persian counterparts. Iran also targets them culturally, preventing them from teaching their languages or giving their children traditional ethnic names. Iranian Azerbaijanis have shown affinity for Azerbaijan. During the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, Iranian Azerbaijanis gathered at the border to cheer on their co-ethnics. When a Chicago-based Azerbaijani-language news channel took calls from inside Iran to discuss Israel, Azerbaijanis called in to praise Jerusalem’s support for Baku.***
Raghu Karnad in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Janaki Bakhle’s book, Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva.
Savarkar entered the Cellular Jail as an anti-colonial revolutionary. He left it as the chief spokesman of Hindu nationalism, and a scourge of India’s Muslims and their great friend Gandhi. What happened? The standard answer, which leans heavily on Savarkar’s memoir, centres on his response to his prison warders in the Andamans. Many of these warders, who were also convicts, were Pathan and Baluch Muslims from north-western India. By observing them, the story goes, Savarkar became convinced of the undisguised arrogance of Muslims and the cost of Hindu timidity. The Pathans were ‘one and all, cruel and unscrupulous persons, and were full of fanatical hatred for the Hindus’, he argued. His writings would contain ever more hostile Muslim caricatures. The Pathans, he wrote, were dumb and vicious, and took any chance to harass Hindu inmates, believing themselves religiously sanctioned to do this. They were also secretly cowards: they wilted when a victim stood up for himself, or if Hindus stood together. But that rarely happened. Instead, a steady trickle of Hindus professed Islam to escape their misery. Within this neat metaphor of the nation’s history, as he saw it, Savarkar would reprise a miniature Maratha rebellion. Savarkar also became aware of a pan-Islamic turn on the mainland, particularly after the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in October 1914. The Pathans, he wrote, could not hide their glee: Britain’s defeat would mean the restoration of Muslim sovereignty in India, under a Turkish caliph. After the Ottoman defeat, Gandhi showed his sympathy to Muslims by throwing his support behind a quixotic campaign, known as the Khilafat movement, to defend the caliph and oppose the sanctions imposed on the Ottomans by the Treaty of Sèvres. To Savarkar, the Khilafat movement was proof of the essential anti-nationalism of the Indian Muslim, imbibed ‘with his mother’s milk’, and of the preposterous lengths to which Gandhi would go to pander to Muslims.***
Hari Kumar, Anupreeta Das & Pragati K.B. in NYT, Violence Flares as Hindu Group Calls for Removal of Muslim Ruler’s Tomb.
The trouble started on Monday, which, according to the Hindu calendar, is the birth anniversary of Chhatrapati Shivaji, a valorized Hindu king who fought Aurangzeb. The Nagpur unit of a right-wing Hindu organization, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or V.H.P., called for Aurangzeb’s tomb to be removed from the state, which had been the seat of Shivaji’s empire. The grave is nearly 300 miles from Nagpur, in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district. Once known as Aurangabad, a name derived from the Mughal emperor’s name, the district was renamed after Shivaji’s son in 2023. Members of the Hindu group protested in front of a Shivaji statue in Nagpur on Monday afternoon and burned an effigy of the ruler wrapped in green cloth, a color that has spiritual significance in Islam, said Amit Bajpayee, a V.H.P. volunteer. Rumors that the cloth had verses from the Quran printed on it set off riots that evening, the police said. Mr. Bajpayee denied the rumors. “During the protest, our simple slogan was that Aurangzeb’s tomb should be removed from Maharashtra,” he said. “It is correct that the effigy was wrapped with a green cloth, but there was nothing printed on it.” Rioters pelted property with stones and set vehicles ablaze. Dozens of people, including police officers, were injured…. On Tuesday, Devendra Fadnavis, the chief minister of Maharashtra State, blamed the violence on the Bollywood movie Chhaava, which was released just over a month ago and depicts the conflict between Aurangzeb and the son of Shivaji. “Chhaava has ignited people’s anger against Aurangzeb,” Mr. Fadnavis, who belongs to the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party, said during a session of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly. The sixth emperor of the Mughal dynasty, Aurangzeb ascended to the throne by killing his brother and imprisoning his father, Shah Jahan, who had built the Taj Mahal. Aurangzeb ruled over the Indian subcontinent, including Delhi, from 1658 until his death in 1707 and sought to expand the Mughal empire.***
Vernie Liebl in STRATEGY & TACTICS, The Siachen Glacier.
In 1978, a West German expedition reached the glacier accompanied by a Pakistani officer acting as an “official liaison,” and an Indian military expedition returned there in 1981. Despite the mounting number of expeditions, the region still had no permanent presence. However, in 1983, Pakistan began planning Operation Ababeel (Flight of Swallows), a military effort to secure the area. As part of the planning, their army ordered 150 cold-weather outfits from a London supplier. When the Indians learned of that, they ordered 300 of the same outfits for themselves and began planning their own military operation, codenamed Operation Meghdoot (Cloud Messenger). Both nations also began stockpiling supplies in locations near the glacier and training the forces earmarked for their respective operations. With signs the Pakistani operation was about to start, the Indians pre-empted them by launching Meghdoot on 13 April 1984. They seized the three passes in the Saltoro Range that control access to the glacier…. A Pakistani reconnaissance helicopter spotted the Indian troops. They countered by rushing soldiers from their Special Service Group and Northern Light Infantry Regiment to attack the 300 Indians holding the passes. Those attacks failed, and they are essentially the positions held by both sides ever since.***
Nigel Biggar in PROSPECT, Labour’s blind faith in international lawmakers.
Sands, who claims Starmer as “a great friend”, has acted as a paid legal adviser to Mauritius. Hermer is Starmer’s attorney general. Writing in the Financial Times shortly after Labour’s election victory last July, Sands called for Britain to reset its international relations by jettisoning the lingering imperial hubris that produced Brexit and substituting an unreserved commitment to the rules-based order of international law and institutions. “The days of ‘international law for others’ are over,” he wrote. “Britain has to be ready to be held to account for actions present and past, whether they be historic emissions of greenhouse gases, or slavery and other acts of colonial wrong-doing, or for waging illegal wars or turning a blind eye to manifest violations of international law by an ally.” Similarly, in October’s Bingham Lecture at Gray’s Inn, Hermer declared that Britain must champion respect for international courts and institutions against “the populists”, exalting international law above its own law, in order to dispel the Global South’s view that international order and human rights are “imperialist constructs”. In another speech, he said that international law “helps us move towards a world in which disputes are settled in courtrooms and arbitration centres rather than battlefields”. Tellingly, he argued that handing over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius will “demonstrate our deep commitment to international law”. So, that’s the key to the Chagos riddle: although not in fact obliged by law, surrender would signal to the world the arrival of a new, humbled, radically “decolonised” Britain.***
Pete McKenzie in NYT, Deadly Clashes in a French Pacific Territory Raise Fears of Civil War.
France annexed New Caledonia, which lies about 900 miles off the eastern coast of Australia, in 1853. It built a penal colony and over time shipped in more foreigners to mine New Caledonia’s vast nickel reserves. That eventually made the Indigenous Kanaks a minority in their own land. The most serious challenge to French rule came in the 1980s, when French troops were ordered in to quell a violent uprising. Dozens of people died in the ensuing clashes. To end the fighting, French authorities agreed to put New Caledonia on a pathway to independence. But the calculus in France has changed in recent years with the intensification of the jostling between the United States and China for influence in the Pacific. French officials fear that China could gain sway in an independent New Caledonia, just as it has sought to do in other South Pacific countries like Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. “New Caledonia is French because it has chosen to remain French,” Mr. Macron told a crowd of people opposed to independence. “No going back. No stuttering.”Four decades after the civil war ended, however, pro-independence sentiment and resentment against French settlers remain strong in New Caledonia, which is now semiautonomous. In the 1980s, France agreed to hold an independence referendum within a decade — a bet that a rising Kanak middle class would choose to remain French. As the new century dawned, voting was put off for two more decades. But the French authorities agreed to freeze electoral rolls so that recent arrivals to New Caledonia, who are thought to be more likely to support continued French rule, would not sway the vote.***
Roger Cohen in NYT, France Acknowledges Devastating Effect of Debt Imposed on Haiti for Freedom.
Mr. Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande, acknowledged the Haitian payments in 2015 during a visit to Guadeloupe, another former French colony. He shocked the crowd at the opening of a memorial center on the slave trade, when he referred to the payments as a “ransom of independence.” “When I come to Haiti,” he said, “I will, for my part, pay off the debt we have.” A few hours later, when he arrived in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, Mr. Hollande’s aides told news organizations that he was speaking only of the “moral debt” France owed to Haiti, not of any financial compensation. In an opinion article published Thursday morning in Le Monde, the mayors of La Rochelle, Bordeaux and Nantes, the main former slave ports, said the time had come “to begin the process of reparations for the Haitian people.” Citing the Times investigation, the three mayors said that France had a “historical responsibility” for Haiti’s current ordeal. “France cannot turn its back on Haiti as if it had not contributed to this situation,” they wrote. The debt is well known in Haiti. It figured prominently in a campaign for reparations by another former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, during the 200th anniversary of Haitian independence in 2004. But in France, a country that prides itself on its history, the existence of the debt remains mostly unknown. A former French education minister, Pap Ndiaye, acknowledged that ignorance two years ago. “While Haitian students all know about the French Revolution, few French students know about the Haitian Revolution,” he said.***
Ken Chen in NATION on Adam Shatz’s book, The Rebel’s Clinic.
But when the French antagonist left Algeria, so did the common enemy. The FLN outlawed other political parties, and the country eventually broke into a devastating civil war that killed as many as 200,000 people. Violence can create a political as well as an ethical problem: It hides underlying cleavages and may cause a creep toward authoritarianism. Fanon anticipated these problems in his description of the native as an “oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor” – a damning prognosis that could be applied as well to the settlers who historically have often recovered from defeat elsewhere by building a militarized society on a new frontier. Every Frenchman had a cousin in Algeria, as Fanon paraphrased one French politician, and such deep bonds meant the settlers’ cancerous despotism could contaminate the mainland.***
Douglas Murray in NEW CRITERION on Renaud Camus’ book, The Great Replacement.
Camus is clearly, by nature, an outsider. Reading this
English edition of his works, you can see why. He is sharp-eyed and unpretending about what he sees going on around him. He describes leaving his desk in the French countryside one day in the 1990s and simply noticing that the population of France has changed. There is a certain naivete in the way he writes, but this is also its charm. He does not delve into immigration figures, talk about data, or have any special interest in the tos and fros of French immigration policy. He simply says what he sees with his eyes and hears with his ears. And what he sees is a country whose population has been “replaced” before his eyes. What he hears is the cant that the age supplies. Early in his famous speech, he refers to an idea pushed by all European governments: that once someone is in France or becomes a French citizen, he or she is as French as anyone else. So, as he says, a veiled woman who speaks poor French, knows nothing about French culture or history, and may in fact hate that culture has to be regarded as the same as a native Frenchman “who has a passion for Romanesque churches, for subtleties of vocabulary and syntax, for Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burgundy wine and Proust, and whose family has lived for several generations in the same valley in Vivarais or Périgord.”***
Guy Chazan in FT, The far right’s appeal to Europe’s young.
Maximilian Krah, an AfD member of the European parliament who is leading the party’s list for the Euro elections, says the far right has been helped by the “unbelievable unattractiveness of the left in its current form”. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the era of hippies, Woodstock and the anti-Vietnam war movement, it had strong appeal for teenagers. But “these days, it’s pretty uncool”. “I mean – vegetarian food? Cargo bikes? Give me a break.” Like Vox, the AfD also presents itself as a way out for young men frustrated by “woke” ideology, who reject a status quo symbolised by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition of social democrats, Greens and liberals. The left is “pushing a ‘degrowth’” agenda, which is basically promising young people they’ll be poorer than their parents and grandparents” and “telling them they have to make sacrifices to save the climate”, says Krah. “With us, they won’t have to sacrifice anything.”***
Janan Ganesh in FT, Europe’s real tourist trap.
I suggest these two things — the irrelevance of the continent, and the popularity of it — are linked. Because Europe commands the interest of the world without trying, it struggles to understand how marginal it has become, and to respond. It can count on levels of attention that other places must fight for. It can reap a level of income from visitors that is near-unique in the rich world. In 2019, the last pre-Covid year, tourism was 12 per cent of GDP in Spain, 8 in Portugal and 7 in Greece. No western nation outside Europe, save New Zealand, got to 3 per cent. Nor did Japan or (despite an airport that could be a destination itself) Singapore.***
Andrew Holter in BAFFLER, Revenge of the Courtier.
The subject of this book—which won the Goncourt Prize when it was published in 2011 and now appears in English translation by Stephen Twilley—is a fascist, yes, but not simply, only, or irreducibly one. Forever tripping over himself to stay one step ahead of the ash heap of history, Malaparte (who “never signed a line of anti-Semitic propaganda,” Serra is quick to establish) was an abject self-promoter and narcissist. His signal contribution to literature was as a “special correspondent to the awfulness of history.” Malaparte’s semi-fictitious accounts of the European cataclysm of the last century—Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (La pelle, 1949)—are extraordinary books, still disarming in their blend of grotesquerie, poignancy, satire, and reportorial detail. Malaparte was born Curt Erich Suckert to an Italian mother and German father in 1898, in the Tuscan city of Prato. A veteran of the First World War, like most of the early fascists, he was exhilarated by the anti-bourgeois, pseudo-revolutionary promise of the Blackshirts to make Italy anew in the ruins of its liberal democracy. He came to prominence as the author of an irreverent novel about the war, Viva Caporetto! (1921), and for founding and editing two influential periodicals: La Conquista dello Stato, whose title suggested its editors’ avidity for “necessary extremism” and paramilitary violence, and the literary quarterly “900,” run in partnership with Massimo Bontempelli, a progenitor of magical realism who would soon be denounced in the fascist press as a xenophile (“Which in this context was not a compliment,” Serra adds helpfully). This second journal, with its modernist, cosmopolitan orientation—contributors included James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and the Soviet Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg—posed itself against the evil little magazine Il Selvaggio, mouthpiece of the ultranationalist Strapaese movement that exalted the earthy virtues of the peasantry.***
Rahmane Idrissa in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Colonisations: Notre Histoire, ed. by Pierre Singaravelon.
As Colonisations moves backwards in time, Europeans lose their status as unique colonisers, a reorientation which entails plenty of de-occidentalisation. Romain Bertrand, one of the contributors, notes that the 17th-century diplomat Thomas Roe may have had a grandiose sense of his mission at the Mughal court, but Emperor Jahangir didn’t bother to note Roe’s visit in his memoirs. He did, however, discuss in detail his relations with Shah Abbas of Persia. This isn’t the way the British have seen things. In 1899, the Hakluyt Society issued a facsimile of Roe’s memoirs. The preface situates his story within the history of British India by way of a grand proleptic metaphor: the standing he was said to have obtained for Britain in the region ‘proved to be but the first step in a march of conquest which has only of late years reached its limits, and the scarlet liveries which escorted the ambassador through Rajputana were prophetic of a time when a descendant of King James should rule over an Indian empire vaster and infinitely more prosperous than ever owned the sway of a Mogul’. The colonial romance typified by this preface and the anti-colonial romance that emerged in the colonies (and which was structured in much the same way as the story it sought to counter) both depended on the same falsehood: that the colonising impulse was not universal but particularly and horrifically European. In textbook histories, France is credited, or blamed, for being the harbinger of modern colonisation in Africa. But that dubious honour should go to Morocco, which colonised the Middle Niger in the early 17th century, or perhaps to Ottoman Egypt, which colonised Sudan ten years before France’s invasion of Algeria in 1830.***
Natan Odenheimer, Aaron Boxerman & Gal Koplewitz in NYT, What a Terror Attack in Israel Might Reveal About Psychedelics and Trauma.
One Israeli said that being high on LSD during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 prompted a spiritual revelation that helped him escape the carnage at a desert rave. Another is certain the drug MDMA made him more decisive and gave him the strength to carry his girlfriend as they fled the scene. A third said that experiencing the assault during a psychedelic trip has helped him more fully process the trauma…. Some 4,000 revelers gathered on the night of Oct. 6 at a field in southern Israel, mere miles from the Gaza border, for the Tribe of Nova music festival. At dawn, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed Israel’s defenses under the cover of a rocket barrage. The survivors of the Nova festival present a case study that would be impossible to replicate in a lab: a large group of people who endured trauma while under the influence of substances that render the brain more receptive and malleable. Illegal in most countries, including Israel, these substances are now on the cusp of entering the psychiatric mainstream. Recent research suggests that careful doses of drugs like MDMA and psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” might be useful in treating post-traumatic stress disorder.***
Timothy McLaughlin in NATION, The Invisible Lives of Israel’s Thai Workforce.
These initial Thai delegations coincided roughly with the start of the first intifada in late 1987. According to Israeli government statistics, in 1988, Palestinians held 25 percent of agricultural jobs in Israel and even more in its construction sector, many of these workers commuted from the West Bank and Gaza. After years of occupation, during which Israel had stifled development within the territories, many Palestinians had little choice but to look for employment in Israel. But in response to the intifada, Israel began subjecting Palestinian workers to onerous restrictions, harassment, and attacks. In turn, an active bloc of workers took to organizing, launching strikes and boycotts. When some resorted to violence, attacking and killing Israeli employers, Israel responded by further restricting Palestinian movement…. By 1993, the proportion of Palestinians in the agricultural workforce had fallen to just 3 percent. That year, Rabin told a crowd at a fundraising event in Jerusalem that in four months, there would be no need for any Palestinian workers in Israel at all and that the “ultimate goal” was “separation between a Jewish state and the Palestinian entity.” Before October 7, most of the 30,000 Thais in Israel were almost exclusively men working in agriculture, according to Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.***
Christopher Schuetze in NYT, In Germany, Far-Right Plotters of an Improbable Coup Go on Trial.
Prince Heinrich XIII of Reuss, the obscure aristocrat who wanted to become German chancellor, and eight men and women who planned to bring him into power by violently overthrowing the government, went on trial on Tuesday in Frankfurt. Nearly a year and a half after a spectacular nationwide raid involving 3,000 police officers at 150 locations that the authorities say foiled a bizarre, far-right plan to seize power, the prince and the plotters will start facing justice. It is expected to be one of the most complex court cases since West Germany tried Auschwitz concentration camp commanders in the 1960s. In a large, gray temporary courtroom hastily built on the outskirts of Frankfurt, the nine accused saw each other for the first time since late 2022, when most of them were arrested. In that time, prosecutors have analyzed thousands of files and chat exchanges and hours of witness testimony to prepare a case they hope will show the grave danger posed by the would-be insurrectionists, who included several retired elite soldiers, a police officer and a former federal far-right lawmaker. Tobias Engelstetter, one of the four federal prosecutors arguing the case in Frankfurt, read the bizarre details behind the charges in an opening statement that lasted longer than two hours. Members of the group, who called themselves the “United Patriots,” believed the government was run by pedophilic, illegitimate politicians who had access to a network of underground military bases. The plotters, prosecutors say, believed in the existence of a secret alliance consisting of sympathetic foreign intelligence services — including ones belonging to the United States and Russia — that would help the group overthrow the deep state once a signal was given. The accused are part of a group within the Reichsbürger movement, which believes the modern German state is illegitimate. “The militant ‘Reichsbürger’ are driven by hatred of our democracy,” Nancy Faeser, Germany’s interior minister, said in a statement on Tuesday.***
Jenny Uglow in NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS on Richard Cockett’s book, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World.
Cockett locates the source of the city’s influence in the distinctive “critical rationalism” and the pluralist, collaborative ethos of its thinkers and planners. The crucible is the socialist Vienna of 1919–1934, but the combustible elements were inherited, perhaps surprisingly, from the early years of the century, the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was Vienna’s golden age, “the glittering metropolis of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Gustav Mahler, Adolf Loos, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil and Gustav Klimt.” Emperor Franz Joseph, with his muttonchop whiskers, penchant for cold water dousings, and love of hunting, seems remote from the modern world. Yet during his long rule, absolutism was succeeded by constitutional monarchy, while the December Constitution of 1867 guaranteed equality and freedom of expression and worship for all the empire’s subjects. Vienna’s population was swollen by waves of migrants from other parts of the empire leaving their villages and towns to seek a better life. With this influx, it became a vibrantly multiethnic capital, its openness demonstrated by the demolition of the massive medieval city walls to create the encircling boulevard known as the Ringstrasse. Within it, major institutions—the parliament, the university, the city hall—were rebuilt in a mix of historical styles: classical Greek, neo-Renaissance, and neo-Gothic. Cockett calls this “bourgeois triumphalism in stone and mortar.”***
Greg Afinogenov in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Alexander Morrison’s book, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia, and Maziar Behrooz’s book, Iran at War.
The justification for the conquest most commonly heard from the mouths of Russian leaders and officials at the time was that the Russians had come to bring civilisation and abolish the barbaric practice of slavery, particularly the enslavement of Russian subjects. This represented a significant shift in the narrative around anti-slavery, which had previously condemned Western imperialism. Yet by that point almost no Russian slaves remained in the khanates and, in practice, both slavery and other forms of bondage were allowed to persist for decades after the conquest. Though some Europeans found this rationalisation for invasion plausible, in the 20th century more cynical interpretations emerged. One, which took its cues from Lenin, argued that Russia was driven by the desire of merchant capitalists to secure more reliable supplies of cotton after the disruptions of the US Civil War. Another, beloved of retired British corporals and their spiritual equivalents the world over, was that the conquest was part of Russia’s Great Game with Britain, a struggle that boiled down to the security of India’s north-west frontier. A third emphasised the agency of ‘men on the spot’, officers like General Konstantin von Kaufman, who produced excuses for military aggression to gain opportunities for fame and professional advancement.***
Terry Eagleton in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, Where does culture come from?.
The nation itself resembles a work of art, being autonomous, unified, self-founding and self-originating. As this language might suggest, both art and the nation rank among the many surrogates for the Almighty that the modern age has come up with. Aesthetic culture mimics religion in its communal rites, priesthood of artists, search for transcendence and sense of the numinous. If it fails to replace religion, this is, among other things, because culture in the artistic sense involves too few people, while culture in the sense of a distinctive way of life involves too much conflict. No symbolic system in history has been able to rival religious faith, which forges a bond between the routine behaviour of billions of individuals and ultimate, imperishable truths. It’s the most enduring, deep-rooted, universal form of popular culture that history has ever witnessed, yet you won’t find it on a single cultural studies course from Sydney to San Diego. For the liberal humanist heritage, culture mattered because it represented certain fundamental, universal values that might constitute a common ground between those who were otherwise divided. It was a ground on which we could converge simply by virtue of our shared humanity, and in this sense it was an enlightened notion; you didn’t have to be the son of a viscount to take part. Since our shared humanity was rather an abstract concept, however, something that brought it back to lived experience was needed, something you could see and touch and weigh in your hand: this was known as art or literature.***
Ben Taub in NEW YORKER, The Dark Time.
In Finnmark, the work of men like Mitrofan Badanin goes beyond recruitment and propaganda. According to Myklebost, the professor, it’s about ideological subversion, sensitizing the local population to the idea that Russia’s presence in Finnmark predates that of the Norwegian state. “They use history to legitimatize the idea that this is part of the Russian cultural sphere,” Myklebost said. Badanin has taken a particular interest in the history of the Pomors, a small seafaring group that originated in Russia but whose members spent much of the past millennium hunting and fishing in what is now northern Norway. The Pomors left traces of Orthodox crosses wherever they had been. In the past decade, representatives of the Orthodox Church have systematically restored old Pomor crosses and erected new ones. The area coincides with the exact territory that would be most strategically useful to Russia’s nuclear defense—Norway’s entire Barents Sea coastline, all the way up to the Svalbard archipelago, where the top Russian official is believed to be a military-intelligence operative serving under diplomatic cover. (The official denies this.) “Now that they have the crosses, and a Russian Orthodox priest has been there, sprinkling his holy water, the narrative back home is that these are Russian holy lands,” Myklebost told me. “This also means that they can be defended militarily.”***
Tom Switzer in MODERN AGE, NATO’s Prophetic Critics.
It was, of all people, President Bill Clinton who
eventually recognized Moscow’s anxieties shortly after NATO’s bombing raids against Serbia in the Kosovo War, which appalled many Russians. As he told the UK’s prime minister Tony Blair in April 2000, the Russians “are still affected by Napoleon, Hitler and the way the Cold War came to an end, and about the way the Soviet Union collapsed.” Yeltsin, he said, “wound up mortally hating communism but still believing in Mother Russia. All these guys do, and we’ve got to be sensitive about that.” Yet Clinton’s considered reflections were too little, too late. According to the New York Times’ veteran reporter R. W. Apple, Jr., writing in 1997, the decision to extend NATO eastward was made in early 1995 “in characteristic Clinton Administration style, without a formal policy review, without a structured evaluation of competing viewpoints, without political debate and over the initial objections of senior military officers.”***
Paula Erizanu in NYT, My Country Knows What Happens When You Do a Deal With Russians.
A small western neighbor of Ukraine, Moldova experienced Russia’s first post-Soviet war of aggression, which ended with a cease-fire agreement in 1992. Thirty-two years later, 1,500 Russian troops are still stationed on internationally recognized Moldovan territory, despite the Kremlin’s formal agreement to withdraw them in 1994 and then once again in 1999. The case shows that Russia simply cannot be trusted. But there’s a bigger problem for Ukraine than Russian untrustworthiness. It’s that freezing a conflict, without a full peace deal, simply does not work. For three decades, it has fractured Moldova, hindered national development and given Russia continued opportunities to meddle with Moldovan life. A frozen conflict, we should remember, is still a conflict. Anyone calling for Ukraine to settle for one should heed Moldova’s cautionary tale. The ground for the Russian-Moldovan war was Transnistria, a strip of land in eastern Moldova with about 370,000 people. With support from Moscow — but no formal recognition — the territory declared independence from Moldova in 1990, setting off violence that escalated into conflict.***
Gary Morson in NEW CRITERION, Narratives of Russian History.
The Eastern Slavs living under Mongol rule for two centuries developed differently from those Slavs who continued as a part of Europe. Muscovy experienced no high Middle Ages or Renaissance but instead adopted Mongol forms of authoritarianism. As Ukrainians tell the story, these developments created two distinct cultural identities; as Putin recounts it, they initiated the enslavement of Western Russians under the rule of various Western powers, especially Austria, Lithuania, and Poland. In Russian-nationalist discourse, Poland represents not only a rival power but a treasonous one, a Slavic country that became Catholic and identified with the West. President Putin established the holiday of November 4, “Unity Day,” which celebrates the expulsion of Polish invaders in 1612 and the preservation of Russia’s distinct civilization from the ever-corrupting Western influence.***
Jillian Melchior in WSJ, Why Is the Estonian Border So Quiet?.
If Russia fears NATO, why would it divert its troops from the border here to Ukraine? Mr. Tsahkna says that when he served as defense minister in 2016-17, Russia had some 120,000 troops across the border, “ready to go within 24 hours.” These days, “it’s pretty empty.” Among the units Russia shifted from NATO’s eastern flank to Ukraine in 2022 was the elite 76th Guards Air Assault Division, headquartered in Pskov, roughly 20 miles from Estonia. Mr. Putin also diverted Russia’s sole maneuver brigades that covered its Arctic border with Europe, as well as other troops in Murmansk, which is near Norway and Finland. If he actually feared NATO expansion, this was a particularly bad miscalculation, since the Ukraine invasion prompted Finland and Sweden to join the alliance. Kyiv, meanwhile, aspires to join NATO but has no realistic prospect. Even after that expansion, “we never observed a redeployment back to Murmansk,” says George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War. If Russia genuinely saw a NATO threat, an observer would be able to see “fixed obstacles” and “active patrolling” along the border with Estonia, says Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. Along the forested border I visited, the only fences and patrols I saw between crossings were Estonian, and at one point I could have walked into Russian territory unimpeded.***
Gilberto Villahermosa in STRATEGY & TACTICS, Soviet & Chinese Wartime Support to North Korea & North Vietnam.
From June 1965 to March 1969, the PLA sent 16 anti-aircraft artillery divisions to North Vietnam. Each was equipped with 138 anti-aircraft artillery pieces, 99 12.7mm machineguns and numerous early warning and fire-control radars. Those units could provide a fire zone from 8,000 to 30,000 feet, and they downed 85 percent of the 3,000 US aircraft lost during the war. Soviet missiles accounted for only eight percent, with less than two percent of the 9,000 SAMs fired at US aircraft striking their targets. According to official US figures, anti-aircraft artillery fire accounted for 70 percent of the planes lost in Vietnam. Each PLA anti-aircraft artillery division operated in North Vietnam for only six to eight months, after which they were replaced by another sent from China. Beijing planned on rotating all its anti-aircraft units through the theater of operations within five years. Hanoi criticized that policy, noting each unit was just reaching maximum combat efficiency when it had to begin preparations to depart.***
Mark Temnycky at euboserver.com, The slow-mo absorption of Belarus into Russian-Moldovan.
Finally, but perhaps most alarming, was a report published by Yahoo News discussing the forced Belarusian integration with Russia. The article sourced a leaked internal strategy document from the Russian government. The document outlined a plan on how the Russian Federation can annex Belarus through political, military, and economic means. By pursuing this strategy, the leaked document stated that Russia should be able to fully establish the Russo-Belarusian union state by 2030. Given the current trajectory of Russo-Belarusian relations, the union state may be inevitable. Since 2020, the Belarusian government has adopted Russian-style politics. The Belarusian government is targeting the political opposition, and it has transformed its media to mirror Russian propaganda. Second, Belarus has effectively become a home for Russia’s military. The Russians have launched attacks on Ukraine from Belarusian territory, and Belarus has become a base of operation for Russia’s armed forces. Finally, the Belarusian economy has become heavily intertwined with the Russian economy. The Russian Federation is dictating monetary policy within Belarus, and the Belarusian state is indebted to Russia.***
Darron Anderson in CITY JOURNAL, Stray Dog Poet.
In many ways, the Stray Dog was the embodiment of counterculture and its paradoxes: elitist, yet radical; indulgent, yet visionary; avant-garde but nostalgic; sexually liberated but riven with jealousies; frivolous, yet consequential. Like other such cultural moments, it was not a dawn, as its devotees believed, but a twilight. Their damnation, however, would not come from hedonism or czarist repression but from a new world that the Stray Dogs welcomed with the enthusiasm of Pandora receiving the gift of the box. To envisage the Stray Dog Café today is to walk through rooms filled with ghosts. The world’s most famous ballerina, Tamara Karsavina, would sit talking with Michel Fokine, choreographer of Stravinsky’s The Firebird. Formerly exiled and persecuted writers like Konstantin Balmont and Vladimir Narbut found sanctuary there, the former’s writing hand permanently injured after trying to take his own life. The feminist diarist and socialite Teffi holds court, as she did while dining with Rasputin. The Russian Diogenes, Alexander Tinyakov, sits alone in a corner. Many of the participants are walking contradictions. With his painted face and top hat, David Burliuk has made his entire life an art experiment, yet he hails from a long line of Cossack horsemen. The boyish Sergei Yesenin comes from a peasant background and plays well the noble savage role of the “last poet of wooden Russia,” despite being urbane enough to seduce a significant proportion of the Stray Dogs. Curious stories orbit another baby-faced poet, Khlebnikov. One is that he has developed a language to communicate with animals. Another has it that he developed a system to foretell the future. He used to laugh and claim that their world would collapse in 1917. The joke becomes less funny with each advancing year.***
Perry Link in NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS on Ian Johnson’s book, Sparks.
In the 1980s Tan Hecheng, whom Johnson describes as
“garrulous, stubborn, and emotional,” stumbled upon the story of the mass political murder of nine thousand or more people in a remote area of Hunan province. Tan spent the next four decades on a one-person crusade to document how, during “class struggle” in August 1967, they were bludgeoned to death, and their bodies were tossed into rivers—or, more imaginatively (in order to underscore the political zeal of the attackers), dispatched by methods with colorful names like “homemade airplanes,” which described the way their body parts flew in all directions when explosives roped to them were detonated. In 2011 Tan published (in Hong Kong) a bookthe att called Blood Myths, which was later translated and condensed as The Killing Wind (2017). In the late 1970s Gao Hua, a university student from a family that had suffered bitterly under Mao, began a project to examine how the entire Mao disaster had begun. He found that the horrors of the 1950s and 1960s had their seeds in the years between 1930 and 1945, when Mao elbowed his way to the top of the CCP and established a regime that could and did destroy anyone who would challenge him. Gao worked almost entirely alone for twenty-two years before publishing, in Hong Kong, a nine-hundred-page book called How the Red Sun Rose: The Origin and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945. The “Red Sun” of the title is Mao. Johnson writes that the book is “dense, long, and challenging” yet an “overwhelming” achievement, “a rewriting of the Yan’an myth that also calls into question the entire Communist project.***
Marc Santora & Helene Cooper in NYT, Fighting Alongside Russia, North Koreans Wage Their Own War.
The North Korean soldiers fighting for Moscow in Russia’s Kursk region are assigned their own patches of land to assault. Unlike their Russian counterparts, they advance with almost no armored vehicles in support. When they attack, they do not pause to regroup or retreat, as the Russians often do when they start taking heavy losses, Ukrainian soldiers and American officials say. Instead, they move under heavy fire across fields strewed with mines and will send in a wave of 40 or more troops. If they seize a position, they do not try to secure it. They leave that to Russian reinforcements, while they drop back and prepare for another assault. They have also developed singular tactics and habits. When combating a drone, the North Koreans send out one soldier as a lure so others can shoot it down. If they are gravely wounded, they have been instructed to detonate a grenade to avoid being captured alive, holding it under the neck with one hand on the pin as Ukrainian soldiers approach.***
Dasl Yoon in WSJ, North Korean Defector Hailed as ‘Hero of Ukraine’.
Lee Seongmin, a 37-year-old human-rights worker who is an Ivy League graduate and fluent in English, has helped Ukrainian forces understand the motives driving Kim Jong Un’s young fighters, translating key documents and shaping antiregime leaflets meant to persuade North Korean soldiers to surrender. “It feels like I’m conversing with them,” said Lee, who worked for a state agency before fleeing to South Korea, “like I’m a fellow soldier.” In December, he was even among the first people outside Ukraine to see the trove of diaries, notepads and photos taken from slain North Korean soldiers’ bodies from the Russian front lines. Ukraine, which has little in the way of Korean speakers or experts of the Kim regime, was unprepared for the arrival of roughly 12,000 North Korean troops on the battlefield. So when Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, first put Lee, his Seoul-based colleague, in touch with an American activist aiding Ukrainian soldiers last year, they welcomed it. Lee’s firsthand experience with North Korean totalitarianism and his ability to understand subtle nuances in the soldiers’ writings that even a South Korean translator might miss would be invaluable. “I thought he would be perfectly positioned to help the world understand why North Koreans were being sent to their death in Ukraine,” Gladstein said.***
Richard Milne & Raphael Minder in FT, Baltic states and Poland plan to leave anti-landmine pact.
The move is one of the latest signs of concern among Nato stats bordering Russia over how to defend themselves against their eastern neighbour following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Finland has also started a debate about withdrawing from the 1997 convention, with senior parliamentarians saying a positive vote could come before the summer.***
Ilya Gridneff in FT, Canada races to secure Arctic frontier as threats to its sovereignty escalated.
For General Jennie Carignan, Canada’s chief of the defence staff, its defence is a top priority. “The Arctic is evolving and we can’t rely on the environment now to protect us as well as it could in the past,” she said. “So this is why we need to invest more, and we need to operated a better defence and take up our responsibilities in the Arctic.” Canada’s Arctic defence strategy relies heavily on indigenous knowledge from Ranger units. The unique network of 5,000 semi-professional soldiers is spread across the vast region that makes up 40 per cent of the country’s landmass but is home to only 150,000 people. Since 2007, Operation Nanook – the Inuktitut word for polar bear – has been held annually with the Rangers in the high Arctic region. Standing in the snow beside a helicopter somewhere between Tuktoyaktuk and Inuvik, Carignan praised the Rangers’ 75 years of service as she met Canadian, British and US special forces soldiers on the exercise.***
Sheila Fitzpatrick in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Sergey Radchenko’s book, To Run the World, and Vladislav Zubok’s book, The World of the Cold War 1945-91.
The Soviets had signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975 in the expectation of gaining increased international legitimacy and respect. But this backfired, since the accords included Western language on human rights that left the Soviet Union open to criticism for not, in practice, providing such rights to its citizens. In an odd turnaround, rights-oriented American liberals and European leftists – previously natural doves – now found themselves in a de facto alliance against détente with Cold War hawks. Jimmy Carter, taking office in 1977, had not run on an anti-détente platform, but was a supporter on principle of human rights and immediately engaged on the issue by writing to the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, to Brezhnev’s outrage. The situation had become more fraught as the discussion focused on the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate. The Soviets were bewildered and embarrassed by this turn of events. Their extreme sensitivity to anything that smacked of condescension meant that Carter’s preaching on human rights was greatly resented. As Radchenko puts it, Soviet leaders ‘felt that they were being forced into a humiliating position of delinquents, being presently taught by someone who (in all truth) was also not beyond reproach ... Such a teacher-student relationship was fundamentally incompatible with the Soviet sense of self-importance.’ At least until perestroika, the Soviets found no way of recovering the moral high ground, either with the West as good international citizens (the aim of signing the Helsinki Accords) or with the Third World as anti-imperialists (given the competition from China and Cuba).***
Nikhil Krishnan in NEW YORKER, Dirty Minds.
The theory behind this method, as articulated by Chairman Mao, didn’t sound so bad. People could not be forced to become Marxists, Mao wrote. He recommended, instead, “democratic” methods of “discussion, criticism, persuasion, and education.” An important stage of the process was called “speaking bitterness.” American G.I.s, like the Chinese peasants on whom the method had first been tried, had a great deal of bitterness to speak: of racism and poverty back home, and of discrimination within the armed forces. Wills was made to introspect, to write an autobiography. He and other P.O.W.s were subjected to hours of lectures on Marxist theory. Faced with the demand to justify “the American system,” Wills—unable to articulate what that even was—found himself moving in what his captors called a Progressive (as opposed to Reactionary) direction. American society was rotting, he came to believe; the Chinese way was the future. He chose not to be repatriated. But, where other prisoners who made the same decision were sent to work on farms and in paper mills, he was sent to the People’s University in Beijing. The brainwashing process was never complete. Ostentatious acts of “repentance” were repeatedly demanded—Wills had already had to participate in “self-criticism” seminars. He was now taught more about Marxism and the history of China. He even witnessed a public execution. But he ended up staying in China for twelve years.***
Edward White in FT, A disappearance in Xinjiang.
Like most academics in China, she was a party member, obtained her degrees from state universities and received funding grants from the Ministry of Culture. When the university ruled that her masters students must submit their dissertations in Chinese — after they had been completed in their native Uyghur — she paid for the work to be translated. When a foreign academic’s passport was confiscated, Rahile visited the local police station to retrieve it, assuring them the visitor was not an agent from a foreign state. When students were questioned or detained for possessing recordings of the Koran, Rahile could rescue them, assuring police they were students of religion and did not pose a threat. Even so, by 2016, there were signs that Rahile’s own mood was darkening. She had long tried to encourage officials to reclassify Xinjiang’s religious traditions and places as part of China’s cultural heritage — something that could be preserved and protected, not forgotten or suppressed. Increasingly, the project was incompatible with the attitude in Beijing towards Uyghurs and its hardline policies. That year, after a flight she was on to Hong Kong was diverted through Chengdu, south-western China, local police came to her room in the middle of the night. While she was not apprehended, her harassment outside Xinjiang was another indicator of the spreading culture of persecution towards Uyghurs. Rahile had often jokingly told her female students to think of the frequent and invasive body searches they encountered travelling in and around Ürümqi as a free massage. But then Rahile, tired and pushed, surprised one student by saying the searches were becoming too much. She said she wished she hadn’t returned from her last trip abroad. Another student came to her torn over whether to pursue her studies overseas or stay in Ürümqi to be closer to her family. “Just go,” Rahile told her. “We don’t know what will happen tomorrow.” Then, in December 2017, Rahile was taken by the Chinese state. For the past six years, close friends and family have been frozen in time, replaying their final conversations with her over and over in their minds.***
Howard French in NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, Toffler in China.
Zhao Ziyang was China’s premier between 1980 and 1987 and then the head of the Communist Party for more than two years. In a speech before China’s State Council in 1983 he drew on Toffler’s ideas to proclaim that “at the end of this century and the beginning of the next century,” China would usher in a “New Technological Revolution” with sweeping implications “for production and for society.” Zhao had gotten wind of Toffler’s The Third Wave from a researcher at the state-funded Institute of American Studies, Dong Leshan, who had also translated George Orwell’s 1984. Dong published a summary of The Third Wave in Du Shu, a Chinese magazine then intended for politically trustworthy officials. One of the problems that made the book politically sensitive was Toffler’s recounting of his youthful renunciation of Marxism. Concerns about this were apparently outweighed by his inspirational message, which seemed so in sync with the reformist ethos then sweeping the Chinese political elite. Some of Toffler’s phrases even had the ring of slogans then being used in China’s Communist Party–controlled press. “Old ways of thinking, old formulas, dogmas, and ideologies, no matter how cherished or useful in the past, no longer fit the facts,” The Third Wave claimed. Three thousand copies of an unauthorized Chinese translation of the book were soon printed for the party’s elite. Toffler was brought to China, where he shared his theories with top leaders and rapt audiences, and as enthusiasm for his vision spread, The Third Wave was released to the general public. By 1986, according to one opinion survey, 78.6 percent of Chinese college students claimed they had read The Third Wave.***
Delger Erdenesanaa in NYT, China’s Cities Are Sinking Below Sea Level, Study Finds.
An estimated 16 percent of the country’s major cities are losing more than 10 millimeters of elevation per year and nearly half are losing more than 3 millimeters per year, according to a new study published in the journal Science. These amounts may seem small, but they accumulate quickly. In 100 years, a quarter of China’s urban coastal land could sit below sea level because of a combination of subsidence and sea level rise, according to the study. “It’s a national problem,” said Robert Nicholls, a climate scientist and civil engineer at the University of East Anglia who reviewed the paper. Dr. Nicholls added that, to his knowledge, this study is the first to measure subsidence across many urban areas at once using state-of-the-art radar data from satellites. Subsidence in these cities is caused in part by the sheer weight of buildings and infrastructure, the study found. Pumping water from aquifers underneath the cities also plays a role, as do oil drilling and coal mining, all activities that leave empty space underground where soil and rocks can compact or collapse.***
Russell Napier in FT, China is heading for full monetary independence.
The world’s second-largest economy is about to move to monetary independence and in so doing it will destroy the current international monetary system. China needs to not just reflate its economy but to inflate away its debts. The country has one of the highest total non-financial debt-to-GDP ratios of any major economy, at 311 per cent of GDP. While the debt burdens of most countries are shrinking relative to output, thanks to high nominal GDP growth and the falling price of debt securities, China continues to report rising debt-to-GDP…. Comments by President Xi Jinping that the People’s Bank of China should launch a bond-buying programme to create more domestic liquidity may be the first sign that exchange rate targeting is slipping down the policy agenda.***
Michael Schmidt & Tariq Panja in NYT, Top Chinese Swimmers Tested Positive for Banned Drug, Then Won Olympic Gold.
Several of the athletes who tested positive — including nearly half of the swimming team that China sent to the Tokyo Games — went on to win medals, including three golds. Many still compete for China and several, including the two-time gold medalist Zhang Yufei, are expected to contend for medals again at this year’s Summer Games in Paris. China acknowledged the positive tests in a report by its antidoping regulator, saying that the swimmers had ingested the banned substance unwittingly and in tiny amounts, and that no action against them was warranted. But an examination by The New York Times found that the previously unreported episode sharply divided the antidoping world, where China’s record has long been a flashpoint. American officials and other experts said the swimmers should have been suspended or publicly identified pending further investigation, and they suggested that the failure to do so rested with Chinese sports officials; swimming’s international governing body, World Aquatics; and the World Anti-Doping Agency, the global authority that oversees national drug-testing programs. Those authorities decided not to act despite an email exchange between a Chinese antidoping official and a top world swimming official appearing to indicate that a violation may have taken place and would, at the least, have to be publicly acknowledged. Even after other national and international antidoping officials repeatedly provided the global regulator, known as WADA, with intelligence suggesting a cover-up and doping by Chinese swimmers, the agency chose not to try to hold the athletes accountable, asserting “a lack of any credible evidence” to challenge China’s version of events. WADA defended its decision not to take action, calling the criticism unsubstantiated.***
Nicholas Tomaino in WSJ, Does Anyone Remember Peng Shuai?.
This WTA tournament will be held in Saudi Arabia, not Shenzhen, an arrangement that is “entirely incompatible with the spirit and purpose of women’s tennis and the WTA itself,” Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. They opposed awarding Riyadh the event owing to its treatment of women. Billie Jean King has taken the other side: “I’m a huge believer in engagement—I don’t think you really change unless you engage,” she said last year. The tour’s decisions, whatever the spin, seem self-evidently to have turned on the dollar. One can see why: The WTA was alone in its boycott of China, and other sports leagues never stopped reaping the rewards of unfettered access. Social-media plaudits are reassuring, but they don’t pay the bills. As play picks up, perhaps Ms. King is right and the WTA will encourage Saudi Arabia to liberalize. The game’s leadership and fans, however, should harbor no illusions elsewhere: The case of Peng Shuai, the grand-slam champion who for three years has all but disappeared at the hands of authoritarians, leaves little reason to have the same hope for China.***
Patricia Cohen in NYT, Why China Is Investing So Much Money in Moroccan Factories.
Using their status as low- or no-tariff zones has required connector countries to thread a narrow path, exploiting opportunities for trade while minimizing the risk of alienating the West or China. But now that the Trump administration has kicked the legs out from under the global trading system, that road has become much more precarious. Chinese carmakers, which have surged ahead of many rivals in battery technology, automated driving and entertainment software, have grand ambitions to expand across the globe in Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa. Even before President Trump’s election, the United States and Europe were growing more concerned about how their own electric vehicle industries would ever compete with Chinese companies selling cars at discounted prices. Last year, the Biden administration effectively blocked Chinese E.V.s by putting a 100 percent tariff on them, and the European Union increased its tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to as much as 45 percent. These types of trade sand traps have been a boon for countries like Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Morocco, allowing companies to sidestep import duties.***
Murong Xuecun at madeinchinajournal.com, ‘Why would he take such a risk?’ How a famous Chinese author befriended his censor.
Red is for high-risk words that cannot be published and must be deleted: ‘Falungong’, the banned spiritual group; ‘64’, after June 4, the date of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre; the names of Liu Xiaobo and the Dalai Lama; ‘Jasmine’, because, after the Tunisian revolution two years earlier, several small-scale demonstrations that have come to be known as China’s ‘Jasmine revolution’ have made the Chinese Government so nervous about the name of a small white flower, the national flower of the Philippines, that the word jasmine is given a red flag. After three years as a censor, Liu Lipeng detests his job. He detests the white office ceiling, the grey industrial carpet, and the office that feels more like a factory. He also detests his 200-odd colleagues sitting in their cubicles, each concentrating on their mouse and keyboard to delete or hide content. Occasionally, someone finds evidence of a crime. One afternoon, the office boredom is disturbed when Chen Min* in the next cubicle suddenly jumps up, limbs flailing ecstatically. He has uncovered Wang Dan’s Weibo account. All the censors know that Wang Dan, the 1989 student leader, political criminal, and exile, is considered by the Chinese Government to be one of the most important enemies of the state. Finding him is a big deal, and the news is immediately reported to the Sina Weibo office in Beijing. It might even be reported to the Public Security Bureau. The following month, a senior manager comes specially from Beijing to highly commend Chen Min for discovering intelligence about the ‘enemy’, praising his ‘acuity’ and ‘high level of awareness’, and bestows on him a 400-yuan bonus. All his colleagues applaud and shout in admiration. All except Liu Lipeng. He sits amid the crowd and glares at Chen Min’s face, flushed red with excitement, and asks himself: is this worth it?***
Perry Link at chinabooksreview.com, Life On a Blacklist.
I was born with a knack for imitating sounds, and my first teacher of Chinese, at Harvard in 1963, took advantage of that knack to drill Chinese tonal pronunciation into me. On the telephone, Chinese people are sometimes dubious when I tell them that I am not Chinese. I have even been accused of lying about it. Face-to-face, it is obvious that I am not Chinese, but the boundaries between “you” and “us” melt away faster when oral exchange begins. This effect is visible whether or not the context is happy. It made a difference when I met in Princeton with Chinese refugee-dissidents who were seeking Princeton’s help; it made a difference, too, when I was in the Mövenpick Hotel with four policemen whose job it was to watch me. The issue matters for the blacklist question because China’s communist authorities, differently from the culture at large, are strongly averse to seeing foreigners get “inside” their world. They want the borders of their world to be impenetrable, and foreigners who sound too Chinese make them nervous. They would rather deal with foreigners who either speak no Chinese or, if they do speak it, speak it badly enough that the line between “you” and “us” is obvious. Once, at a luncheon for a visiting Chinese delegation at UCLA, where Americans and Chinese were speaking through interpreters, I decided to ask a question directly in Chinese, without the interpreter. The head-of-delegation from China was visibly discomfited. He was on the spot. What should he do? After an awkward moment he turned to his interpreter and waited for her near-verbatim repetition of my question. In form, after all, she was the person who was supposed to be speaking Chinese to him. Waiting to funnel the message through her was not done to improve clarity; it was more nearly a political reflex, whose purpose was to maintain the border between “our side” and “your side.” In short, I believe that for people in the CCP regime, who do not like it when I do things like help Fang Lizhi or co-edit The Tiananmen Papers, it only makes things worse that I sound like a Chinese person orally. It makes me seem slicker, more sinister, and more likely to have been trained in the CIA. (The latter point is ironic, because it is well-known in the Chinese-teaching field in the U.S. that CIA schools do not stress training in tonal pronunciation.)***
John Psmith at thepsmiths.com on David Graff’s book, Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900.
It’s an extremely sensitive and difficult to discuss topic in China, but there is genetic evidence of substantial steppe admixture in Northern Chinese lineages, and it seems likely that this is around when it kicked off. Meanwhile, remember that huge numbers of Northern Chinese were migrating to the South at around this time. Our best guess from both ancient DNA and linguistic evidence is that the modern Southern Chinese are pretty close to what the Northern Chinese were a couple thousand years ago, while the modern Northern Chinese have a good amount of Turkic and Mongolic ancestry. The thing is you don’t even need to look at the genetics, it’s also quite apparent from the literary, artistic, and military record that over time a hybrid aristocracy emerged in the North with influences from both the old Chinese nobility and the invaders. The change is visible in everything from fighting style (suddenly Chinese armies are using cavalry), to fashion (pants!), to preferred hobbies (suddenly a lot more archery and falconry). It was this mixed-blood elite that finally reunified North and South China, and eventually gave rise to the glorious Tang dynasty. This may have been the most shocking fact I learned from this book. I’d always thought of the Tang as the most quintessentially Chinese of all Chinese rulers (and moreover the real beginning of “modern” Chinese history). Chinese people tend to think that way too — “Tang” is a still-used archaic ethnonym for the Chinese ethnicity (the same way that it's recently gotten trendy in the West to use a different archaic ethnonym, also the name of an ancient dynasty, “Han”). The idea that the Tang actually represented an intrusion of alien Turkic influences into Chinese society is not at all the mainstream view within China, but it’s pretty much the Western scholarly consensus, and Graff lays it out convincingly.***
Anna Gross, Alexandra Heal, &c. in FINANCIAL TIMES, How the US is pushing China out of the internet’s plumbing.
In 2015, the Chinese government announced a strategic initiative to invest huge amounts in developing countries’ communications, surveillance and e-commerce capabilities in exchange for diplomatic influence. Internet cables were key to this “Digital Silk Road”, which ran in parallel to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative that has pumped hundreds of billions into building roads, railways and ports across the developing world. The Chinese telecoms champion Huawei was at the time successfully carving a niche in the submarine cable market, via its joint-venture Huawei Marine, which it owned almost equally with the UK-based submarine cable installer Global Marine. Fuelled by Beijing’s ambition, Huawei Marine managed to capture about 15 per cent of the global market by 2019, according to Mike Constable, who was chief strategy officer of China’s largest cable supplier until March this year and chief executive at the time it was co-owned by Huawei. But this was “before the geopolitics went crazy”, he says. In 2019, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Huawei and the telecoms group swiftly divested from the submarine cable joint venture. A little known regional Chinese cable manufacturer, Hengtong Group, bought Huawei Marine and renamed it HMN Tech. Today, only one HMN Tech-supplied cable is due to come online in each of the years 2024 and 2025, each connecting China exclusively to south-east Asian countries.***
Austin Ramzy & Ann Simmons in WSJ, Putin’s China Visit Hits Czarist Past.
Harbin was developed by czarist Russia starting in the late 19th century as it expanded railroads and influence across a region referred to at the time as Manchuria. Russia’s colonial sway was cast aside, first by the Japanese empire and then Mao’s revolution. But the city remains dotted with onion domes and Orthodox churches, some now converted to museums. Putin visited one of the churches on Friday, an opportunity for him to continue efforts to portray himself as a man of faith and emphasize an institution he has relied on to amass power and influence at home. Russian state media showed him entering the Church of the Intercession, where he lit a candle while being escorted by a local priest. The church, which was once popular with Ukrainians who fled the Russian Revolution, was also visited by the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, in 2013. Kirill is an ally of Putin who has used the church to give the Kremlin leader critical backing in Russia, where most of the population identifies as Orthodox, even if they don’t regularly attend church.***
Edward Luttwak at unherd.com, Trump’s reverse-Nixon manoeuvre.
These days, one of Putin’s growing worries is the territorial integrity of easternmost Siberia, Russia’s Maritime Province. Local officials and academics in Vladivostok voiced acute concerns about Chinese intrusions even during my last visit in 2019 — before the sharp increase in China’s relative power caused by the Ukraine war. Since then, things have only grown more concerning. Ultimately, the problem is demographic. Eastern Siberia — officially the “Far Eastern Federal District” — is a tad smaller than Australia, much bigger than the European Union and twice the size of India, but only had a population of 8.1 million at the last count. Meanwhile, China’s northernmost big city Harbin has more than 10 million inhabitants all by itself, while its Heilongjiang province has 30 million, and Inner Mongolia another 24 million. As the Chinese increasingly outnumber Russians along that immensely long and scarcely patrolled border, there are other shifts there to alarm Moscow. One small example tells a significant tale. In 2023, the Chinese government abruptly issued an ordinance that mandates the use of the pre-Russian name “Haishenwai” for Vladivostok, in place of the previous “Fúlādíwòsītuōkè” — which was clearly a meek attempt at a Chinese pronunciation of the Russian name. This seemingly innocuous linguistic tweak belies a deep historical resentment. The Chinese still remember with great bitterness the collapse of imperial power in the 19th century, and the ensuing territorial losses under “unequal treaties” and forced concessions to the British, French, Japanese, Austro-Hungary, Germany (in Qingdao where good German beer is still made), and even Italy, in Tianjin.***
Niharika Mandhana & Camille Bressange in WSJ, China Expansion Takes Advantage Of a ‘Gray Zone’.
On Bhutan’s official maps, the areas of some of the recent Chinese construction fall within Bhutan’s marked borders. The maps, together with parliamentary discussions and ministerial statements over past decades, cast these areas as Bhutanese territory, according to Barnett, who is a professorial research associate at SOAS University of London. Barnett says Chinese actions in these borderlands have progressed in six stages over a few decades. First, in the 1990s, China sent herders to disputed areas claiming customary grazing rights, much like the historic rights it asserts in the South China Sea. Then it dispatched official patrols to support the herders, squeezing out Bhutanese pastoralists. After that, temporary shelters or checkpoints emerged, to later be upgraded into robust outposts. Next, China built roads linking these remote areas, said Barnett. Then, to consolidate control, it made villages and populated them.***
Patrick Baker in STRATEGY & TACTICS, Chinese Naval Base in Cambodia.
Situated near the Gulf of Thailand, the base provides access to critical sea lanes linking the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca and the Indian Ocean. That positioning allows China to bolster its presence in a region vital to global trade and energy supply chains. Reports suggest that, under the terms of a secret agreement finalized in 2023, Beijing gained exclusive access to portions of the Ream facility, authorizing it to station military personnel, equipment and naval assets there.***
Dominic Green at theeditors.com, “Partitioned, Neutral Ukraine” Could Draw Russia Away from China.
The American interest lies in ending the Ukraine war on terms that favor a global strategy for this new era. The Biden administration acted correctly by backing Ukraine’s war of defense against Russia’s brutal imperial revanchism. That said, Henry Kissinger’s warning of June 2022 has been vindicated. The Biden administration’s strategy of “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian” has, apart from hastening the devastation of Ukraine, damaged American interests. Adding Finland to NATO roughly doubled the length of NATO’s eastern frontier with Russia. Resupplying Ukraine drained money and weapons from budgets and arsenals. Prolonging the war has pushed Russia onto a war footing, and excluding Russia from the SWIFT interbank system and dollar-denominated exchanges pushed Russia into an open alliance with China and warned the world that the U.S. dollar is no longer a safe harbor. China, not Russia, is the prime challenge to American interests. The Trump administration is right to attempt a “reverse Kissinger,” and draw Russia away from its deepening alliance with China. It is preferable that Russian energy is exported westward to America’s European allies than eastward to America’s Asian rival.***
Elizabeth Economy in FOREIGN AFFAIRS on Kenneth Wilcox’s book,The Chinese Business Conundrum.
He was repeatedly undercut and outmaneuvered by local and central government Chinese Communist Party officials, as well as by his Chinese joint-venture partner. Wilcox discovered that his partner took his proprietary investment model—which he had been required to turn over to government officials—to make independent investments and compete with Silicon Valley Bank. Wilcox concludes that China doesn’t want joint ventures to succeed: it wants to learn from foreign partners and then let them fail. This book deserves a place alongside such classic business memoirs as Tim Clissold’s Mr. China (2005) and Paul Midler’s Poorly Made in China (2009), in which otherwise successful Western businessmen find themselves drowning in China’s complex crosscurrents. Those older accounts were often funny, and hopeful that China’s market and business practices would improve. That wry optimism no longer exists. Wilcox’s account is less a tutorial on how to swim in China’s dangerous waters than a warning not to get in at all.***
Ryan McMorrow, Wenjie Ding & Nain Liu in FT, Chinese venture capitalists put start-up ecosystem in crisis via hard-nosed claw-back methods.
Lifeng said redemption rights had turned entrepreneurship into a “game of unlimited liability”. In 90 per cent of investor lawsuits, the firm said, founders were named as defendants alongside companies, with 10 per cent of the people ultimately added to China’s debtor blacklist. Once blacklisted, it is nearly impossible for individuals to start another business. They are also bloced from a range of economic activities, such as taking planes or high-speed trains, staying in hotels or leaving China. The country lacks a personal bankruptcy law, making it difficult to escape the debts.***
Matthew Omolesky in AMERICAN SPECTATOR, The Catholic Church in China Has Been Co-Opted by the Communist Party.
In 2018, the Vatican and Beijing came to an accord, the contents of which are closely guarded. The agreement, which was renewed in 2020 and 2022, is meant to regularize the status of underground Catholics while legitimizing the Catholic Patriotic Association. Pope Benedict XVI had previously warned that “compliance with those authorities is not acceptable when they interfere unduly in matters regarding the faith and discipline of the Church,” particularly with respect to “forces that influence the family negatively,” with which Red China is positively awash. But the current Bishop of Rome has been more willing to seek rapprochement with Beijing, confusing the theological accommodation of his Jesuit forebears with the political accommodation (otherwise known as kowtowing) demanded by the ruthless apparatchiks of the Zhongnanhai. An unending humiliation ritual has been the result. On November 25, 2022, Cardinal Emeritus Joseph Zen was found guilty by a Hong Kong court on a trumped-up charge of failing to register a humanitarian relief fund, just a day after Bishop Giovanni Peng Weizhao was installed as auxiliary bishop of Jiangxi, over the vociferous objections of the Vatican. A few months later, Bishop Shen Bin was installed as the bishop of Shanghai, again contrary to the wishes of the Holy See. As Bitter Winter’s Massimo Introvigne has argued: “[T]wo clues make a proof. It is now obvious that the Vatican-Chinese deal of 2018 is regarded by the CCP as binding for the Vatican only, which is expected not to criticize religious persecution in China, but not binding for Beijing, which appoints Catholic bishops as it deems fit, with or without Papal mandate.”***
Christian Caruzo at breitbart.com, Nicaragua Forcing Priests into Weekly Police Interrogations.
The Pillar, citing a report recently published by the Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), explained that the Ortega regime imposed “precautionary measures” on the Catholic Church that forced its priests to make weekly, in-person reports at local police offices and to share details of their planned activities. The Catholic priests are forced to present copies of their weekly homilies to the local police to verify that these do not contain anti-regime messages, and they are prohibited from leaving their respective municipalities without government authorization. All indoor religious activities, CWS’s report described, are subject to “overt and covert” regime surveillance and monitoring. The regime warns the Church’s religious leaders not to speak or pray about specific topics, such as preaching for unity, justice, or praying for imprisoned religious leaders or the general situation as a whole — which can be considered as “criticism of the government and treated as a crime.”***
Gary Morson in FIRST THINGS, Faith and Russian Literature.
Dostoevsky observed that if a European theory fascinated Russians, they discovered a “Russian aspect” that utterly transformed it. Specifically, Russian intellectuals took European ideas as springboards for radical action. Their extreme conclusions were “drawn only in Russia,” Dostoevsky said with a mix of alarm and admiration. “In Europe . . . the possibility of these conclusions is not even suspected.” It is no wonder, then, that Russia invented the system we have come to call totalitarianism and that its greatest writers explored totalitarianism and its antecedents. Russia is also where modern terrorism, the focus of Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, began. Dostoevsky also invented the prison camp novel with Notes from the House of the Dead. In the early Soviet period, Eugene Zamyatin wrote the first dystopian novel. Among the words we get from Russian are populism and intelligentsia, which in Russia meant not intellectuals as a class but adherents of a specific revolutionary ideology. That ideology varied, but it always included some form of anarchism or socialism. Above all, an intelligent (member of the intelligentsia) had to be an atheist and an uncompromising materialist. As Dostoevsky observed, Russians do not become atheists; they believe fervently in atheism.***
Gary Morson in WSJ on Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book, March 17.
Alexander Kerensky, the socialist minister of justice, celebrates the release of murderers and other dangerous criminals. “Had they really deserved a punishment?” he asks himself in Solzhenitsyn’s telling. “It was the [social] environment, not they, that was to blame, after all.... Time to reject punishments altogether!” Solzhenitsyn quotes an Odessa newspaper: “In the Odessa prison fortress there is a ‘constitutional administration’... the prison administration is in the hands of a committee of 10 prisoners, including famous Bessarabian ‘knight of the highways’ Grigori Kotovsky.... Prison security is borne by prisoners themselves, who have given their word of honor.” In Solzhenitsyn’s novel, intellectuals who ought to know better either rush to conform to prevailing opinion or fear to oppose it. Andozerskaya is shocked that even her most sensible colleagues find excuses to go along. Absolute freedom of the press is proclaimed, she notes, but the Soviet and trade unions shrewdly exercise their right to suppress reactionary views. Dmitri Filosofov, a literary critic, proclaims: “It is in the name of imminent freedom that the government now cannot help but resort to violence. Yielding to the trap of sophisms about freedom means encouraging counterrevolution.” Lenin could not have asked for more clueless opponents. When intellectuals and political leaders can believe in eliminating the police, weakening the army, encouraging violent protest and suppressing any contrary opinion, someone who understands power and is ready to wield it ruthlessly is bound to take over.***
N.S. Lyons in FIRST THINGS on John Davidson’s book, Pagan America.
Davidson’s most important contribution in Pagan America is to explain how repaganization can be expected to change the character of the American state, alongside society more broadly. Until now, America has been governed largely by the tenets of political liberalism. But as Davidson points out, liberalism always relied on “a source of vitality that does not originate from it and that it cannot replenish”: the Christian faith. And as the nation repaganizes, “we will revert to an older form of civilization, one in which power alone matters and the weak and the vulnerable count for nothing”—neither in spirit nor in law. “As Christianity fades in America,” Davidson warns, “so too will our system of government, our civil society, and all our rights and freedoms.” The state will no longer allow the principle of individual rights or conscience to override its desires, and it will not hesitate to use force to get its way, even if that means violating previously sacred norms by, say, threatening to break up the families of those who refuse to submit. The pagan state, on this view, will not pretend to maintain any sort of liberal neutrality. Instead, Davidson argues, “We will have a public or state morality, just as Rome had, which will be quite separate from whatever religion one happens to profess.”***
Erin Maglaque in NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS on Carlos Eire’s book, They Flew.
Did they fly? It was a question that bore the pressure of a fracturing continent. The boundary between the supernatural and the natural was a major point of contention in the Reformations that transformed Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Eire argues that the Protestant reformers radically reconfigured the relationship between the two realms. They sealed off the supernatural world, made it inaccessible, and “rejected the commonplace irruptions of the sacred” that had characterized medieval Christianity. For the reformers, there were no miracles after the biblical period of church history: all accounts of flying, healing, glowing were falsehoods, manipulations, superstitions. The miraculous became a theological weapon in the confessional arsenal. Protestants argued that so-called miracles were evidence that the Catholic Church was rife with demons, or that they were a bunch of swindlers; Catholics argued that miracles proved God really was on their side, that Protestantism was a heresy. But what sent these enchanted people into the sky? Was it God—were they saints? Or were they animated by demons, flying in an evil sort of way, like witches? Worse, were they committing fraud, concealing their stilts or suspension by ropes, bouncing from an invisible premodern trampoline? The Catholic Church was reforming itself, too, and they had to be sure they weren’t allowing the faithful to pray to a charlatan. The writings of holy people were examined for evidence of their sanctity, and even Teresa of Ávila wasn’t immune from the Inquisition’s suspicion. She wrote her spiritual autobiography knowing that the text would be vetted for orthodoxy and authenticity. Her descriptions of how it felt to levitate give us a sense of what it was like for a woman to negotiate such pressures. She describes becoming insensate, “as if the soul has forgotten to animate the body.”***
Stephen Brumwell in WSJ on Matthew Tuininga’s book, The Wars of the Lord.
In the coming decades, as fresh waves of settlers
gravitated to New England, other colonies emerged, most significantly Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Expanding into the interior, the colonists sought to buy land from the indigenous inhabitants, to be cleared and developed with English-style farms, bartering coveted European goods to obtain deeds granting the settlers sole possession. Native Americans who did not share the same notion of property became exasperated by the remorseless elimination of the habitat upon which their traditional hunting and horticulture depended. Despite their hunger for territory, the Puritans, Mr. Tuininga emphasizes, were nonetheless sincere in their efforts to convert Native Americans to Christianity. The 1629 seal of Massachusetts Bay showed a smiling American Indian imploring the English to “come over and help us.” In that colony, the missionary drive headed by Rev. John Eliot enjoyed some success, with smaller indigenous groups, especially those devastated by epidemic disease, clustering in “praying towns” to improve their fortunes. One important factor in the swift establishment of New England was the longstanding animosity between tribes, preventing any unified resistance to the newcomers. As early as 1637, when war erupted with the Pequots of Connecticut, the colonial army was aided by the Narragansetts and Mohegans. These allies were shocked by the wholesale massacre of their old enemies, implemented by English soldiers who reveled in carrying out what they saw as God’s bidding.***
Brian Graebe in WSJ, America Isn’t Sacred, Only God Is.
Mr. Biden’s arrogation of godly language for civil matters follows a recent trend in political discourse. That was perhaps most notable after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. In condemning the attacks, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to the building as a “temple of democracy.” A temple is a place to worship God and, in a specific Judeo-Christian understanding, to offer him sacrifices. The U.S. Capitol is famous, iconic, and worthy of protection and respect. But it isn’t a temple, and democracy isn’t a religion. Other examples abound, from Donald Trump’s declaring himself the “chosen one” to congressmen condemning anti-Israel demonstrators for “desecrating” various landmarks, not simply defacing or vandalizing them. Jesus warned against confusing the things of God with the things of Caesar. Yet an increasingly irreligious culture seeks to adopt these orphaned words. In so doing, many give an outsize importance to the things of this world, to civic monuments and political processes. Scripture reminds us that we have no lasting city here and that the world as we know it is passing away.***
Cynthia Haven in CHURCH LIFE JOURNAL, Constellation of Genius: Milosz, Camus, Einstein, and Weil.
The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē, the arts and skills that brought us human culture, the gifts of civilization. The story is not a cautionary tale—it is an act of courage that separated us from the animals. Like many myths, the hero is destroyed and yet lives. The stories we tell ourselves matter, and how we tell them matters—and that is true of Prometheus, who can be seen as the rebellion against the gods, or as the one who brought our humanity, who, by his very act of disobedience, made us conscious of our consciousness. And one rebellion gives birth to another: our hostility to culture, civilization, technology, is an extension of Prometheus’s defiance. Prometheus rebelled, and now we too rebel against the very genius that brought us life. That is the newer spin. We rebel against our arts, cities, literature, against the very notion of progress. We fantasize returning to the wild, though we could not live without a microwave.***
R.R. Reno in FIRST THINGS, Diagnosing Disaster.
Polanyi calls this dynamic “moral inversion.” Modernity’s zeal for scientific critique destroys the moral traditions of the West. These critical techniques readily unmask these putatively baseless traditions, but that’s all. What they cannot do is create new foundations. Into the resulting vacuum rushes a moralistic pseudoscience. Karl Marx offers a particularly clear example. His reductive scientism is complete. While writing a biography of him, Isaiah Berlin researched Marx’s manuscripts. Berlin observed (as Polanyi cites him) that the communist philosopher marked up the socialist manifestos of his time, vigorously crossing out appeals to rights and statements of the principles of justice. In the margins he penned fierce comments denouncing these moral terms as bourgeois ideology. Hostility to moral language arose from Marx’s scientific reductionism.***
Katrina Miller & Dennis Overbye in NYT, ‘More Than a Hint’ That Dark Energy Isn’t What Astronomers Thought.
Dark energy, the new measurement suggests, may not resign our universe to a fate of being ripped apart across every scale, from galaxy clusters down to atomic nuclei. Instead, its expansion could wane, eventually leaving the universe stable. Or the cosmos could even reverse course, eventually doomed to a collapse that astronomers refer to as the Big Crunch.***
Clive Cookson in FT, Labs aim to show ‘Darwinian evolution’ by making basic life forms from scratch.
Starting with inanimate chemicals, the researchers aim within six years to produce metabolically active cells that grow, divide and show “Darwinian evolution”. The €13mn “MiniLife” project, which is funded by the European Research Council and involves researchers from several universities, could be the first to reach the minimum criteria for a synthetic living system. “Success would constitute a landmark achievement in basic science,” said Eors Szathmary, director of the Centre for the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is a principal investigator. “De-novo creation of living systems is a long-standing dream of humanity.”***
Malcolm Moore in FT, Nuclear fusion start-up hails milestone.
Several other nuclear fusion projects, including ITER in France, the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor and JT-60SA in Japan, use a “tokamak” design pioneered by Soviet scientists in the 1950s. The device consists of plasma contained inside a doughnut-shaped chamber by powerful external magnets. Mataira said OpenStar’s breakthrough had been to turn the tokamak design “inside out”. Instead of magnets outside the chamber, OpenStar levitates a high-temperature superconducting magnet inside the superheated plasma, which is then kept within the magnet’s north-to-south field lines. This allows the plasma, which is so hot it would destroy any material it touches, to be contained inside a vacuum chamber.***
Holman Jenkins in WSJ, Nobody Wants the Covid Truth.
In 1999, a string of apartment bombings propelled a little-known Vladimir Putin to Russia’s elected presidency. A resolute choice of Western governments was to ignore evidence that these bombings, which killed nearly 300 Russians in their beds, were actually carried out by Mr. Putin’s intelligence allies to aid his rise. Mr. Putin had to be somebody Western politicians could be seen doing business with. In a point I’ve made more than once, U.S. intelligence exists not only to protect U.S. secrets, and not only to ferret out the secrets of our enemies. It also exists to protect certain secrets on behalf of our enemies. This too involves risks. Mr. Putin’s run as president would likely have been short, after all, if he had been rejected by the West as a valid interlocutor. The only exception to the official U.S. silence on the bombings came early in the Trump presidency, apparently as a warning to Mr. Putin to back off from his political meddling amid America’s roiling collusion debate. A U.S. administration wouldn’t be any more likely to pursue formal accountability from China for inflicting Covid on the world. By now, it’s arguably even unnecessary as the lab leak becomes by osmosis the prevailing theory with a useful undercarriage about the untrustability of governments generally in such circumstances. Accusing Mr. Xi personally would be the diplomatic equivalent of an unconditional surrender demand, making relations all but impossible until China got a new leader, which may not happen for another decade. With a Taiwan showdown in the offing, both sides are more sensitive than ever to avoid Covid recriminations that could complicate an already complicated situation, which begs for the lines of communication to be kept open. Nor has the U.S. has been willing to unleash full information warfare on Mr. Putin. Mr. Putin has returned the favor. He raised no objection after the Kremlin was falsely accused in the Hunter Biden laptop caper.***
Yuhong Dong in EPOCH TIMES, How Ivermectin Trials Were Designed to Fail.
It’s difficult to believe that the designers of these studies were unaware of the dosing of ivermectin. Despite all the above analyses, the reasoning behind the ivermectin underdosing or unfavorable study design may be linked to factors beyond science. A new drug or vaccine cannot achieve an emergency use authorization status if there is an existing viable therapeutic available. This fact alone may have affected many decisions. The NIH website lists only those RCTs that I found to have design flaws (or potential fraud) to justify its recommendation against the use of ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19. Peer-reviewed studies showing the efficacy of ivermectin in treating COVID-19 have been retracted without explanation, and doctors have been demonized, censored, and doxxed for speaking the truth.***
Alex Berenson at substack.com, Yale researchers have found Covid spik protein in the blood of people never infected with Covid – years after they got mRNA jabs.
Some vaccine-skeptical researchers have previously suggested the potential for the genetic material in the shots to integrate with human genes. But the new findings are crucial, not just because they make the possibility more likely but because the head of the Yale team is a renowned scientist who had strongly advocated for the Covid jabs. The researcher, Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, is a former president of the American Association of Immunologists. In May 2021, she told the Washington Post that concerns about mRNA shots were “absurd” and added that “no safety concerns” had been found in their clinical trials. She later signed a letter advocating Covid vaccine mandates. The people who told Unreported Truths of the findings included one person who participates in the study and directly heard the reports from the Yale researchers on the conference call. The other person is a scientist who is in contact with multiple members of the team. Contacted by Unreported Truths, Iwasaki did not dispute her team had found continuing evidence of spike proteins in participants who had been vaccinated but never infected. “We are working hard to finalize our study and post it on a preprint server,” she wrote.***
Nidhi Subbaraman in WSJ, Researchers Critical of Bad Science Have Own Study Pulled.
A study trumpeting the value of applying rigorous standards to scientific research was retracted, in part because the authors didn’t follow their own advice. In the sprawling project, scientists in four labs designed and tested experiments and then tried to replicate one another’s work. The intention, according to the study, was to test methods aimed at ensuring the integrity of published research. But the group neglected to fully document key aspects of the project ahead of running the experiments, one of the practices the study was looking to test, leading to the retraction. The authors—who include two of the most prominent voices advocating for research reforms—dispute some of the criticisms and said any errors they made were inadvertent. “It wasn’t because we were trying to fool someone, but it is because we were incompetent,” said Leif Nelson, one of the authors, a marketing professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.***
Nathan Descheemaeker in RANGE, Net Zero, 30x30 and Natural Assets. Who Benefits?.
Although after heavy opposition the New York Stock Exchange withdrew its rule to establish natural asset companies from the Securities and Exchange Commission early this year, the natural asset accounting strategy is still being pushed through the White House and executive departments. The White House Natural Capital Accounting strategy places conservation as an economic necessity. These processes seek to arbitrarily place a value on nonuse of public lands and inventory them under the 30x30 conservation objectives. The White House document – “National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental Economic Decisions,” published in January 2023 – signifies that the Conservation Stewardship Atlas will serve as a tool “for tracking a range of conservation benefits provided for biodiversity, climate and equity benefits.” It appears that the Department of Interior’s landscape conservation leasing rule may serve as an administrative mechanism to transition lands from active use to nonuse, while the America the Beautiful Conservation Atlas will serve as the inventorying system to monitor and track the transition, and then some form of natural asset valuation system will be the mechanism for entities which acquire such lands to sell nonuse as an ecosystem service on the New York Stock Exchange.***
Sanjana Friedman in CITY JOURNAL, Urban Anarchy.
Why would Nuru, who was then one of the preeminent power brokers in city politics, direct millions to an unknown nonprofit? Perhaps as a favor to a longtime friend. In the San Francisco Standard, Matt Smith reports that Urban Alchemy CEO Lena Miller—who has spent her career working in city government and the nonprofit sector—maintained a “mutually beneficial relationship” with Nuru from the 1990s onward. Per Smith, Miller helped Nuru secure his first position in city government in the early 2000s, when she introduced him to her then-boss, Mayor Willie Brown. Nuru eventually encouraged Miller to quit her job in the mayor’s office and return full-time to nonprofits. Miller later teamed up with Bayron Wilson, who reportedly had been paroled after serving ten years in prison of a life sentence, to found Urban Alchemy. The timing paid off; under Nuru’s Department of Public Works, UA would receive $34 million in contracts. The group’s big break, however, came in 2020, when San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing began awarding no-bid contracts, ostensibly to expedite services in a public-health emergency. The organization scored a $10 million contract to run an encampment (euphemistically termed a “safe sleeping village”) outside City Hall. Soon after, it received a no-bid contract to run “shelter-in-place” hotels—local hotels that the city rented out during the pandemic to house homeless people—and a nearly $20 million no-bid contract to run a youth hostel that the city was converting into homeless housing. In other words, from the pandemic onward, Urban Alchemy expanded primarily through public contracts to operate programs that the city had created for it to run.
Obituaries of the Issue…Michael Boudin (1939-2025)
Chesa Boudin said: “We’re all our own people. He got along very well with his father. He was very angry with his sister for what she did. She caused a tremendous amount of harm.” Nonetheless, he added, during Ms. Boudin’s years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y. — she was released in 2003 — Judge Boudin would occasionally visit her. “He cared about her well-being, but he was a disappointed older brother,” Chesa Boudin said. Ms. Boudin, who died in 2022 at 78, first achieved public notoriety in March 1970, when the Greenwich Village townhouse where she was living blew up. Her colleagues had set up a makeshift bomb factory there; three were killed on the spot, and Ms. Boudin, who had been showering, had to scramble away half-naked. Her brother, meanwhile, was immersed in his corporate law firm. “While Michael was making partner at Covington & Burling, Kathy was making bombs in Greenwich Village,” David Margolick wrote in a 1992 profile of Michael Boudin in The New York Times.***
Oleg Gordievsky (1938-2025)
In practice he helped the British root out secret operatives and informants working for the Soviet Union. He kept up enough of a front to please his K.G.B. bosses in Moscow, who soon promoted him to rezident, or head agent, in Britain. He also played a crucial role in preventing what could have become World War III. By the early 1980s, the Soviets were convinced that the United States was planning a first-strike nuclear attack under the guise of a major NATO exercise, a suspicion underlined by President Ronald Reagan’s bellicose rhetoric. As NATO carried out the exercise, known as Able Archer 83, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies moved onto a war footing. Historians consider this to have been the closest moment to world war since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Mr. Gordievsky was in a unique position to work both sides. He was able to persuade Moscow that an attack was not in fact imminent while also communicating Soviet fears to the British and the Americans. As a result, Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan pared back their language, and future military exercises were more limited. All of this remained secret for years afterward, and in the meantime Mr. Gordievsky had to watch his back. In 1985, he was recalled to Moscow, given drugs and interrogated. Someone, it seemed, had tipped off the K.G.B. to the presence of a high-ranking mole in London.Thanks to Joseph Pope, Steve Beeho, Mike Vann Gray, Andy Schwartz, Jay Babcock, Jeff Roth, Mark Carducci, Mike Carducci, Julie Carducci, Mike Watt, aldaily.com, zerohedge.com...
Snowy Range, Wyoming
Photograph by Joe Carducci
