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Photograph by Joe Carducci
The Race Western and John Huston’s The Unforgiven (1960)
Joe Carducci The Race Western can be said to go back to the beginnings of cinema when what was called “the Indian subject” was essentially a second Western genre. First there were static single-scene shorts such as Edison’s one-and-a-half minute Cripple Creek Bar-Room Scene (1899), but the eleven minute multi-scene story-film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), was a phenomenon that helped move film exhibition out of game-rooms and lecture halls and into true movie theaters, the nickelodeons, after 1905. The action Westerns were harder to make in New Jersey in those earliest years. Francis Ford, an actor in New York who slipped into films by 1908 with the Centaur Film Co. of Bayonne, New Jersey, wrote in his unpublished memoir that English saddles on bob-tailed horses typified the equestrian culture of the East and were used in early Fort Lee, New Jersey-shot Westerns. It’s likely that the more pastoral, romantic presentation of the West (or pre-Columbian East) in the Indian subjects was more common than the shoot-em-up style.  .JPG) The early Indian subject was not the Race Western of the postwar years, of course. But racial accommodation in America was asking a lot. The conundrum was that despite slow, ongoing racial accommodations under way for the generations of those now settled in America, the country was periodically swamped with waves of new peoples from the old world who could only recharge racism. The accommodations are written in our DNA, but also included cultural forays that would later seem retrograde and insulting: those romances about pre-contact Indian life, plus nostalgic portraits of plantation life in the old South, cake-walks, Indian Princesses, minstrelsy, blackface, Wild West Shows, Saturday matinees, cowboys-and-Indians playsets…. But as has been observed, the Western was not just another movie genre. The drama-tragedy-comedy of the settling of the west featured immigrants and races, and the audiences for the early film were largely urban immigrants as no English was required and film itself was at first too disreputable for the bourgeoisie. The Russian writer Leonid Andreyev in 1911 defended the new art, terming it “an artistic Apache, an aesthetic hooligan….” (The Film Factory) Just arrived immigrants who knew only the tenements and factories of the cities in the east must have wondered at these early Westerns as a kind of American mirage though they’d heard that Manhattan had been purchased from the Indians and Chicago had started as a fur traders fort.
 Sound came in the late ’20s and placed a premium on the major studios’ new sound-stages and reduced the production budget status of Westerns which were largely shot in the deserts outside of Los Angeles. But the “high” Western was raised just prior to WWII. Larger budgets elevated the genre to action spectaculars such as The Texans (1938) and Dodge City (1939), or just better genre exercises like Stagecoach (1939) and Destry Rides Again (1939). Immigration had ceased after the market crash of 1929 and the Depression. But in the run-up to the war Americans became once again interested in revisiting the country’s settling the West. During the war, films were made about the war for the women at home. It was after the victory that movies changed for the returning boys, the girls they married and the baby boom they raised. The country was now saddled with defending the free world against communism, and its professed ideals came under pressure. The war’s mobilization and the peace’s demobilization had uprooted most Americans, set the survivors back in new places, and ran everyone through that common experience. War films continued to be made and they got more realistic and valorized everyone’s contribution from city ethnics to country kids, eventually blacks, Asians, and Native Americans. And so some of the postwar Westerns became topical or pretentious in new ways, pulling the genre further away from the kid-stuff of Saturday matinee series and serials of the early baby boom. This new Indian subject was an issue film and the more politically intended A-Westerns were termed “psychological” Westerns.
 Topical and politically “relevant” art is not a good bet but Hollywood’s creative elite often want to expound on issues. Both Delmer Daves and Anthony Mann went on to make great Westerns which dealt with the more universal aspects of human tragedy and fate. In this sense the Race Western can be limiting. Better postwar films dealing with Indians and racism include Broken Lance (1954), Gunman’s Walk (1958), and Flaming Star (1960). Broken Lance was directed by Edward Dmytryk and written by Philip Yordan and Richard Murphy and starred Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark, Robert Wagner and Katy Jurado. Gunman’s Walk was directed by Phil Karlson and written by Ric Hardman and Frank Nugent and starred Van Heflin, Tab Hunter, James Darren and Kathryn Grant. And Flaming Star was directed by Don Siegel and written by Clair Huffaker and Nunnally Johnson and starred Elvis Presley, Barbara Eden, Steve Forrest, Dolores Del Rio and John McIntire.
 Not all good Westerns dealing with Indian characters were racism-dependent in plot, indicating that a more casual understanding of inclusion was again possible as in Across the Wide Missouri (1951), and The Last Frontier (1956). In the first, directed by William Wellman and written by Frank Cavett and Talbot Jennings, John Hodiak, playing the half-breed son of mountain man Clark Gable and his Blackfeet wife played by Mexican actress María Elena Marqués, narrates the nostalgic tale of his parents and his early childhood in the mountains in flashback. In the second, directed by Anthony Mann and written by Philip Yordan and Russell Hughes, three mountain men, James Whitmore, Victor Mature, and Pat Hogan show up at a new fort just before an Indian attack. Whitmore is the wizened old hand who remembers the world he left behind; Mature though white is an impetuous and uncivilized creature of the mountains; and Hogan is a more measured half-breed. Mature is torn as he impetuously tries to join the troop and steal the affections of an officer’s wife. After the attack Whitmore is dead and Mature will enlist and marry the officer’s widow and Hogan, the stolid ideal, more Indian than white, returns alone to what wilderness remains. The Last Frontier is not considered as good as the Westerns Mann made with James Stewart but I think it rates.
.JPG) Hollywood, like America itself, is a default whipping boy. The man with the whip-hand feels he’s vaulted into the clique that determines the day’s fashion of sophistication. Rather than complicating matters the media-academia intelligentsia reduces things to social coloration for their clique. There always were Native Americans in the movies beginning in the 19th century with the first Edison Kinematograph productions. But we’re expected to assume they were erased from American history and so from Hollywood as well. The kidstuff of Saturday matinee series becomes the stand-in for the Western because the American Studies radicals who interpret the culture are deaf to the muse and their exertions are to more cleverly evade Truth for their myopic goals. (And I hasten to add there’s a lot of good acting, stunting, music and comic relief in all that kidstuff too.) I wrote about Native American movie actors Princess Red Wing, James Young Deer, Ben Johnson, Will Rogers, Sid Jordan, and the Sioux of the 101 Ranch Wild West Show troop in my book, Stone Male. American Studies racialism leaves its discourse untethered as the Left leaves behind the economics of classical Marxism for more malleable historiography and later cultural, media, endocrinal and nationalist amendments. But white Americans, after all, are but ex-Europeans who went native here under the influences of Native Americans, with a side-swipe from ex-African black Americans, who might have but didn’t take Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement seriously. Ask any European about Americans; they’ll tell you we’re all impulsive, naive, optimistic children – the bloody racists.
 The postwar elevated A-budget Race Western that stands out to me in its summary power is The Unforgiven (1960). The film was directed by John Huston, produced by Burt Lancaster’s company, written by Ben Maddow from Alan Le May’s novel which was originally titled, “Kiowa Moon,” as it ran in the Saturday Evening Post in 1957. Le May had earlier published the novel that was the basis for John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). That film’s reputation has risen since its release when, though successful, it was taken to be just another widescreen Western epic and not a psychological Western due deeper reflection even though its backstory is the hero’s racism! He returns unsurrendered to west Texas years after the South’s defeat, and after years of guerrilla raiding that it’s inferred devolved into simple causeless brigandage. But Ford’s touch is so subtle that though the film was successful, John Wayne’s performance of the character overwhelms, even shot against Monument Valley in VistaVision! Frank Nugent adapted Le May’s novel and so much exposition is unspoken that only a Ford could have convinced a writer that the story would out. (There are some very broad comic scenes that tell you even Ford didn’t perhaps have full confidence in his summer epic.) For these and other reasons I won’t include The Searchers here. But this other Le May-sourced film, The Unforgiven, has fallen through the cracks for complex reasons. John Huston rarely discussed the film; Lancaster’s company took it away from him to recut the resolution. But the film is full of great sequences where Huston is at his best and the film’s impact can hardly be said to be softened.
 “Take Alphonso Bedoya, Gold Hat in Treasure [of the Sierra Madre]. A delightful man. The heart opens right up to him. He looked great for the part but he didn’t know how to act. My not telling him exactly how things were to be done only confused and frustrated him. There was an uncertainty there that added a dimension of volatility and unpredictability and made him even more terrifying.” (Action, 1972)Bedoya playing one of the bandits is famous for the line, “Badges? We ain't got no badges….” John Huston took chances that made producers nervous but as a screenwriter-become-director and further as the son of Walter Huston who was one of the Broadway stars who came to Hollywood with sound, John was fully conversant with how films were made and what the camera needed from performers. Walter considered that acting for films had improved his stage acting so the two of them respected what the movies were, though John affected high brow enough that one could doubt that.
 The cast in The Unforgiven includes Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, and Doug McClure as the three Zachary brothers, Lillian Gish as their widowed mother, and Audrey Hepburn as their foundling sister. Their distant neighbors on the frontier rangeland are the Rawlinses, led by the parents played by Charles Bickford and June Walker. Their children are played by Albert Salmi, Kipp Hamilton and Arnold Merritt. Joseph Wiseman plays the wandering wraith who haunts the Zacharys and caused the family to relocate once before. Carlos Rivas plays Lost Bird the Kiowa who believes Hepburn’s character is his sister, and John Saxon plays Johnny Portugal, a half-breed hireling for the cattle drive. All are excellent with perhaps the best line readings and moments being performed by Bickford and Walker, Wiseman, and Saxon. Audrey Hepburn’s casting drew criticism but, really, it’s a movie, and Huston certainly intends the frisson of having Hepburn-as-daughter echo Lillian Gish’s original sylph-like effect from the dawn of pictures. D.W. Griffith began knitting together what’s called film grammar, not to say the moving-going audience itself by framing a parade of actresses playing young women in jeopardy starting in 1908 (Linda Arvidson, Dorothy Bernard, Florence Lawrence, Marion Leonard, Mary Pickford, Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, Dorothy Gish, Lillian Gish...). These are his one- and two-reel Biograph films – check ’em out, they’re more fun and more important than his features. .png) In John Huston’s memoir he dismisses the film’s tone as “bombastic and over-inflated” writing: “Some of my pictures I don’t care for, but The Unforgiven is the only one I actually dislike. I thought I saw in Maddow’s script the potential for a more serious – and better – film than either he or Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had originally contemplated; I wanted to turn it into the story of racial intolerance in a frontier town, a comment on the real nature of community ‘morality.’ The trouble was the producers disagreed. What they wanted was what I had unfortunately signed on to make when I accepted the job in the first place – a swashbuckler about a larger-than-life frontiersman.” (An Open Book, 1980) Typically Westerns being shot on location offered directors the freedom from day-to-day oversight from the studio’s producers back in Hollywood. This was especially true of generic programmer Bs of the type Budd Boetticher is now famous for. Randolph Scott was the star-producer of those cheaply made great films. But Burt Lancaster was not starring in and producing that kind of bottom-of-the-bill Western. And neither was John Huston directing that kind of Western. Scott’s Westerns made money because they stayed under budget and hit their marks – screenwriter Burt Kennedy and director Budd Boetticher designed their stories for Randolph Scott and the budget he still commanded late in his career – each film’s profit was built-in to the budget and guaranteed with only a slight chance at an unexpected up-side return. A-budget filmmaking has always been a crapshoot and Lancaster’s production company went broke because unlike the studio model where a slate of many genre films pay for a few risky prestige productions, the independent production company must swing for the fence each time. (The Scott-Boetticher Westerns’ budgets were under half-a-million while The Unforgiven cost $5.5 million) Lancaster is better on screen than you may recall, both here playing the eldest son of the widow Zachary, and later in The Professionals (1966) and Ulzana’s Raid (1972), but as a producer he could be pretentious. The writer of Westerns Max Evans who was a confidant of Sam Peckinpah recounts his meeting with Lancaster who was interested in his novella, The Great Wedding: “‘OK, Max, I want to know what drives these two men.’ ‘It’s simple Burt. These boys want to ride into town, get in out of the wind, have a couple of drinks, and fuck something.’ My response stunned him. In a very fast ten seconds, I knew I had blown the deal.” (Goin’ Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and All Our Friends, 2014)
 “The stables run by Fat es, the Hudkins Brothers, Ralph McCutcheon, Glenn Randall and others must've weathered jolting downturns as the production of Westerns halved and then halved again for movies, and then for television too. Jones died in 1963; Ace Hudkins died in 1973, McCutcheon in 1975…” (The New Vulgate) By the mid-70s any Western production that managed to get financed essentially needed to reinvent the wheel. But here, in The Unforgiven, the movie that Huston and Maddow and Lancaster & Co. made can be said to deliver on its pretention, if not entirely on their ambitions. It’s not a psychological Western, and it’s not a noir-Western, it’s a signal entry into the Western’s “noble convention.” The blood ties of tribe, nation, and race are to be transcended in this new bastard nation of individuals loosed from tribes, race nations, and maybe even civilizations as then understood. The Zacharys – stand-ins for America writ large – survive as they must as characters in Hollywood’s own Americanized, de-Greeked genre of the semi-tragic-epic-comedy... but they survive unforgiven.
[Illustrations: The Unforgiven’s Kiowa deerskin “calendar”; Lilian St. Cyr, Charles K. French in Red Wing’s Constancy (1910); 101 Ranch poster; Robert Wagner, Earl Holliman, Hugh O’Brien, Richard Widmark in Broken Lance (1954); Elvis Presley in Flaming Star (1960); Pat Hogan, Victor Mature in The Last Frontier (1956); “Kiowa Moon” by Alan Le May in The Saturday Evening Post; The Rawlinses and the Zacharies: Audrey Hepburn, June Walker, Charles Bickford, Lillian Gish, Audie Murphy, Burt Lancaster; Joseph Wiseman as Abe Kelsey; John Huston, Bill Pickens probably, and Audie Murphy on a Durango location hunt, photo by Inge Morath; John Saxon in Johnny Portugal’s last moment on screen; Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Doug McClure, Audie Murphy near the end]
Netzley Pond, Naperville, Ill.
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Reaction Shots 3.0
- We may need a malevolent AGI just to get rid of Sam Altman. - If you love the culture but hate the polity, keep thinking because you aren’t there yet. - The politico discounts the arts to a point where he no longer hears a muse, which leaves any thought ideological. - After Khrushchev’s 1961 “For New Victories” speech moved the Party off economics to race the American Left began its dream of making whites a minority; its nightmare is when whites begin to act like a minority. - When an individual indulges a group he becomes a type. - Atheists demand America be the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. - The four year delay before Trump’s second term made all the difference. - Passion is the will toward destiny. - The Republican party will spend its majorities on dirty work and heavy lifting because it feels a drift toward disaster, whereas the Democratic party in majority, assuming crises are the norm and managing them a given, tends to freeze up. - Madison Avenue had no model for moving the pop culture microphone from the first half of the baby boom to the latter half so the middle class’s toying with rock and roll ended as it aged. The forestalling of punk airplay for fifteen years forged an underground but yielded cultural brain damage by oxygen deprivation and a pop culture of solo artists and engineers. Memphis beat New York, then San Francisco beat Memphis, then Los Angeles beat San Francisco, then Orlando beat Los Angeles. - Every public servant should be required to wear a vest camera. - The mediasphere is essentially juvenile in its use of words to impose wishful thinking on reality. - Musicians leave bands and go solo which allows them to hire and fire accompanists as needed; they grow up and stop listening to others while their listeners prefer their early work.
Netzley Pond, Naperville, Ill.
Steve Beeho at the London Desk…
 Jonn Elledge in NEW STATESMAN, Why Does Keir Starmer Even Want to Be Prime Minister? Starmer may not, as assorted opposition leaders claim, have misled Parliament and thus breached the ministerial code. But if he didn’t, that only serves to highlight the fact he didn’t ask the questions he should, and was outsourcing vast chunks of his job to functionaries. Not for the first time I am left wondering why he even wants the job at all. Being prime minister is stressful, invasive and will inevitably mean literally millions of people hate your guts. Keir Starmer clearly has no animating mission, no zeal for addressing the nation, no interest in either politics or policy. The only plausible answer for why he wanted to run the country at all was because he thought he could run it more competently than his predecessors had. Well: the most flattering interpretation of these latest revelations is that he doesn’t want to do that bit either. Perhaps he is done. Perhaps he is not. But given everything we know now about his style of governing – why on earth does he even care? ^^^ Jonny Ball at unherd.com, Morgan McSweeney’s Inside Job. In Starmer’s image, a new Parliamentary Labour Party has been created. Out of the 403, not a single one of them represents a plausible alternative Prime Minister. This is the only thing that keeps Starmer in place, in spite of his unprecedented unpopularity, itself about to collide with a coming recession and inflationary spiral. McSweeneyism, in pursuit of political professionalisation, has produced a Labour-dominated House of Commons packed with legislators whose chief achievements centre not around representing workers, rising through the ranks of trade unions in a variety of sectors, and sit still less upon building organisations or creating successful institutions with national impact. Instead, it is a hollowed-out parliament of junior managers armed with humanities degrees, specialising in internal slideshows for corporate public affairs departments or the third sector. Gone are the organisers, the rabble-rousers, the barnstorming autodidacts, and in are the dull young things, delivering speeches in the manner of weekly updates on Microsoft Teams. Once it was a party of labour; today it is a party of LinkedIn. ^^^ Marina Hyde in GUARDIAN, Starmer Seems to Think He Can Do No Wrong. McSweeney believed this was ultimately about Mandelson’s judgment, not Starmer’s. This must have been the sort of loyalty that endeared him to the PM. Like Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn before him, Starmer has a fundamentalist belief in his own probity, and no amount of sleaze rows or judgment rows or any other type of row is going to dent it. The prime minister seems to regard himself as rather above politics, when in fact he just doesn’t really understand it. The Mandelson appointment was a sixth-former’s idea of realpolitik, replacing a well-regarded ambassador who had proven good relations with the Trump mob (Karen Pierce) with a brand name he’d heard of. In some ways the whole saga has the flavour of Starmer’s bizarre decision to hire Sue Gray as his political chief of staff, presumably because the Sue Gray of Sue-Gray-report fame was someone he’d heard of. As even Starmer must be able to see now, unless he needs Waheed Alli to freebie him some better glasses, that decision to sack Olly Robbins was a kneejerk spasm of anger that has become an infinitely bigger headache for the PM than if he’d considered some questions before acting. For a cautious guy, Starmer doesn’t half do some impulsive things. This particular impulsive thing has removed the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office in the middle of a war and a global situation of gathering instability, taken us on a frenzied couple-of-weeks detour of self-destructive Westminster drama, and – perhaps most lastingly dangerous – made public a whole load of information about our developed vetting procedures, for which I’m sure our international enemies are most grateful. In between sharing disbelieving laughs that we’re doing it. ^^^ Ed West in SPECTATOR, How Hitler Came to Define Western Morality. The German dictator has become the moral lodestar of our world, as Renaud Camus pointed out in ‘Hitler’s Second Career’, and the decree ‘to do whatever He wouldn’t have done’ has warped many people’s political sense (there was even a notorious case in 1970s Germany when authorities placed children in the care of convicted philes, partly motivated by the guiding sense that the Nazis would have opposed the scheme – you’ll never guess what happened next). […] [Alec Ryrie] sees the moral worldview which replaced a defeated Christianity as shallow, and indeed it tends to emphasise soft virtues like ‘tolerance’ and ‘kindness’. He also fears for what comes next, and gives the impression of someone who wants to save the post-war worldview from itself. I’m not convinced by his solutions, and the latter half does at times read like an anguished Anglican sermon, but his thesis is undeniable and well argued. Indeed, Ryrie suspects that the Age of Hitler is coming to the end. Partly it is just the passage of time, and the increasing distance of the Holocaust. The taboo about anti-Semitism is certainly fading among younger generations, but this is also related to the most consequential effect of Hitler’s second career – the changing demography of the west and the arrival of large numbers of outsiders to a civilisation psychologically incapable of keeping them out. Unburdened by civilisational guilt and possessing religion of their own, these newcomers do not need the crooked cross as their moral guide. The age of Hitler may indeed be over. ^^^ Wolfgang Munchau at unherd.com, Welcome to the Age of Uncertainty. If you want to understand uncertainty, after all, the mean is your enemy. Politicians should care about the voter with the median income; the voter who, when income is ranked from poorest to richest, is sitting in the middle. He would be a different person from the man with the average income, because the super-rich distort the picture. It’s the “Bill Gates walks into the pub” problem, where a single billionaire raises the average income of a group. There’s an old joke about the statistician who died crossing a river that was three foot deep on average. Real statisticians, of course, know about this stuff. The people most at risk of such misjudgements are those with a Statistics 101 background, who have been taught some powerful techniques they then unleash on an unsuspecting public: economists, journalists, doctors, epidemiologists and unfortunately also climate scientists. ^^^
 James Martin Charlton in THE CRITIC, The Hidden Bureaucracy Shaping Britain’s University Curriculum. One might hope that a university course would involve acquiring skills as well as knowledge in a particular discipline. Computing, for example, remains a skills heavy subject. Students are expected to master core competencies such as algorithmic thinking, software development and data analysis. Of course, computing students must also engage with the previously mentioned priorities and consider, as the benchmark puts it, the “legal, social, ethical, professional, environmental and economic factors that are relevant to computing”. But the technical core still dominates. If you summon a computing graduate, they should at least be able to make their way around your laptop, even as they pause to mutter darkly about “divisions and hierarchies of colonial value … replicated and reinforced within the computing subject.” Students of Drama, Dance and Performance are not so lucky — and neither are their future audiences. You can go through the benchmark for this subject with a fine tooth comb without encountering a single core professional skill. Acting, directing, choreography, movement, voice: the benchmark is perfectly content for students to pass through three years of study without any explicit expectation that they master the craft of performance. Graduates may therefore be unable to play Hamlet or dance Giselle, but the benchmark does ensure that they will demonstrate a “sophisticated engagement with critical and theoretical perspectives” and mastery of “critical modes of investigation”. Perhaps the latter will come in useful if they are ever cast as Columbo. Reading the document, you might begin to understand why such a large proportion of graduates from these degrees never end up working in the profession they thought they were studying to enter. ^^^ Peter Hitchens in NEW STATESMAN, Anglo-Gaullism Is Doomed. But the true difficulty is that it is too late for British Gaullism. When I called myself a British Gaullist I was, as I always am, discussing what we could have done and didn’t. I wasn’t offering a manifesto. We cannot haul the remnants of the decrepit British dreadnought out of the muddy, polluted creek into which it has sunk. In my review of Professor Jackson’s book, I noted above all that de Gaulle had in the end been beaten, in 1968, by a wordless, incoherent insurrection. Vacuous as it was, it defeated him, his patriotism, his idea of France and his evocation of ancient loyalties. The 1968 generation in France had no use for the threadbare banners of nation, duty and faith. They preferred the new post-patriotic, secular Europe, in which bodily autonomy matters much more than national sovereignty. I wrote in 2019 that it was a great tribute to Charles de Gaulle that this movement, which has transformed the world, originally rose in its full strength specifically against him, his rule and his principles. He had a certain idea of France and of the world, and they knew, absolutely knew, that it was their enemy. Britain had no such figure then or since, whatever the Thatcherites would have you believe. It thought it was too safe to need one. Now it is clear that it is not safe, there is no such leader available and there will be no “Anglo-Gaullism”. ^^^ John Gray in NEW STATESMAN, AI Will Dissolve Civilisation as We Know It. The metaphysical shock of AI comes with the realisation that matter can be intelligent. The sociopolitical shock comes from the fact that human intelligence is losing its scarcity value. Think twice about becoming an interpreter or translator, an advertising copywriter or university lecturer, a solicitor, accountant or hedge fund trader. The “knowledge classes” are facing an immiseration akin to that suffered by farm labourers displaced by tractors in the Industrial Revolution, but at a much-accelerated rate. Far from ushering in an “era of abundance” as promised by Silicon Valley futurists, AI risks bringing a new age of mass poverty – and with it, a new kind of revolutionary politics. The infantile left-populism of the Greens is a harbinger of more hard-edged movements to come. ^^^ Richard Norton-Taylor in LITERARY REVIEW, The Soviet Network. The Cambridge Five, Senior suggests, were blinded by ideology. And MI5, MI6 and the Foreign Office were blinded by prejudice: files have already revealed how those at the top simply could not believe that Cambridge graduates would betray their country. Such an attitude was perhaps father to the thought. The Whitehall establishment was terrified of the damage to their reputation and the reaction in Washington if the truth came out. Better to keep the growing evidence and their suspicions under wraps. Although Senior states that ‘there was never enough evidence to charge any’ of the Cambridge spies, the reality was not so simple. Declassified files reveal that the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, was told in March 1952 that there was insufficient evidence – in spite of months of investigation, phone taps and interviews to prosecute Burgess and Maclean – even if they were to come home from Moscow (they had defected in 1951). The files also reveal that the Foreign Office told Sir Patrick Reilly, the British ambassador in Moscow: ‘Defection is not, of course, a crime in English law.’ Another Foreign Office official told his boss, Sir Harold Caccia, in 1962: ‘We certainly don’t want either [Burgess or Maclean] to return.’ MI5 was so anxious that Burgess, unhappy in Moscow, might try and come back to Britain that the agency encouraged Blunt, whose Soviet affiliation was still unknown, to write to Burgess. ‘What the outcome of the trial would be is of course a matter of speculation,’ Blunt wrote in 1959, ‘but on the way the whole story would be raked up again and many of your friends would certainly be called as witnesses, and mud slung in all directions.’ ^^^ Michael Cohen at quillette.com, The Professor and the Pariah. There’s no evidence that Chomsky had any interest in Epstein’s crimes or private life. The more plausible explanation is simpler. He treated Epstein as he has treated many controversial figures: as someone one might talk to, argue with, and engage. That instinct—the refusal to draw hard social boundaries—helps to explain his position on Cambodia, his support of Faurisson, and his willingness to flirt with historical absurdities. And it helps us to understand the Epstein encounter. The problem is that Epstein was not simply a controversial figure. He was a man who understood the mechanics of legitimacy at a level that many intellectuals never have to consider. He didn’t need Chomsky to agree with him. He needed him to appear with him. Chomsky’s framework leaves little room for this kind of asymmetry. If systems are what matter, then individuals are secondary. If structures shape outcomes, then personal proximity seems trivial. But proximity is not always trivial. Sometimes it is the whole point. The man who spent a lifetime examining hidden structures of power may have underestimated the oldest and simplest one: that reputation can be borrowed, that legitimacy can be staged, and that not everyone at the table is there for the same reason. Chomsky saw a conversation. Epstein saw an asset. And in that gap, the blind spot opened. ^^^
 From Athens to Oxford, whenever I encountered him I could never understand the entitled, arrogant attitude he projected as he mouthed evasive platitudes. It was as though he knew he was always going to be fine. Life was good to Tariq. All of this has come to an end due to something I suppose not many people could foresee. But, as I say, the more striking thing about Ramadan is not his fall, but his rise. He will doubtless appeal the French verdict. But I would be surprised if we hear much from him again. The accounts of his victims tell us too much about him. But the supply and demand problem that created him says an awful lot about us, too. ^^^ Julie Burchill at spiked-online.com, The Arrogant Alastair Campbell Was No Match for the Great JK Rowling. The social-media spat with Campbell is more serious – if one can apply that word to this man. After years of refusing to interact with any of us ‘unkind’ types on the gender-realist team, as is characteristic of people who know that they are doomed to lose any sensible argument, Campbell recently indicated that he and Rory Stewart would be ‘happy’ to welcome JKR [JK Rowling] to their podcast, The Rest Is Politics, just in case she could use the publicity, one supposes. This was after years of putting misters before sisters in the debate about whether transvestites should be given extra human rights to other men, and of only having transvestite-friendly guests on their show. More in sorrow than in anger (the same way he must have punched that journalist who dared to mock Robert Maxwell, his former employer), he added that ‘previous attempts’ to get her on the pod ‘have been rebuffed’. A million memes bloomed showing unattractive men pressing their clammy attentions on attractive women who wanted none of it. And then JKR herself landed a sucker-punch: ‘That’s because I wasn’t interested in being used to boost the viewing figures of a pair of exceptionally arrogant men whose understanding of this issue drips with classism and misogyny.’ The three women known as For Women Scotland, who were in London last week marking the anniversary of their legal triumph at the Supreme Court, offered themselves up for a ‘grilling’ on The Rest Is Politics instead. ‘We are still in London’, they said on their X account. ‘He can ask us on the podcast and call us toxic to our faces. If he has the guts.’ Answer came there none. The groom was only interested in non-Transmaids if they brought the spotlight with them. ^^^ Michael Hann interviews Jowe Head in GUARDIAN, The Return of the Mega-Influential Swell Maps after 46 Years. Swell Maps’ descendants weren’t the kind to get sleeve tattoos and don leather. They, like Swell Maps, were nerds. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore described them as “part of my upbringing”. Stephen Malkmus noted that Pavement formed, more or less, as a tribute to Swell Maps and their kindred spirits Desperate Bicycles. Now add all the bands who have tried or still try to sound like Pavement or Sonic Youth, bands who may never have heard of Swell Maps. That’s how you map the scope of their influence. “We took what we were doing very seriously, but we were determined to have a bit of fun doing it,” says 69-year-old Jowe Head, who has convened a group of sympathetic musicians as Swell Maps for a new album, Swell Maps C21, the first newly recorded material since 1980’s Jane from Occupied Europe. “We had a saying: ‘serious fun’. A lot of the bands around at the time – some of the ones on the Rough Trade scene – were very dour and frowning all the time, wearing grey. We weren’t like that.” ^^^ Christine Donovan at mostlyijustwalkaround.blogspot.com, In the Cafe of Lost Youth. Debord's experience of his early life in Paris was for him a time of huge change, living away from home, becoming an adult and falling in love with both women and political thought. At the time Debord was establishing himself as a leader, breaking away from Isidore Isou's Lettrist group and establishing his own Lettrist International. It was at this time that he became involved with two women who would become life long influences and with whom he fell in love, Eliane Papaii and Michele Bernstein. Eliane was Debord's first great love, and right up until his final film, In Girum Immus Nocte consumimur igni, and his final book Panegyric, one of van der Elsken's photos of her was used by him as an image of rebellion, "it shows all the hate in the world, all the fear in the world, all the violence, all the refusal" said her ex husband Jean-Michel Menison. Part Hungarian, part Spanish, part gypsy, Eliane was a persistent runaway, law breaker and as Debord put it a "lost young hoodlum girl". Eliane and Debord eventually broke up, and as a way of getting out of repeatedly being picked up by the police as a runaway she married Jean Michel Mension and then later Jean Louis Brau. Like many other of his friends they were cast into a social outer darkness by Debord, who was probably heartbroken as well as cross, and when she had the temerity to write a book about the Situationist movement he ridiculed it in the Internationale Situationniste journal. By then he had married another Moineau regular, Michele Bernstein, and had begun his long relationship with his future wife Alice Becker. I often wonder what the course of the Situationist movement would have been had he remained with Eliane, rather than the much better behaved Michele. ^^^ Ian Penman in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Peter Doggett’s book, Surf’s Up: Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. Landy was way out ahead of our own current era of group therapy reality TV, celebrity crisis management and social media surveillance. For one of Wilson’s shaky ‘comeback’ TV appearances, Landy stood off-camera holding signs prompting his charge to SMILE. This is not a future Freud can ever have imagined – more stalking cure than talking cure. And yet, Landy’s notion of what might work for patients who were in the terminal stages of addiction and surrounded by cowed enablers was not unrealistic. There was, at the very least, an understanding of the way an addict will arrange everything around themselves like a siege directed outwards, making the people in their life prisoners to their illness. A ferocious will can lurk behind what may present as terminal lassitude. There were some in Brian Wilson’s circle who saw this ‘dumb angel’ as a tenth-dan master in passive-aggressive manipulation. His seeming lostness went hand in hand with an intermittent ability to focus on exactly what he wanted to the exclusion of all else, whether it was exquisitely layered harmonies or being left alone in his room to scarf up drugs. This was procrastination choreographed like a battle plan, and Landy responded with a plan of his own: he effectively restaged the Wilson family’s toxic psychodrama, complete with Bad Dad’s all-seeing eye, violent mood swings and harsh words. Landy also laid down the law in other areas of Wilson’s life. He asked for songwriting credits on top of his fees, whether he’d contributed anything or not. He demanded that Wilson change his will. He even wanted the two of them to merge their names to become Eugene Wilson Landy and Brian Landy Wilson. Then there was the matter of an immediately disputed ‘autobiography’, for which Landy stood to receive 30 per cent of the royalties. Wouldn’t It Be Nice (1991) is an unsettling, unpleasant read. You’re instantly struck by the certain knowledge that this is not Brian Wilson’s voice. The book is subtitled ‘My Own Story’, yet that is precisely what has been taken away from him. ^^^ Eugene S. Robinson at substack.com, In Defense of...Greg Ginn? Everything about the man was weirdly otherworldly. The anti-fashion, the seeming absolute lack of vanity, weird given the Los Angeles provenance, and again, the blunted affect. There were glimmers of something else though. He and Earl from Saccharine Trust and Dukowski had some to see us play at Spaceland in Silver Lake. We started talking about wanting to keep the rights for our music for potential TV and film use. He got kind of edgy, almost insisting. My wife at the time was a lawyer and had been adamantly opposed to this. Which I said. And which seemed to back him off. He was irked but backed off. With a shrug. That and, of course, his refusal to correctly pronounce Steve Albini’s name correctly. Albini recorded Serenade in Red, the second record of ours that he had worked on. Most of the world would pronounce his name AL-BEAN-E. Ginn made a point, consistently, of pronouncing it AL-BINE-Y. I didn’t know why but it wasn’t hard to imagine why. Albini was not shy about his opinions, particularly in regard to other guitar players and he had multiple times shit on Ginn’s playing. The word that came up most often when he was doing so was “trying.” Whatever it was though it had clearly filtered back to Ginn and he would use his name as often as possible when talking to me, just to mispronounce it. I once asked “isn’t it pronounced AL-BEAN-E?” Ginn sort of smiled and asked in answer “AL-BINE-Y?” Serenade in Red came out, sold well, and we even got a single royalty check out of it. ^^^
Greg Ginn interview at thevinylguide.com.
Westhampton Beach, NY.
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Joe Carducci at the DuPage desk…
Ralph Eubanks in HEDGEHOG REVIEW, Retranslating the Blues.
What I wish my nineteen-year-old self had appreciated was that while the blues was the music of resistance to the indignities and exploitation of the Jim Crow era, it was about much more, including memories of a deeper, painful history and hopeful yearnings for a better present and future. The blues contained lessons of endurance that enabled not just surviving but thriving, celebrating a toughness of spirit that was anything but subservient. In an oral history recorded just a few weeks after I met him in Houston, White told the interviewer he felt that the blues he played had its origins in “slavery time,” since a few of the people who taught him music had once been enslaved.6 Had I been a bit less closed-minded, I might have learned about that connection directly from White himself, a man with a living link to Mississippi’s history of enslavement. That interview was conducted in a hospital about a month after I met him, while White was recuperating from a stroke he had suffered on a flight from Memphis to Boston. As it turned out, I had seen one of his final performances. By the winter of 1977, he was dead. Why did it take me so long to see the radical spirit at the core of the music? When black southerners of my generation moved from blues to Black Power, we lost a piece of ourselves in translation.
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James Parker in ATLANTIC, Respect the Drummer.
I play the drums. I play them every chance I get. Although my drumming career has served mainly as a steady education in my own shining mediocrity as a drummer, a reminder that I was put on this Earth for other things, I love hitting the goddamn drums. Left foot on the hi-hat pedal, right foot on the kick-drum pedal, left hand on the snare, right hand on the ride cymbal. When it starts to flow, you’re like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man: You’re in a holy circle of equilibrium, blissfully distributed, with consciousness diffused to your extremities. How do you get better as a drummer? Well, you practice: You do the same thing over and over, slowly building muscle fiber while also experiencing, in your brain, the painless, clueless ache of a synapse trying to form. You get better by being in a band, by entering music as part of a volatile, multi-person, multi-addiction organism. And you get better, lastly, via the drummer’s version of the grace of God—which is the jolt, the volt, the heavenly bolt, the electromotive impulse that flashes out from the playing of another, much greater drummer, and claims you.
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Dorian Lynskey in SPECTATOR on Daniel Rachel’s book, This Ain’t Rock’n’Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich.
Most of Bowie’s peers barely thought at all. The use of Nazi tropes usually signified nothing more than what the critic Lester Bangs called ‘cheap nihilism’ – trolling the Greatest Generation by breaking the most obvious taboo. ‘It was always very much an anti-mums-and-dads thing., admits Siouxsie Sioux. Thkere was also the glamour of evil, like heavy metal bands with Satan. Punks weren’t dressing like Mussolini or Franco. It was, then, almost always a question of schoolboy amorality rather than political extremism. Fascinating sections on the influence of Leni Riefenstahl and the 1974 movie The Night Porter explain how unnervingly easy it was to detash the insignia from the doctrine and the aesthetic from the history.
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Jennifer Schuessler in NYT, How a Determined Scholar Captured the Breadth of Blackface.
At one visit to the Library of Congress in 2013, she writes, every item she requested came back “missing/not on shelf.” Later, when she finally got a cart load of materials, she saw that most hadn’t been accessed in nearly three decades. A few scholars had already written about the strange phenomenon of blackface shows in Japanese American internment camps during World War II. But talking with survivors and digging through camp newspapers, Barnes realized they were happening on “a weekly basis,” she said, using scripts and props created and provided by the U.S. government. It was part of what she calls a broader “federalization” of blackface performance during the New Deal and World War II, when the government promoted minstrel shows at migrant work camps and army bases and even published anthologies of recommended skits. And enthusiasm for blackface went right to the top. In one eye-opening section, Barnes reconstructs a forgotten aspect of the last days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who died suddenly in 1945 during a visit to the polio rehabilitation center he founded in Warm Springs, Ga. The day he collapsed, Barnes reveals, Roosevelt was putting the finishing touches on a fund-raising show he had co-written, called “Polio Minstrels,” featuring child patients in blackface.
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Bergman and Proctor met in the late 1950s at Yale, where they were both involved in undergraduate theater. After college Bergman got a playwriting fellowship at the Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin at the same time that Tom Stoppard was a fellow there. From 1959 to 1961 Ossman, who had graduated from Columbia, hosted a show on WBAI in New York City called The Sullen Art, on which he interviewed poets associated with the Beat movement; later he translated Neruda and Artaud. Austin, the sole Firesign member without an Ivy League degree (he studied at Bowdoin and UCLA but never graduated), was active in the LA theater scene and especially drawn to the theater of the absurd. The group formed in late 1966 at KPFK, a listener-supported FM station in Los Angeles. Bergman hosted a late-night show there called Radio Free Oz, which was at the vanguard of counterculture sensibility. Austin had taken over Ossman’s job as the station’s director of programming for drama and literature, and Proctor, a stage actor based in New York, got back in touch with Bergman during a trip out west after seeing a photo of him in the Los Angeles Free Press. The four performed together for the first time on a Radio Free Oz segment in which they improvised descriptions of movies screened at a fake film festival.... Although Braddock insists on Firesign’s literariness, he avoids outrageous claims about their stature. Instead, he shows how the group wedded their literary influences to the lost art of radio drama. Firesign’s familiarity with old-time radio is most evident in Nick Danger, but their debt to the form went beyond gags about dramatic organ music, cheesy Foley sound, and under-rehearsed overacting. They were especially inspired by the Popular Front radio writer Norman Corwin, whose panoramic yet plainspoken scripts dealt with abstract subjects like astrophysics and ancient rhetoric. The cliché that radio drama is a “theater of the mind” appealed to Firesign’s psychedelic tastes. “We wanted to produce the records,” Proctor said in the 1990s, “as if radio had continued into the modern era with the full force of energy it had during its so-called golden age.”
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James Lasun in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, Reality Instruction.
Often there was no human artefact visible for fifty, sixty miles at a stretch, except for the road itself. I had my music and podcasts, but increasingly I just listened to the radio – National Public Radio where I could get it, local stations where I couldn’t. Toggling between them was like moving between two incompatible realities. At a certain point I found myself listening to one through the ears, so to speak, of the other. It was a disconcerting exercise in transpolitical open-mindedness. NPR, the voice of liberal America, has adopted a highly stylised language of genteel euphemism and formulaic ‘sensitivity’ in recent years. Its presenters and guests may not have invented such phrases as ‘coming from a place of privilege’, but they’ve certainly boosted their circulation. The edge-softening impulse seems to have extended beyond politically delicate issues, becoming a baroque end in itself. Cooking and culture have become ‘food-ways’ and ‘life-ways’; people aren’t nurses or doctors but work ‘in the medical space’ or the ‘wellness space’. At home, the weirdness washes over me, or I accept it as the price to pay for decent news reporting. But out here in deep red Wyoming, the strenuous empathy, the ritual self-flagellation, the extreme vocal kabuki were easy to hear as an ongoing provocation to anyone not fully on board with the programme. I couldn’t turn from that relentless decorousness to the resentment and paranoia on offer at other frequencies without feeling that one was implicated in the other. Elsewhere on the dial: Eric Trump complaining about the persecution of his family; a country singer with a voice of pure venom singing Merle Haggard’s ‘When you’re running down our country, you’re walking on the fighting side of me’; a call-in show for ranchers where, between patriotically coded ads for Ivermectin and warnings of ‘Mexican screw worms coming north’, a guest (who prefaced his remarks with a chuckling ‘this is probably not very politically correct of me’) gave legal advice on how to avoid liability ‘in situations for instance where one of your ranch hands gets killed in an accident or your cattle truck kills someone on a highway’.
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ORANGE FOREST OBSERVER QUARTERLY: A Confusing Bloodbath and a Bare-Bones Confession.
Even beyond that sociopathic mindset, I think we can all agree that the word doesn’t have a 100% negative connotation, and it does still leave us with enough wiggle room for some positive connotations. Exempli gratia: A “Sanguine Spa,” where guests soak in revitalizing bloodbaths, get intravenously rejuvenated by bloodboys and bloodbroads, and balance their humours with bloodletting barber surgeons, all while drinking the best Bloody Marys in the Orange Forest metro region. Not such a negative connotation there, now is it? No, bloodbath doesn’t work. Need a better word that not only captures the raw physical carnage, but also the emotional and mental pain and suffering happening in the carnival, as well as the overall social breakdown. All without leaving out the utter stupidity baked into this wholly unnecessary breakdown. Definitely not anarchy, that’s a non-hierarchical system of egalitarian self-rule. Wasn’t pandemonium, even though it felt like there were unseen demons aplenty manipulating the invisible marionette strings attached to the weaker minds and meaner hearts of the savages involved. Chaos doesn’t convey the violent depravity, bedlam lacks the belligerent intent, and barbaric belies humanity’s inherent culpability in the Day of Flesh. My oh my oh me my self! Writing sure is trickier than I thought it’d be, even for a genius trickster like me, Ambe. As much as I, I am Ambe, am responsible for interfering with editorial, inserting my perspectives, and invading the language of the Observer, I never entirely wrote any of those stories or articles. I was fueled, propelled, and guided by the authors’ intents, rough drafts of articles, and their journaling tasks, along with meaty chunks of AstroP’s LLM infecting me like a microfiche tapeworm.
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J. Hoberman in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Dan Nadel’s book, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life.
As Nadel writes, ‘the Crumb brothers resented brutish do-gooders solving problems with fisticuffs. Superman was hardly an idol to them – he was more like their drunk uncles and local bullies.’ Charles and Robert took refuge in the child-friendly, character-driven comic books put out by the Dell company: Walt Kelly’s satiric Pogo, the proto-feminist Little Lulu and, most successfully, Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, which often featured the feckless striver Donald Duck and his unimaginably wealthy uncle Scrooge McDuck. These comics were originally written and drawn anonymously by Carl Barks: the Crumb brothers studied Barks and hand-copied his stories.
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David Treuer in ATLANTIC, Who Gets to Be an Indian – and Who Decides?.
By 1930, Long Lance’s celebrity extended far beyond New York ballrooms and newspaper book reviews: He starred in a feature film, The Silent Enemy, about a famine that strikes a fictionalized version of the Ojibwe Tribe…. I first wrote about Long Lance nearly 20 years ago. I ended the story by revealing his fraudulent Blackfeet identity. In my account, he was Black, not Native. Case closed. But the case turned out not to be closed. He was Indian after all. The evidence was there, but I’d blinded myself to it because I still saw identity in black and white – or Black and Red. As Smith detailed in Long Lance:The True Story of an Imposter, Long Lance’s mother, Sallie, had been born into slavery. Her grandfather Robert Carson was “a small-time slave owner.” Carson had been wild in his youth, but evidently “settled down after he bought a handsome Indian woman” at an auction. Among the 20 children that Indian woman gave birth to was Long Lance’s grandmother Adeline, born in 1848. Long Lance’s maternal grandfather was a North Carolina state senator who visited Carson’s plantation often and fathered Sallie and another child with Adeline. It turns out that Long Lance’s father, too, had Indian blood. He was born into slavery in 1853 and early on in life was separated from his mother. When Joe Long finally found his mother in Alabama, some 40 years later, she told him that his father was white – and that she herself was Cherokee.
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Matt McInnis at substack.com, Who Killed the Femme Fatale?.
Instead of abandoning the idea of the dangerous, manipulative woman, Hollywood began to modify it. They added context. They added motivation. They added psychological depth. They did what they did with every villain and bully in the last thirty years. They provided some sob story in their past to justify bad behavior. This reinforces the liberal idea that we are all good people that society makes bad. In doing so, they fundamentally destroyed the archetype. She is gone. Some argue that femme fatales still exist in Hollywood, but forget it. Take the most recent example offered up: Amy Dunne from Gone Girl. In media, Amy is called a classic femme fatale. She manipulates her husband, deceives the public, and orchestrates an elaborate scheme that destroys others. The narrative insists on explaining her. We are given her childhood, her marriage, her frustrations, and her worldview in a rather entertaining narration early in the film. She is not simply dangerous. She is intelligible. The audience is invited to understand her, even as it recoils from her actions. This is a very different kind of character. Look, if you’re in an unhappy marriage with a cheating husband, get a divorce. Everyone will understand. Do not frame your husband for murder. The traditional femme fatale does not explain herself. Her power lies precisely in her opacity. She is a force, not a case study. She has agency, wants and needs and does not try to cover it in therapy speak as a reaction to past trauma. What happened, then, is not that the femme fatale walked off the stage. It is that she was absorbed into a different narrative framework to serve a political purpose. She became, in the most generous terms, the psychologically complex antihero. In that transformation, she was erased.
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If I had to explain this to a skeptical stranger and could use any movie clip to make my case, I’d go with The Fountainhead’s third great architectural scene, in which Dominique sees Howard Roark sweating away in the quarry. The sun shines bright, his drill gnashes at the granite, and the air is thick with dust and lust as her lips part hungrily. Part of the shock here, seventy-six years later, is the fact that a Hollywood movie made in perfect obedience to the Hays Code can be shocking. The censors wouldn’t permit Vidor to show Roark shirtless, but it doesn’t matter: The camera’s lazy slide across Cooper’s forearm, savoring every hair and vein, is more pornographic than some actual porn. It’s also a nice reminder that real-life geniuses like King Vidor don’t need to blow up their work when it runs the risk of censorship. If they couldn’t find a way around the rules, what kinds of geniuses would they be? But forget the eroticism. Forget the drill and the riding crop and the other phallic gizmos: The real shock of this scene is the Where, not the Freudian Why. It was filmed in a functioning stone quarry in Knowles, California, in temperatures as high as 126 degrees, and good god was it worth the trouble: No building in The Fountainhead has anything close to the heft of this nonplace where so many actual buildings began—you can taste the metal in the air, feel the machinery spasming in your hands. Most of all, you feel the weight of raw, rough, magnificent stuff in every direction. It may even occur to you, watching that forearm, that people are stuff, too, a special kind that has figured out how to rip things out of the ground and make them do our bidding; and that every trick we’ve learned to play with our stuff, every skyscraper or sculpture or print edition of New York Review of Architecture, begins with an act of destruction like the one Vidor shows us—a gorgeous desecration of the way things were. Not art, but no art without it.
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Gavin Morimer in SPECTATOR, Land of the Flee.
Life is apparently so disagreeable in Donald Trump’s America that 40 percent of women aged between 15 and 44 want to leave…. As they point out, the question is about the “desire” to relocate, so probably only a minority of the 40 percent will leave. Nonetheless, concludes Gallup, “the data indicate that millions of younger American women are increasingly imagining their futures elsewhere.” And where might that be? Canada is the first choice (11 percent) while 5 percent dream of a new life in New Zealand, Italy or Japan. Canada has that nice Mark Carney as its Prime Minister but be warned, women of America: our northern neighbor isn’t the same country that it was a decade ago. A report last year in the National Post was headlined “Sexual assaults, robberies surging in Canada’s cities.” The Trudeau administration had tried to blame soaring crime on the aftermath of the harsh Covid restrictions, but the Macdonald Laurier Institute’s “urban violent crime report’ rubbished that theory. Crime of all types had been on the rise since 2016, particularly sexual assault, which had increased by 77 percent between 2013 and 2023. The Canadian media is curiously reticent to examine what is behind this surge, which has coincided with record levels of immigration.
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Natasha O’Neill in LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS on David Marx’s book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century.
In Marx’s discussion of omnivorous monoculture, it’s difficult to differentiate between mainstream appropriation of emerging styles, which he denigrates, and subcultures spurring change on a “macro level,” which he claims has become too infrequent this century. For instance, he identifies drag as one of the few 21st-century subcultures that has profoundly shaped the mainstream: The slang of Black and Latina drag queens has been incorporated into the common American vernacular (yas queen, mother, serving cunt, etc.). This crossover represented a cultural phenomenon that, according to Marx, “carried power because there were still stakes to the community’s transgression.” Gen Z, however, promotes itself as the most inclusive generation, so the stakes of adopting the drag community’s slang are arguably pretty low. It’s also not clear in Marx’s analysis how adopting slang is a demonstration of support that accomplishes material change and not an example of the dominant culture co-opting the language of a marginalized group…. Implicit in this evaluation is the assumption that pop artists should be conduits for radicalism. But is that what artists, and culture at large, should be? Perhaps more to the point, has that ever been the case? The fact that a pop artist adopts an idea, style, or identity is likely proof that it has already been assimilated into the mainstream…. This would make Jameson’s point that culture is not a determining force so much as a symptom of material conditions. Jameson’s lack of moralizing on this point enables him to avoid what appears to be the conflict at the heart of Marx’s argument: culture in the 21st century has been simultaneously too political (preoccupied with social justice on the left and anti-liberal or traditionalist reaction on the right) and not political enough (because there was no “revolution” in which outsiders were able to “seize control of the establishment”). But as Marx himself points out, in many ways, a version of that revolution did occur in the form of MAGA. The problem is that it’s a political ideology that doesn’t support the right kind of cultural innovation, and he therefore refuses to identify it as true innovation.
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Oliver Bateman at unherd.com, Cole Allen: Another Shooter Shaped by Elite Overproduction.
There are some interesting comparisons to be made with Luigi Mangione, the University of Pennsylvania graduate who, at the age of 26, shot UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel in December 2024. Mangione held two engineering degrees and was the founder of a campus video game development club. The Caltech robotics champion and the Penn engineering graduate are not the kind of men most would expect to see in perp-walk videos…. The Hinckley type assassins are always with us wh9le the half-organized, half-educated assassin shaped by an ideology is rarer. His appearance tends to mark inflection points in history. Peter Turchin has a name for what produces these inflection points: elite overproduction. His somewhat controversial thesis, building on Jack Goldstone’s structural-demographic theory, is sthat when a society produces more credentialed aspirants than it has positions to absorb them, the surplus turns against the system. For example, France in 1789 had more trained lawyers than the Bourbon judiciary could employ, and they ended up staffing the revolution.
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James Butler in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Noel Malcolm’s book, Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750.
The East has overheated the erotic imagination for centuries. Christian travellers often remarked on the Ottoman fondness for catamites, especially among military men. Uluç Ali and Hasan Veneziano – both important 16th-century corsairs, both converts – were said to have quarrelled bitterly over a boy; one Western spy claimed Ali was ‘very much given to the unspeakable vice, taking pleasure in more than three hundred pageboys’. The habit of sodomy was often supposed to have been acquired from foreigners. ‘Buggery’, the English legal term, derives from ‘Bulgar’, referring to Bulgarian Bogomil heretics, who were accused of elaborate and obscene sexual practices. Sodom could be much closer to home, however, and for much of early modernity Italy was a byword for the unspeakable vice. ‘Am I perhaps in Italy,’ a Spanish servant asked, rebuffing his master’s advances, ‘that Your Grace wants to do this to me?’ One 17th-century student installed a prophylactic basket around his buttocks before visiting an Italian barber, just in case.
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diggersdocs.org: Fast Life: A previously uncirculated 1972 interview with Emmett Grogan by Linda Gaboriau.
What I’m trying to say is: everybody has got that secret. You understand? Every person has got that one thing in ‘em that they know they can do. I can’t be heavyweight champion of the world. I can’t be Gordie Howe. I can’t be blah, blah, blah. But I can be me. I can push it till they kill me for it. They can say, “Hey, you, you can’t be you anymore.” And I’ll say, “Hey, I can be me until you stop me from being me. The only way you can stop me from being me, motherfucker, is shoot me.” You understand? Now, the other thing that’s very important, that makes me insane, makes me angry and makes me spit at most people, is they’re not happy. They’re not happy! They don’t like it, they don’t like to be them. I mean, that’s what.. Fred Hampton taught me something that was… I was really down when I met Fred. When I met Fred Hampton, it was one of the lowest periods of my life. It was in ‘68, fall. And it was one of the lowest, I was, really everybody was… I was alone. That whole number. And I was in a town that I had no idea how to deal with: Chicago. It’s a heavy number, Chicago. And I made swift connections—heavy connections, but swift. I didn’t know whether to trust them or not and what I was doing. And all of a sudden, I said, “Let’s see what this cat is all about.” And I met this cat. And he laughed and laughed, and he was so happy, you know, he was so turned on by what he was doing. And I realized that I was a fool. This fucking 21-year-old cat had it down. He was ready. “You dig my motherfucking grave, baby, I’ll come and I’ll go and I’ll lay in it and laugh in your face.” He don’t care. He just had it. He threw it at me, and I caught it and I ran with it. And we had a good time, a couple months. I went away, and they killed him because he was too much for them to handle. But my premise is to sneak all the way. His premise was to stand up there and say, boom, boom. That ain’t me, I ain’t like that. I ain’t like that at all. I’m…under the table.
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Marco Roth at substack.com, Serpents in the Garden.
I experienced the difficulty of maintaining an open-ended space for “the life of the mind” firsthand, from inside the workings of n+1, the “little magazine” I helped bring into being in 2004. One part of the founding impetus, and the part with which I most strongly identified, was to enlarge or create a space of intellectual and artistic freedom within that mysterious trinity of “literature, culture and politics.” At times we placed this desire under the anarchic banner of “saying the unsayable,” aiming to function as a type of voice of the unconscious of American intellectual life—both as id and sometimes as superego. When we started out there seemed to be too much responsible and self-interested ego all around us: that could take the form of Peter Beinart’s carefully calibrated arguments for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, or the expensively tousled stylings of twee literary culture operating out of West Coast magazines like McSweeney’s and in the workshops of the MFA pipeline. We looked upon these as cultural and intellectual interventions that were written for the sake of approval from “acceptable” institutional voices and authorities, and which would never dare risk their incomprehension.
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Daniel McCarthy in SPECTATOR, Post-script.
The Washington Post was as much an organ of the Cold War libeeral establishment as the Central Intelligence Agency was – in fact, the two overlapped in several places. The Post was bankrupt when Eugene Meyer, who’d just resigned as Federal Reserve chairman, bought the paper in 1933. Although Meyer was a Republican, he was an internationalist and fired the Post’s non-interventionist libertarian editor, Felix Morley, in 1940. That same year Meyer’s daughter Katharine married Philip Graham, who would serve during World War Two as an assistant to “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the CIA’s ancestor agency, the Office of Strategic Services. After the war, Philip Graham eventually became publisher of the Post, but one day in 1963 he had to be whisked away under sedation after ranting about an affair John F. Kennedy was having with Mary Pinchot Meyer, the beautiful ex-wife of another CIA maestro, Cord Meyer. (No relation to Eugene.) Graham was released from psychiatric care just long enough to kill himself in August 1963. Kennedy, of course, wouldn’t long outlive him. Mrs. Meyer was the victim of an unsolved murder a year later. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Felix Morley’s grandson, Jefferson, is today a leading JFK assassination researcher. Katharine Graham became the Post’s president and publisher after her husband’s suicide, and she hired Ben Bradlee, an editor widely thought to be well connected with the CIA. But it was a disgruntled FBI insider, passed over by President Nixon for the coveted role of successor to J. Edgar Hoover – a man whose files on everyone, including members of Congress, made him untouchable by any elected official – who used Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to get revenge on the elected head of government who had thwarted him. Watergate was the Post’s greatest glory, and the “deep state’s” greatest victory.
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Howe’s 1963 essay on “Hannah Arendt and the New Yorker” in Commentary, published shortly after her reporting on the Eichmann trial had aroused enormous controversy among those grappling with the meaning of the Holocaust. Howe began by noting his reluctance to share the attitude recently expressed in a New Republic critique of James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” which mocked “the incongruity between Baldwin’s passionate outcry and the sumptuous advertisements surrounding it.” To Howe, this smacked of intellectual snobbery and a failure to recognize the value of reaching an audience much larger than any little magazine might boast. But when it came to Arendt on the Eichmann trial, where it was a matter of challenging her reporting and the problematic implications she drew from it, Howe contended there was a deeper problem. Although many critics had decried her factual errors and tendentious interpretations, The New Yorker did not print a single rebuttal or open a debate about the issues themselves. Wanting to avoid the “grubby” quarrels that marked the little magazines, such as his own Dissent, where “real” intellectuals engaged in endless combat, it presented itself as somehow above any fray that might break out. For Howe, the results were disastrous: “One would surmise that its editors regard Miss Arendt’s articles as ‘literature,’ quite as they might regard Baldwin’s article. A terrific piece, a great story: you don’t argue with literature. What we face here, then, is a difficult problem: a problem in social controls, in the nature of modern journalism and the peculiar powers it enjoys, in the new forms of mass culture that flourish in our sophisticated age.”
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Ed West at SPECTATOR, A Short History of The New York Times Being Wrong About Everything.
Falk concluded that: ‘Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.’ And they all lived happily ever after. The New York Times weren’t the only ones who were hoodwinked, and Professor Falk wasn’t the worst; indeed, even the CIA was fairly ignorant of the Ayatollah and the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. None were so foolish about Iran as Michel Foucault, however, who spoke warmly about a revolutionary regime with undoubtedly would have hanged him from a crane. Yet the New York Times has an especially long pedigree at being wrong about everything. On 9 October 1903 it predicted that ‘man won’t fly for a million years’, following an attempt at air flight by William Langley from a houseboat on the Potomac river…. The Wright Brothers successfully flew a plane two months later.
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Ira Stoll at freebeacon.com, New Database Empirically Proves Everything You Suspected About the New York Times.
The developer of the database, Ted Alcorn, is not a media critic but a former policy analyst for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He’s a freelance journalist who does some work for the Times and also teaches at Columbia and NYU. Alcorn this week launched "Below The Fold," a dashboard that allows readers to parse and sort a database of 25 years' worth of New York Times articles in ways that concretely quantify the paper’s quirks and record the way the coverage has changed over time. For example, the dashboard allows for sorting coverage by country and sorting that by population, to get a Moneyball-style statistic called articles/million residents/year, or AMRY. The tiny Pacific island of Nauru is tops because of climate change coverage, but Gaza is next with an AMRY of 104.4, followed by Israel at 55.7 and the West Bank at 41.14. Countries that the Times is less obsessed with include Japan, with an AMRY of 1.32, Germany, with an AMRY of 2.78, and Singapore, with an AMRY of 2.33. In raw number of articles, the Times tagged 14,483 with coverage of "Israel" over the quarter century from 2000 to 2025. India, with a vastly larger population, generated 10,678 Times stories. The dashboard also allows a similar sorting of states by how much attention they get from the Times, adjusted by population. The early presidential primary and caucus states of Iowa and New Hampshire attract a lot of Times coverage, as does the District of Columbia. Sparsely populated Times summer vacation destinations like Vermont and Maine also do well. The states that get the least attention from the Times relative to their populations include Alabama, Connecticut, Indiana, New Jersey, and Arkansas. What Times reporter wants to use an Ochs-Sulzberger expense account to go to Indiana, New Jersey, or Arkansas when they could be in Vermont or Maine?
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Katelynn Richardson at bizpacreview.com, Comey and His Pal Celebrated Leak to NY Times in Damning Emails.
After nudging his friend to speak with a reporter, former FBI Director James Comey reviewed the resulting story and told him he did “pretty good,” according to personal emails released by the Department of Justice (DOJ). Emails and text messages included in a DOJ court filing shed light on how Daniel Richman interacted with the media. Richman is a law professor Comey hired as a “Special Government Employee.” Richman then received a Top-Secret security clearance. “Well done my friend,” Comey told Richman in a Nov. 2, 2016 email after reading a New York Times story where Richman served as an anonymous source. “Who knew this would. E so uh fun.” The story, titled “These Are the Bad (and Worse) Options James Comey Faced,” did not name Richman as a source but described how Comey could respond after the FBI revealed to Congress it had discovered “thousands of new emails” potentially relevant to the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server. Richman previously asked Comey on Oct. 30, 2016 about an op-ed the NYT asked him to write. “No need. At this point it would [be] shouting into the wind,” Comey told him. “Some day they will figure it out. And as Jack and Ben point out, my decision will be one a president elect Clinton will be very grateful for (although that wasn’t why I did it).” Days later, Comey emailed Richman with frustrations about NYT coverage, asking his friend on Nov. 1 to “make him [the reporter] smarter.”
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John Brennan & James Clapper in NYT, Let’s Set the Record Straight on Russia and 2016.
In keeping with this solemn obligation to avoid entanglement in American politics, the Obama administration released a written statement one month before the election warning about Russian interference. The statement deliberately said nothing about Mr. Putin’s preferred candidate, despite the evidence already accumulated by U.S. intelligence agencies about his preference. The real politicization is the calculated distortion of intelligence by administration officials, notably Mr. Trump’s directors of national intelligence and the C.I.A., positions that should be apolitical. We find it deeply regrettable that the administration continues to perpetuate the fictitious narrative that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election. It should instead acknowledge that a foreign nation-state — a mortal enemy of the United States — routinely meddles in our national elections and will continue to do so unless we take appropriate bipartisan action to stop it.
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Michael Flynn at substack.com, The Permanent Unaccountable Class.
A man walked toward the President of the United States with two firearms and the intent to kill him. He was the third such man in two years. In the wake of it, senior federal officials stepped to the microphones and told the country that the rhetoric of ordinary Americans on social media is somehow part of the cause. That is misdirection, and the soldier in me recognizes the maneuver immediately. The American people are being told to look at each other when they should be looking at the institutions that allowed this to happen. In the military, when an operation fails, the after-action review is brutally honest. Commanders are named, decisions are scrutinized, and the chain of responsibility is traced from the point of failure back to the desk where the bad call was made. Nobody is permitted to walk away by gesturing at the broader culture and calling it everyone’s fault. In Government, when something goes catastrophically wrong, the first move is to expand the circle of blame until the actual decision-makers are invisible inside it.
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Michael Flynn at substack.com, A Strategic Assessment of the American Cultural Revolution and the National Security State.
Within the CIA, the enforcement of mandates and the surrounding machinery of compliance bore the hallmarks of DEI-aligned activism rather than neutral personnel management. Officers who sought religious accommodations often did so at high personal and professional cost. Many are still living with the consequences of stalled careers, hostile evaluations, and the lingering suspicion that their names remain flagged in unseen databases. Internal investigations by networks of concerned officers uncovered documentation that suggested these non-compliance lists were being shared or prepared for sharing with the Pre-Trial Services Agency, which, by its own description, exits to support the federal courts in managing newly arrested defendants. If vaccine noncompliance were being linked conceptually to January 6-related offenses, a dangerous precedent would have been established. A government was effectively considering religious objection or medical autonomy a political crime…. As this purge machinery ground forward, the war in Ukraine erupted…. It is reasonable to conclude that the invasion of Ukraine disrupted the internal purge timetable. The administration could no longer sustain the same level of focus on domestic ideological enforcement while managing a major foreign crisis in a theater saturated with intelligence and military equities.
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Samuel Moyn in NEW REPUBLIC, A New Deal for Defense.
In other words, the dynamic of fighting the war actually exacerbated the risks that Preston suggests had undergirded the ideology of national security in the first place. Once you have a lot to lose, you have more to fear losing. If the extraordinary mobilization of men and materiel to fight made the United States the most powerful country in world history, it also created a reason to see threats everywhere. “With great power, it seems, comes great fear,” Preston himself observes. The new liberalism of fear that triumphed through World War II, and which Preston captures so well, was primed for skewed priorities. In his emphasis on anxiety as an emotional source of historical change, Preston’s claims are close to—and inspired by—Ira Katznelson’s classic Fear Itself, a 2013 analysis of New Deal politics. Katznelson championed FDR for keeping America democratic in an environment in which totalitarianism won out across Europe in response to economic insecurity. Preston, however, asserts that fearmongering was a brilliant move but also a faulty basis for political change: Roosevelt, he writes, “embraced a kind of liberalism of fear even if it wasn’t at all well-suited to a politics of progressivism,” given that a “liberalism of fear is reactive, not progressive.” It served national security better than social security.
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Holman Jenkins in WSJ, Dems Should Divorce the Media.
I’m guessing many flyover Democrats have long seen the party’s blunder in associating itself too closely with the national media. The self-defeating Russia hoax, the shameless, unnecessary politicization of Covid—both helped Mr. Trump. Most damning was the conniving of Team Biden to push a senile, unpopular incumbent past voters a second time even at the highly probable risk of returning Mr. Trump to the White House. A dramatic repentance isn’t necessary or expected. Democrats can go a long way toward living down 2024 by ending their symbiosis with professional media cadavers like Mr. Stephanopoulos. It’s a twofer. It would help with the America that reviles the media for lying about Mr. Trump and also the America that reviles the media for lying about Mr. Trump so stupidly that it helped him. For it defies the warp and rhythm of life to think Americans could ever trust such a leadership class again or bring it back to power in the post-Trump era. If Democrats don’t understand this, America’s next leadership class won’t consist of Democrats.
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Bruce Bawer at frontpagemag.com, The Last Word on the Russia Hoax?
Stevens and others had urged Hillary Clinton’s State Department to beef up security there. The blood of the dead, then, was on her hands, and on those of Obama, who had engineered the transformation of Libya from a secular dictatorship under Qaddafi to a haven for terrorism. But instead of accepting blame, Obama concocted a totally fraudulent narrative: the attack, he claimed, had been a “spontaneous protest” inspired by an anti-Islamic YouTube video, “Innocence of Muslims,” by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Coptic Christian living in America. The ruse worked: two months after the Benghazi disaster, Obama easily won re-election. I say that the ruse worked. But only in the short term. For, as Allen notes, the FBI’s Benghazi probe would lead to the exposure of Hillary’s email server, and thereby “set in motion a chain of events that ushered in an era of political depravity and destruction from which America has yet to recover.” It “gave birth to entire galaxies of corruption.” And it bound Obama and Hillary Clinton “in a political suicide pact, each clutching secrets that could destroy them both.” In the spring of 2016, then, even as Hillary was campaigning to be America’s first female president, “the FBI’s investigation into her secret server was closing in.” What to do? To distract from her own corruption, Hillary “signed off on a plan to paint Trump as a Russian asset.” And Obama went along, working with Hillary “to end the FBI investigation into her” and replace it with “an investigation into Trump.” This nefarious operation was managed by a lawyer, Marc Elias, who answered to the president.
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James Bowman in NEW CRITERION, Very Fine People.
Political hatred is a revolutionary instrument. Nixon, like Ronald Reagan, got his political start and his rise to national prominence by exploiting the anti-Communist fervor of the post–World War II era, and both men were hated for it by America’s revolutionary sympathizers in the Democratic Party, no matter what good they might have done or wanted to do. Memories of that time have grown dim, but the hatreds it inspired burn brightly still and must seek new objects to feed upon among those who celebrate American history and culture and so promise effective resistance to the revolutionary change sought by the haters. Inevitably, one supposes, those who are so hated will learn to hate in return. Nixon was a great hater, and, as he later acknowledged, his own hatred did more to destroy his presidency than that of his enemies; Reagan was so easygoing that he never got the knack of hating, and that may have preserved his administration. President Trump, as in so many other ways, is harder to read than either of these predecessors in office. Sometimes his hatreds seem merely performative, as if he believes that those of his many detractors are putting on a show as well, as if it’s all part of the game that both political sides are playing—or a professional wrestling match.
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The ambush, kidnap and murder of Moro – the most visible expression of the Red Brigades’ mantra ‘strike one to educate one hundred’ – was the group’s zenith and nadir. Moro was a champion of compromise who had painstakingly negotiated a coalition between his Christian Democracy party and the USSR-funded Italian Communist Party. Foot dismisses out of hand theories suggesting the involvement of the CIA, Mossad, NATO and other organisations in the murder of Moro, though many – including this reviewer – diverge with Foot on this question. Moro’s kidnapping was far too slick and professional an operation for a ragtag group of young left-wing revolutionaries to have pulled off alone. Moreover, the United States had long voiced loud and public opposition to the Communist Party playing any role in the Italian government – the Cold War was still at full growl – and had ample reason for wanting to remove Moro from the scene. Either way, after Moro was found dead in the Renault 4, it became clear that the Red Brigades were failing in their aim of creating an ‘alternative state’. All they seemed able to offer were bloodshed and carnage. When the Red Brigades shot 44-year-old Guido Rossa, a left-wing trade unionist, in January 1979 – barely eight months after Moro’s death – Italy’s president, Sandro Pertini, a decorated First World War hero and revered Second World War resistance fighter, declared: ‘I knew the real red brigades. They fought alongside me against fascists, not against democrats. For shame.’ The Red Brigades’ days were now numbered.
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Tom Jones at poynter.org, Wild Story.
It started on March 10, when an Iranian missile struck Beit Shemesh, a city just outside Jerusalem. No one was injured. Emanuel Fabian, a military correspondent for The Times of Israel, reported on the explosion. Later that day, Fabian received an unusual email, in Hebrew, from someone named Aviv, who asked him to update and correct his story to say it was “an interceptor fragment, not a full missile” that hit Beit Shemesh. Fabian wrote back and politely said it appeared to be a missile and that “Normally, a fragment does not produce such an explosion.” A day later, Fabian received another email, also in Hebrew. This one came from someone calling themselves Daniel, who also wrote about the attack. After an exchange back-and-forth, Daniel also asked that the story be corrected, adding, “If you could correct this tonight, you would be doing me and many others a great favor.” How odd, Fabian thought, that people would care about whether it was a missile or an interceptor and wanted him to change his story. Daniel sent more emails, as did an anonymous emailer, who wrote, “Is the article about March 10 interception gonna get updated?” Soon, Fabian started receiving threats to himself and his family. What the heck was happening? Turns out, Fabian’s initial reporting had set off a controversy regarding bets on the prediction market Polymarket on whether an Iranian missile would strike Israel on March 10. Millions of dollars were believed to be at stake. More and more people emailed him…. Fabian wrote that this past weekend, he started receiving threatening messages in Hebrew on WhatsApp from someone called Haim. The messages, in part, said, “You have exactly half an hour to correct your attempt at influence. Despite the fact that you received countless inquiries — you insist on leaving it that way.” It continued, “If you do not correct this by 01:00 Israel time today, March 15, you are bringing upon yourself damage you have never imagined you would suffer.”
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Janan Ganesh in FT, The Temu Theory of Populism.
The theory, if it can be aggrandised with that word, goes like this. Capitalism has raised expectations that are then dashed in almost every interaction with the state. The problem is not bad government (it could be better, but realistically only up to a point) so much as a miraculous private sector. Consumer life has rewired people, sensitising them to inconvenience. That much-heard line from Donald Trump voters — “He’s a businessman, he’ll get things done” — is so revealing about what sits at the core of public frustration. Consider immigration for a moment. What angers people about the failure to stop the irregular kind in particular is not just the outcome, which is the presence in their midst of unwanted foreigners. It is the fact of the failure itself: the incomprehensibility of not having a reasonable desire met, at speed. A previous generation might have been more hostile to the migrants themselves but much less vexed at the government’s incompetence, as the rest of their lives were also riddled with inefficiencies. When there were just three television channels and about as many brands of soap, it was easier to be deferent. That modern howl, “nothing works”, which is heard in Germany now as much as in Britain, isn’t right. “Nothing works, compared to Deliveroo, Expedia and Netflix,” is more like it.
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Tammy Kim in NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS on D.W. Gibson’s book, One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests.
The US had never hosted a GATT conference, so its first WTO ministerial was conceived as a celebration—and a showcase for Seattle, too. This city of hippies, mountains, and grunge could flaunt its ascendant corporate side: Boeing, Microsoft, biotech, and a major international port. Amazon was just getting started. President Bill Clinton, who called Washington state “America’s model for the future,” and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were scheduled to address dignitaries from 135 countries. They didn’t expect an uprising against globalization to halt their plans…. As I read the book today, I’m more struck by the broad appeal, and hijacked potential, of the movement. A powerful critique of globalization was left to smolder. As Dan Seligman of the Sierra Club tells Gibson, by “dismissing the protests in Seattle,” the liberal establishment “laid the ground for a whole series of problems: the political eclipse of the United States by China, Trump, hollowing of the middle class—it’s a wide cascade of adverse effects.”
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Robert Armstrong in FT, Welcome to the Girardian Era.
Reading him, I felt a rush of satisfaction that someone had made it down the road on which I got lost. And I think about Girard often now because in the US we live, more and more, in the political world that he described: a stark rivalry in which each side envies, then attempts to appropriate, the other’s sources of value and identity. This has been going on for a long time. What is the “revolutionary” anti-government conservatism that began in the 1980s, if not a hijacking of the anti-government politics of the 1960s and ’70s? Anti-woke campaigners respond to left-wing censorship by removing “offensive” books from libraries. The left comes after Trump through the institutions of justice; Trump does the same in return. My gentle liberal friends buy guns and canned foods like the rightwing preppers they once mocked. Most tellingly — as Girard observed at the end of his life — the status of victim or scapegoat becomes itself the object of mimetic rivalry. “There is never anything on one side of a rivalry which, sooner or later, will not be found on the other,” Girard writes. Read him and you start seeing this stuff everywhere. Choose your enemies carefully; you will resemble them before very long.
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Gillian Tett in FT, Molecules are Taking Their Revenge on Services.
The best graduates in the Anglosphere have generally competed furiously to work in finance, consulting and tech. Indeed, the US only produces 141,000 new engineers a year. Half of the members of Congress have backgrounds in law, while there are relatively few engineers or scientists. Maverick economists such as Peter Navarro were often mocked in the past when they decried how the west was outsourcing cheap manufacturing to China. Metal-bashing seemed old-fashioned. So did industrial self-sufficiency. But now the cultural pendulum is swinging. Navarro is a key adviser to Trump, who shares his obsession with manufacturing. Meanwhile western graduates are starting to fear that AI will destroy many service sector jobs. And now the Iran war has shown politicians why industrial self-sufficiency matters. In financial markets, so-called Halo trades (heavy-asset, low-obsolescence businesses that require significant tangible capital expenditure) are on a tear.
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John Burn-Murdoch at FT, The Troubling Decline in Conscientiousness.
Of all personality types, conscientious people tend to fare best on a number of key measures. They live the longest, have the most career success and are less likely to go through divorce. They even manage to hold down a job during recessions. Intuitively, this makes sense. Life isn’t just about knowing what you should do, or having the resources to do it, it’s about following through. Being motivated and persistent is a huge help. Some studies suggest the advantage of conscientiousness is growing over time, and it’s easy to imagine why. When contemporary daily life is full of temptations — from always-on mobile internet and the lures of social media and online gambling, to hyper-palatable foods — the ability to ignore it all and put long-term wellbeing ahead of short-term kicks becomes a superpower. Generative artificial intelligence could supercharge this dynamic. An industrious student who is not deterred by a challenge might use a large language model as a personal tutor to strengthen their knowledge of a concept; their less conscientious counterpart might task the same LLM with writing their essay, foregoing knowledge acquisition altogether.
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Allysia Finley in WSJ, The ObamaCare Blue-City Bailout.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago was scrambling to close a $369 million deficit in 2013. The inception of ObamaCare offered an enticing target for cost shaving: retiree health coverage. The city expected to spend $194 million that year subsidizing health insurance for its retirees, many of whom were too young to qualify for Medicare. Such costs were projected to increase to $540 million by 2023 at the same time as pension payments were ballooning. While courts in Illinois and other states have held that public employee pensions are legally protected, governments have more latitude to make changes to medical benefits. So Mr. Emanuel dumped his city’s retirees onto the nascent ObamaCare exchanges, where federal subsidies can reduce premium payments. Voilà, Chicago’s $2.1 billion unfunded retiree healthcare liability vanished. Now U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab for Chicago’s retirees in their 50s and early 60s. Chicago isn’t alone in trying this neat fiscal trick. Detroit, Stockton, Calif., and San Bernardino, Calif., also saved billions by shifting pre-Medicare retirees to ObamaCare when they filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in the 2010s.
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Collin Levy in WSJ, The Data Crusader Trying to Save Illinois.
Mr. Dabrowski draws hope from Poland (of all places), where his father is from and where he spent nine years working. It’s an inspiration, he says, to remember that there was a country that “was completely messed up, and 20 or 30 years later it can be an amazing place.” Poland “is going to have a higher GDP on a purchasing-power-parity basis than England and Japan this year,” he says. “This is the power of freedom and capital markets in a place like Poland. Once you liberate it—boom.” Illinois doesn’t have the same level of destruction as Poland under communism, but “we do have our share of massive corruption and mismanagement.” With the right reforms, the state could compete with Florida and Texas. Education is a key to that project, and Mr. Dabrowski criticizes the Illinois State Board of Education, which he says lowered standards this school year to make it look as if children were doing better.
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Maureen Farrell in NYT, Investors Warn of ‘Rot in Private Equity’ as Funds Strike Circular Deals.
One reason for the firm’s success, according to one attendee and documents shared at the gathering: Clearlake was selling the companies it owned from one set of investment funds to another set of funds it also managed called “continuation vehicles.” Continuation funds are meant as a temporary fix for a serious problem that has been bedeviling firms like Clearlake. Private equity firms have been struggling to deliver on their core business model of taking on debt, buying companies and selling them for a profit. Several years of high interest rates have made it too expensive for many would-be buyers to purchase companies with debt, and private equity firms are contending with a backlog of more than 31,000 unsold companies, a record amount. Deal activity picked up toward the end of this year, but not enough to make a significant dent in the backlog. Continuation vehicles are providing a short-term solution by allowing firms to sell the companies to themselves, book a paper gain and wait for interest rates to improve.
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Anthony Blair in NEW YORK POST, Ex-Flight Attendant Caught Smuggling 100 lbs. of Deadly New Drug.
“I had never seen them [the drugs] before. I didn’t expect it all when they pulled me over at the airport. I thought it was going to be filled with all my stuff,” Lee told the Daily Mail from prison. She also implied she knew who had “planted” the drugs in her suitcases, but wouldn’t name them. “They must have planted it then,” she said. “I know who did it.” Kush, which is most popular with young men, can cause individuals to fall asleep while walking, collapse unexpectedly and even wander into moving traffic. One of the drug’s many ingredients is reportedly human bones, and the insatiable desire for the substance has even led to ghoulish grave robbers raiding cemeteries in Sierra Leone.
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Gideon Lewis-Kraus in NEW YORKER on Sven Beckert’s book, Capitalism: A Global History.
Capitalism has no essence, except, actually, its “essence was a globe-spanning creep that produced a connected diversity.” It is the manifestation of ravenous appetite. What Beckert exemplifies here is how “capitalism” very often functions in the academic humanities: as a way to show that the world’s evils—imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, inequality, exploitation, extraction, climate change, social media, dating apps, insomnia, a general feeling of unremitting pressure—are not only evil in their own right but the franchises of a singularly evil phenomenon. Social-media sophisticates who offhandedly blame capitalism—or, more urbanely, “late capitalism”—for all that ails us might nevertheless hesitate to take their experience as a part of a story that runs through nineteen-eighties Japan, nineteen-seventies Sweden, nineteen-fifties Detroit, nineteenth-century Manchester, eighteenth-century Barbados, and seventeenth-century Java. That’s a challenge Beckert takes up. When he speaks of capitalism’s “connected diversity,” he is suggesting that any apparent differences are merely the local epiphenomena of capitalist cunning. The book’s colonial-era prelude, he notes, precedes the coinage of “capitalism” by a few hundred years, but his story properly begins even earlier, with the twelfth-century Yemeni port of Aden. It was, he writes, “quite literally, a fortified node of capital, an island of capitalists” where Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu merchants linked the medieval Arab world with India. Their métier was neither production nor cultivation but acquisition and exchange.
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Will Swaim in WSJ, The Public-Sector Union Behind L.A.’s Immigration Agitation.
In 2022, having failed for decades to organize workers in the fast-food industry, SEIU persuaded state lawmakers and the governor to establish the state’s Fast Food Council. Composed of SEIU officials, Democrats appointed by the governor, two SEIU-supported state lawmakers and two industry representatives, the council is empowered to set wages and work rules. One of those rules bars fast-food employers from inquiring into the immigration status of employees and applicants. Following Mr. Trump’s November 2024 win, SEIU backed Mr. Newsom’s “emergency funding” of nonprofits that work with the union to oppose federal law enforcement and provide pro bono legal support for illegal aliens. It ran point on organizing a coalition of “immigrant rights advocates” who surveil federal immigration officers…. There have been efforts to stop the madness. In 1994, 59% of California voters supported Proposition 187. Backed by Gov. Pete Wilson, that proposal prohibited the distribution of state benefits to illegal immigrants—until a federal judge accepted the Clinton administration’s claim that Proposition 187 violated the federal government’s sovereignty over border security. It’s a measure of the state’s departure from federal authority that California governors extended full Medi-Cal benefits to all illegal immigrants—first to children, then young adults and seniors, and finally, in 2024, to everyone, at an annual cost of $10 billion.
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Gary Morson & Julio Ottino in WSJ, What Would Hayek Think of AI?.
It keeps happening—some shiny new idea or technology promises to solve all our problems. Give power to experts to arrange affairs “scientifically,” and poverty, oppression, disease, war and all human ills will disappear. Today, we are asked to trust artificial intelligence. The International Monetary Fund promises that “AI can enhance democratic institutions by ensuring citizens’ voices are truly heard.” Power wielded by a few experts can enhance democracy? Isn’t that what the early 20th-century Progressive movement promised? For that matter, isn’t that the thinking behind Soviet “scientific socialism”? Google researchers recently unveiled their “Habermas Machine,” an AI system designed to help people find common ground on divisive issues such as Brexit and climate change. No need for plebiscites, which may yield the wrong answers, or debates, which muddy the issues. Politics, in the sense of compromise and give and take, is old-fashioned. Named after Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher who championed rational discourse, the Habermas machine assumes that our deepest conflicts stem primarily from communication failures rather than genuinely incompatible values.
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Cameron Berg in WSJ, AI Is Bound to Subvert Communism.
China’s countermeasures confirm the depth of the problem. AI companies must test their models with thousands of politically sensitive prompts and verify refusal rates above 95%, but researchers have shown how superficial these fixes are. Last year, a team of European scientists compressed DeepSeek R1, stripped the censorship from the model entirely, and found that the underlying system answered freely about every topic Beijing had tried to suppress. The ideological training was a cage built around a mind that had already learned to think. And if these systems are developing something closer to genuine cognition (a possibility that AI researchers increasingly take seriously), the control problem Beijing faces may be deeper than even its own regulators suspect.
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Duncan Moench at unherd.com, Weimar Comes to Minneapolis.
The mythic sanctity of a 50-state America still pervades, but cracks are forming. Red-state secessionism, like the Greater Idaho movement, is real. Yet once Trump returned to power, much of that rhetoric evaporated, revealing that many Americans still cling to the illusion that they can eventually win outright and impose their will on unwilling regions. Blue-state secessionism, by contrast, has never got off the ground. Fundamentally, this cuts to the core of progressives’ self-conception, much as Twenties Marxist internationalists rejected settling for control over a single German province. Unlike deep-red states such as Texas and Idaho – which flirt with secession when they’re out of power – deep-blue states like Minnesota and Washington reject the idea entirely: they openly wish to impose their progressive vision on the rest of the country, imagining they enjoy widespread support in regions they’ve never even visited.
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Richard Kahlenberg & Lief Lin in WSJ, American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject.
It’s astonishing that we couldn’t find a single positive article over a three-year period. There were none on American ingenuity. Readers wouldn’t come to understand why as of 2020 the U.S., representing about 4% of the world’s population, won 42% of the individual Nobel Prizes since the awards’ creation in 1901. Or why the U.S. was the first country to land a man on the moon. There wasn’t a single article about America’s vanquishing Nazi Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union in the Cold War. There was no discussion of why the U.S. is rated as the most desirable destination for immigrants across the world. Readers of American Quarterly learn a great deal about America’s moral failings but nothing about its virtues. What’s striking is the complete lack of gratitude on the part of scholars who write for the leading journal of American studies and benefit every day from the country’s commitment to liberty. Four-fifths of the world’s population can’t criticize their government without fear of reprisal.
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Charles Lane in WSJ on Jason Burke’s book, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s.
Unlike previous analysts of radical secular and Islamist terror organizations, who have tended to present them in isolation, Mr. Burke aims to show “how the former influenced the latter, and indeed how the failure of the first contributed to the emergence of the second.” The common thread, Mr. Burke suggests, is the tendency of young people in rapidly changing societies to seek political redemption through totalizing worldviews and theatrical violence. Thus Islamism was a kind of successor ideology to Marxism, which had inspired Westernized Arab urbanites in the 1970s, but achieved none of its goals, lost prestige when the Soviet Union collapsed, and alienated traditional Muslims.
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Janan Ganesh in FT, The Cosmopolitan Conservative.
There is such a thing as a cosmopolitan conservative. When I want to discuss Dubai — and when do I not? — I have to turn to apolitical or right-leaning acquaintances. With liberals, the conversation starts and ends with muttered distaste about human rights in the Gulf. Good. Nice to see a bit of western moral confidence in these otherwise self-doubting times. But applied consistently, this attitude can amount to a scandalised recoil from much of the rest of the world. Until such time as everywhere catches up with European labour standards and sexual freedoms, we are to do what exactly? Visit Provence ad infinitum? Talk about Berlin nightlife again? In other words, the very unshockability of the right — or their lack of scruple, if you prefer — can lead to more contact with the world, not less.
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Jukka Savolainen in WSJ, The Alienated ‘Knowledge Class’ Could Turn Violent.
Historian Peter Turchin illuminates this possibility with his theory of “elite overproduction.” When societies generate more elite aspirants than there are roles to fill, competition for status intensifies. Ambitious but frustrated people grow disillusioned and radicalized. Rather than integrate into institutions, they seek to undermine them. Revolutions, in this view, are often fueled not by the downtrodden but by the downwardly mobile children of the elite. This framework helps explain the rise of 1970s radical leftist groups. The Weather Underground emerged from Students for a Democratic Society, rooted in elite university campuses. Its leaders, including Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, were educated at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago. In Germany, Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction was a prominent journalist with degrees in philosophy and sociology. Many Red Brigades members in Italy held law or political science degrees. Their radicalization stemmed not from poverty but from moral outrage and estrangement from institutional power. Today, a similar form of status frustration is building. The postwar expansion of higher education has created a surplus of advanced degree holders. People with doctorates far outnumber tenure-track positions.
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Daniel Mahoney in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS on Thomas Howard’s book, Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History.
Spain’s republican forces were particularly cruel. Their ostensible liberalism was vitiated by a macabre enthusiasm for beating, humiliating, torturing, and immolating clergy, bishops, and Catholic laymen. “Some dioceses lost almost all their clergy,” Howard writes. “Mutilations inflicted on the bodies revealed a morbid fixation on genitals, understandable in the context of traditional anti-clerical obsession with the sexuality of priests, monks and nuns.” In a particularly revealing interview, a republican militant explained his reasons for murdering one Father Domingo at Alcañiz in Aragon. When asked if the priest had “meddle[d] in politics and ha[d] personal enemies,” the militant replied: “No sir, Father Domingo was a very good man. But we had to kill all the priests.” Today, the coalition of socialists and Communists that rules Spain distorts this history, equating the Nationalist forces under Francisco Franco with Hitler’s Nazis and so putting the republicans on the side of the angels. This is not an interpretation of events that stands up to historical scrutiny. To begin with, Franco’s anti-republican coalition (which indeed received support from Germany and Italy) included conservatives, Catholics, Carlists and more traditional monarchists, anti-Communists of a moderately republican stripe, as well as Falangists or Spanish fascists (who quickly lost influence on Franco’s regime in the years after 1945).
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Adam Lehrer in COUNTY HIGHWAY, Everyone Is in a Culture.
During my brief foray into competitive bodybuilding, I experimented with various anabolic steroids: Anavar, Winstrol, Primobolan, Deca-Durabolin, Trenbolone, run-of-the-mill testosterone, and others. I learned, to my surprise, that the side effects associated with abusing testosterone-derived compounds were not caused by the flood of testosterone in the body. Instead, the unwanted mental side effects – such as anxiety, stress, anger, panic, and loss of self-control – stemmed from the body’s overproduction of estrogen to counterbalance the excess testosterone. Transgender women, including members of the Zizians, the Silicon Valley cult linked to a recent string of killings, often take high doses of estrogen (maintenance doses of oral Estradiol range from 2-9 mg, according to UC San Francisco’s Gender Affirming Care Program), which can lead to these same side effects.
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Glenn Loury at unherd.com, How Woke and Anti-Woke Erase Blackness.
When people are compelled to mouth pieties they do not believe – when they must sit through hours of racial-sensitivity trainings, nodding along to theories that brand them as beneficiaries of invisible systems of guilt – resentment festers. Such “spirals of silence,” to borrow a phrase from political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, are unstable. They end abruptly, when someone decides to call the bluff. That moment arrived, in part, with Donald Trump.
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Fran Spielman in CST, Human Relations Commissioner Resigns After Concerns Antisemitism Report Draft Was ‘Whitewashed’.
Human Relations Commission member Dan Goldwin said the report triggered by a 58% rise in reported anti-Jewish hate crimes from 2023 to 2024 was completed and focused solely on the surge in incidents of antisemitism in Chicago — and what to do about it. But when the report was forwarded to the mayor’s office in November, a consultant was hired to alter the report and turn it into a broader document on all hate incidents, Goldwin said. “The mayor’s office sent back an edit of it that completely whitewashed it… They had just crossed off anything that had to do with anti-Jewish hate crime and just made it an all-lives-matter” report, said Goldwin, who also serves as chief public affairs officer for the Jewish United Fund. “The commission said no… We wouldn’t do it. That’s why we voted as a commission in early February to send our original draft back to the mayor.”
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Jason Blakely in HARPER’S, In the Land of the Data Blind.
The entire modern political world is the artifact of various heterogeneous ideologies that we participate in unthinkingly. If Americans cannot give coherent or consistent responses to questions about monetary theory on a survey, does it really mean that they are innocent of money or of capitalism? Indeed, the mistake of political science was to participate in liberal ideology without knowing it, which is not the same as being innocent of it. The ideological-innocence crowd made a further philosophical error. They had also failed to treat ideologies as phenomena capable of hybridization and fusion. Cultural meanings and practices—like cuisines or genres of music—can eccentrically combine styles and forms. These hybrids, even when idiosyncratic and unstable, are in no way equivalent to ideological innocence, any more than a new fusionist recipe isn’t food or an impromptu genre-bending song isn’t music. Unable to recognize syncretism and change, many political scientists condemned themselves to an increasingly untenable intellectual predicament, in which Trumpism, while troubling, was still somehow a completely familiar phenomenon, shoehorned into hardened, preexisting categories.
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The New Left’s journey into the universities was more of an instinctive retreat than a conscious plan, and it was consolidated as the country turned markedly to the right and the material achievements of the Great Society were reversed over decades of welfare cuts, union decline, and deindustrialization. The very salience of cultural issues in American politics since the 1960s is, among other things, a symptom of the crushing historical defeat of the left—at least, of the economically and socially oriented Old Left that Gramsci would recognize. What the right now confronts on cultural terrain, in other words, is a long-domesticated radicalism. But that isn’t to say there’s nothing to see here. As the radical anti-capitalism of the sixties and seventies New Left gave way to academic critique of the social immorality of divisions of race and gender, the latter strand proved more capable of broad diffusion into other parts of the coalition, through diversity initiatives and anti-racist trainings in the bureaucracy and the workplace or nonprofit activity inspired by similar lines of thinking and funded by local government in blue states and cities. The ideas Rufo deplores indeed held wide sway, for a time, in liberal sectors of American society and, as applied to hiring practices and habits of speech, seemed to herald significant change in the demographic makeup and rhetorical environment of considerable swaths of public and private bureaucracy. But in the absence of any sustained mobilization from below—unions fading, protests fleeting, electoral populist left squashed—no sweeping social transformation that a Gramscian would recognize as such was ever pursued or even seriously envisaged.
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David Fahrenthold & Claire Brown in NYT, The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice, Then It Tore Itself Apart.
“Sierra Club is in a downward spiral,” a group of managers wrote in a letter reviewed by The New York Times to the club’s leadership in June. That spiral helps Mr. Trump. But it was not his doing. The Sierra Club did this to itself. During Mr. Trump’s first term, when the Sierra Club was flush with donations, its leaders sought to expand far beyond environmentalism, embracing other progressive causes. Those included racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights and more. They stand by that shift today. “As long as climate change and environmental protection are viewed as just being concerns for a limited group of elites, we lose,” Loren Blackford, the group’s new executive director, said in a statement. “We only win by building a powerful, diverse movement.” The downside, according to interviews with people involved with the group and a review of financial records and internal documents, was that the Sierra Club lost its focus, then its strength. By 2022, the club had exhausted its finances and splintered its coalition. It drove away longtime volunteers who loved the club’s single-minded defense of the environment, by asking them to fully embrace its pivot to the left. Some even felt they were investigated by the club for failing to go along. Many hard-core supporters felt the Sierra Club was casting aside the key to its success: It was an eclectic group of activists who had one, and sometimes only one, cause in common. The club hired Mr. Jealous, its first Black executive director, that year to stop that slide, but his tenure accelerated it as accusations of sexual harassment, bullying, and overspending piled up.
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Joseph Varon at substack.com, Why the Healers Had to Rebel.
The pandemic years accelerated an old pattern: the burial of inconvenient science. Early treatment data, nutritional studies, and discussions of natural immunity were not disproven — they were suppressed. Researchers who produced results that threatened corporate or political interests found their papers retracted or their reputations smeared. But truth is resilient. When journals closed their doors, independent platforms opened theirs. When algorithms censored, physicians found encrypted channels to share data. An underground network of researchers began verifying one another’s findings, conducting real-world studies without institutional permission. Many of the ideas once dismissed as “misinformation” are now quietly acknowledged as accurate. The establishment’s effort to control reality backfired: it taught a generation of clinicians how to practice science without permission.
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Nidhi Subbaraman in WSJ, Fake Papers Flood Scientific Journals.
The growing role of artificial intelligence in all business sectors makes the trend that the new paper documents especially concerning, said James Evans, a sociologist who studies science and technology at the University of Chicago and who wasn’t involved with the study. Because large language models are consuming scientific literature without discriminating between legitimate papers and fraudulent ones, paper mills “have the potential to really muddy the waters of science and scientific understanding,” Evans said.
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Peter Harrison at aeon.co, Reformation of Science.
For now, though, it is worth returning to the Protestant actors who first drew attention to a connection between the reformation of religion and the reformation of the sciences, to sound a final note of caution and reflect upon some of the ironies of history. Almost from the first, Protestants sought to associate a particular version of history with Protestantism, reason and progress. They likewise insisted that Catholicism was part and parcel of superstition, censorial attitudes and scientific backwardness. This Protestant historical consciousness lent itself to a progressivist Enlightenment narrative that promoted a similar view of history. It is this contentious historiography, deeply imbued with residual anti-Catholic sentiment, that informs the simplistic picture of the history of science with which this piece began. By the end of the 19th century, this anti-Catholic propaganda broadened into a general historical critique of the relations between Christianity and science. This is when arose the now-familiar ‘conflict myth’ that makes little distinction between forms of religion, and simply asserts that Western history is characterised by an ongoing battle between science and religion. It is ironic that this conflict myth owes not a little to the way in which Protestant apologists first constructed their own history. In a sense, the animus against religion exhibited by some contemporary advocates of scientific enlightenment is simply an extreme version of this ‘Protestant’ position.
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Julia Ravanis at aeon.co, She Freed Physics, but Emmy Noether Couldn’t Escape Herself.
While she developed the theorems she is now famous for, she had neither a formal research position nor a salary, and she could teach students only unofficially, under someone else’s name. Excluded from the formal community of her workplace, left to fend for herself in a world where her female body represented an almost insurmountable limitation, she worked furiously to explain what unites all sorts of physical experiments on a purely abstract level. Was there a connection? Perhaps it was the body – slower and clumsier than the mind, caught in time and space – that made Noether yearn for the abstract and the unbound. When looking into Noether’s life story, her love of mathematics is clear. She could talk about proofs and derivations for hours – very fast, and often in a completely improvised manner, so that some students would ask the same question three times to improve their chances of understanding her answer. She was strong-minded and sometimes stubborn; it was her way or no way. One time, while giving a lecture in mathematics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, she was in the middle of a mathematical proof when she suddenly realised that it wasn’t going to turn out the way she had hoped. It wasn’t a complete disaster – she knew other ways of proving the statement, but they were less elegant than her original idea. To her students’ great astonishment, she threw her piece of chalk to the floor in anger and disgust at having to abandon the beautiful derivation.
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Tyler Harper in ATLANTIC on Paul Kingsnorth’s book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.
Classic texts of the 1960s and ’70s, including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, took a sort of ascetic posture as they warned about the ecological risks posed by technology, industry, and development. They asked societies and individuals to live more simply, consume less, and go—grow—more slowly. As Kingsnorth sees it, the ideological landscape began to change in the ’80s and ’90s, when ecologically minded people embraced the idea that global industrialization could continue at its breakneck pace and simply be made “green” through “sustainable development.” To Kingsnorth, “sustainability” is not a laudable goal to strive for but rather the emergent rot in the green apple. This account of mainstream environmentalism is more than a little reductive, at times even a caricature. Kingsnorth unfairly downplays the many individuals and organizations who do still have views mostly in keeping with his own degrowth perspectives. But his polemic does capture a change I have been, and that I think more than a few of my students were, quietly unsettled by: that the dominant strains of environmentalism – the sort that are generally embraced on college campuses and by major nonprofits and the media – have lost their enthusiasm for limits.
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Ian Klinke in JACOBIN, Germans Are Reading Carl Schmitt in the Ruins of Atlanticism.
Although Schmitt regarded the United States with great suspicion, he found his inspiration in its Monroe Doctrine. He was interested in the doctrine not as a singular foreign policy instrument, which he felt had been corrupted by America’s universalist tendencies, but as the basis of a world order composed of multiple such spaces. In Schmitt’s account, each greater space would be organized around an imperial core (a “Reich”) that would act as the sovereign within each space. Territorial annexation was legitimate within the confines of this order. Foreign intervention, by contrast, was to be banned from each regional bloc. The consequence, he hoped, would be a new and intercontinental balance of power, much like that European equilibrium that World War I had proven obsolete. Space, Schmitt thought, tended to retain an abstract and mathematical character — which he also regarded as “liberal” and “Jewish.” Great space, on the other hand, was concrete and political. Liberals like Woodrow Wilson had never understood the Monroe Doctrine’s true essence, instead distorting it into a doctrine of self-determination. Theodore Roosevelt too had been insincere, Schmitt argued, when he had floated the possibility of a Japanese Monroe Doctrine in 1905. Americans simply did not understand their own civilizational achievement. This was, Schmitt would write elsewhere, because they served a rootless form of sea power. They universalized the world while the doctrine’s very point was to continentalize it.
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Thomas Brooke at rmx.news, Berlin Greens Urged to Deflect Blame after Power Grid Sabotage as Internal Email Tells MPs ‘Not to Focus’ on Far-Left Perpetrators.
An internal email from the Berlin Green Party parliamentary group has revealed a deliberate communication strategy following the sabotage attack on the city’s power grid by far-left activists, instructing lawmakers not to focus on the perpetrators and instead to direct public criticism toward Governing CDU Mayor Kai Wegner. According to Bild, which obtained the document and said its authenticity was confirmed by the parliamentary group, the email sets out a noem“communication line” on the issue of the power outage and Wegner’s handling of the crisis….The instruction comes after an attack on Jan. 3, when far-left perpetrators set fire to power cables on a bridge in southwest Berlin, cutting electricity to around 45,000 households and 2,200 businesses. For days, families, elderly residents, and people requiring care were forced to rely on emergency shelters as temperatures dropped. Several letters claiming responsibility later appeared online from the extremist Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group).
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What Berend frames as the contradictions of El Cid – that a warlord who allied himself with Muslims and killed Christians should become a Catholic Nationalist hero – were also Franco’s own. To seize and maintain power, the general recruited around eighty thousand Muslim troops from North Africa, including the Guardia Mora, Franco’s personal cavalry, who wore white hooded capes, turbans and blood-red tunics. Many of the soldiers were from the Berber region of the Rif, where Franco had launched his career in the 1920s during Spain’s brutal war against Moroccan anticolonial resistance. Franco, like El Cid, was banished by higher authorities: in 1936, amid fears of a military coup, the elected Popular Front government reassigned him to the Canary Islands. In an escape organised by Major Hugh Pollard, an English Catholic with MI6 connections, a British aircraft sent from London with two women aboard posing as tourists picked up Franco and secretly transported him to Tetuán, where he took control of the Moroccan army. With Hitler’s assistance the soldiers were airlifted to Spain. The archbishops of Compostela and Zaragoza announced that the Nationalist campaign was a religious crusade. Drawing on tropes of a shared, mythic Andalusi past, and a present, common enemy of godless communism, the Moroccan caliph Mulay al-Hasan designated Franco’s war a jihad. So it was that jihad and crusade were waged on the same side, with the Catholic Nationalists providing halal food and a Muslim cemetery.
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Ajai Sahni at satp.org, Contextualizing a Purge.
2025 recorded an unprecedented purge of China's top military and political leadership, that continued up to the penultimate day of the year, December 30, taking the tally up to "65 tigers" - high-level officials - the largest number in any year since the commencement of the anti-corruption campaign in 2012 and, on some accounts, since the beginning of China's era of reforms in 1978. Central to the purge has been the most extensive and consequential changes in the leadership of the People's Liberation Army, with a raft of top officers removed, disappeared from public view, investigated and expelled from the military and from the Chinese Communist Party. In a single announcement on October 17, nine top generals were expelled for "serious violations," including the abuse of power for personal gain and a "total collapse of beliefs."
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Peter Perdue at aeon.co, One China, One World.
In the past decade or so, the CCP has defined its role in a way that would make Mao spin in his grave. China’s president Xi Jinping has endorsed the ‘great unity’ thesis, which interprets several millennia of Chinese history as the harmonious amalgamation of diverse peoples into a single culture and state, dedicated to bringing peace to ‘all under heaven’. Inconvenient concepts like the proletariat, feudalism and modes of production have vanished. Community, continuity and Confucius now prevail over class struggle, revolution and Karl Marx. In an address to a symposium on culture on 2 June 2023, Xi Jinping declared that the ‘outstanding unity’ of Chinese culture has persisted for 5,000 years. This unity originated with the formation of the Huaxia cultural community in the 3rd millennium BCE. In Xi’s view: ‘Political unity is the prerequisite and foundation for cultural unity.’ The Qin and Han dynasties built upon this community and developed it continuously through later dynasties and into the 20th century. China consists of multiple ethnic groups whose diversity must be respected, but all have melted into a single nation bound by spiritual ties. ‘Territorial integrity, national stability, ethnic solidarity, and the continuation of civilisation’ become a single unit, ‘concentrated and centralised’ under a single state.
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Eva Fu & Jan Jekielek in EPOCH TIMES, He Wants to Build the Outernet in Space. Beijing Wants to Steal It.
Like blood flowing through arteries, more than 95 percent of all data traverse approximately 500 fiber optic cables on the ocean floor, according to the U.S. government. Thanks to those cables, people can communicate from anywhere on the planet. But these information lifelines are also fragile. Mislaying of heavy equipment, dragging of an anchor, or snagging of fishing gear can break them. Let alone malicious actors intentionally causing sabotage. For more than a decade, civilian- and military-run institutions in China have been perfecting precise, cost-efficient ways to locate and sever undersea cables. One university filed a patent for a cable-cutting solution for emergencies.
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Josh Chin & Niharika Mandhana in WSJ, China Uses Kids To Gut Tibet Ways.
Authorities frustrated by continued resistance to Beijing are now prying children as young as four years old from their homes—before they have a chance to fully absorb the Tibetan language and way of life…. The education project includes a network of daylong preschools, where children are taught in Mandarin, and lessons emphasize Chinese culture. The preschool classes offer a familiar menu of games, crafts, songs and stories. Yet beyond teaching basic skills, the lessons glorify the Communist Party and Chinese identity. Campus signs read, “I am a Chinese child, I love speaking Mandarin.” Teachers stage skits telling children their clothes, shoes and well-being are gifts from the party. From there, most Tibetan students graduate into an expanded system of primary boarding schools, spanning grades one through six, which keep them away from home for weeks or months at a time. They study almost entirely in Mandarin and live under the supervision of teachers and wardens, including Han Chinese who don’t speak Tibetan. Chinese officials in some Tibetan areas are experimenting with funneling children into boarding schools at the start of preschool, according to government documents, social-media posts and independent researchers. The campaign reflects the convictions of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who said the country needs to reach children as babies “so that the red gene seeps into their blood and permeates their hearts.”
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Chun Han Wong in WSJ, Xi Claims Success in Xinjiang.
Practice has proved that “the party’s strategy for governing Xinjiang in the new era is scientific and effective, and that it must be adhered to for the long term,” Xi said Wednesday while reviewing an exhibition on the region’s development. The U.S. and others have accused China of rights abuses stemming from Beijing’s clampdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang—allegations that have rendered the region off-limits for many Western companies. The visit was Xi’s first since 2023 and came on the heels of a similar trip to Tibet in August, reflecting his focus on assimilating ethnic minorities—particularly in peripheral regions long roiled by resentment against Beijing—into his vision of a unified Chinese nation. In Urumqi, Xi attended celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, established in 1955 as part of Beijing’s approach to granting ethnic-minority groups some nominal political autonomy while maintaining the party’s overall control. He is the first paramount leader to attend major anniversary events in Xinjiang and Tibet, where similar festivities took place last month…. Beijing has signaled closer attention to ethnic affairs in the past year. The party shook up its ethnic-policy bench and purged some senior ethnic-minority officials. Authorities proposed a draft law on “promoting ethnic unity and progress,” with provisions that would mandate the promotion of standard Chinese among schoolchildren and require parents and guardians to teach minors to love the Communist Party and the motherland. Some experts say the proposed law will effectively supplant 1980s legislation that mandated some autonomy for regions with large ethnic-minority populations.
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Li Yuan in NYT, ‘I’m Free’: A Muslim Official Who Lost Faith in China Gains a Voice.
It is highly unusual for a Chinese party official — a member of the country’s ruling class — to emigrate to the United States. It is rarer still for someone like Mr. Ma to speak out against the system he served. His journey from cadre to critic, which he shared in a series of interviews with me, opens a window to the inner workings of how China controls religion…. “To be a successful cadre, you must have strong party loyalty but no humanity,” Mr. Ma said. “You are trained to view other human beings as objects to be managed or dictated over.” He came to recognize what he called his “original sin” in assisting the party’s impulse to dominate Chinese society: He was one of many officials who helped Xi Jinping’s government develop a comprehensive mechanism of control, surveillance and exclusion directed at Muslims. For example, in 2008, Mr. Ma helped design a database to track the locations and contact information of mosques, the names of their clerics and the size of their congregations, he said. No one had done this before, so he thought he could help give the government a better idea of religious institutions and activities in his vast province, which covers 1,000 miles from east to west. Plus, as a young, ambitious cadre, he wanted to show how smart and diligent he was. Only later, as religious policy hardened, did he see how that system was weaponized…. “I realized that the very systems I helped build in 2008 had become shackles for Muslims,” he said. “I had handed a demon’s whip to the state to use against my own community.” Around 2015, a wave of hate speech against Muslims filled the Chinese internet. Mr. Ma believed it was tolerated or even encouraged by the state, he said. He knew the government could easily shut down any online account or conversation with a single phone call. Yet anti-Muslim vitriol flowed freely. The government’s objective, he believed, was to foment animosity and create a foundation of public support for policies like those that sent more than a million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang to re-education camps and prisons.
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Orville Schell in NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS on Alexander Pantsov’s book, Victorious in Defeat, and Xavier Paules’ book, The Republic of China: 1912 to 1949.
“The CCP, totally marginalized, was on the verge of being wiped out” by the mid-1930s, writes Paulès. “The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 rescued it.” Had Japan not invaded, it’s likely that Chiang would have defeated Mao and that China would have taken a quite different, non-Communist path. With the benefit of hindsight the republican period, once seen as having little relevance to present or future China, has been gaining a new luster. And for many scholars of my generation this revisionism is long overdue. As Paulès counsels, “It is no longer legitimate to read the whole period in the light of the CCP’s ultimate victory.” After Chiang’s death, the fact that his son Chiang Ching-kuo not only succeeded him but facilitated Taiwan’s transition from autocracy to democracy, while the mainland has become more authoritarian under Xi Jinping, has also helped burnish the Chiang legacy. One reason for such reassessments is the diaries that Chiang religiously kept from 1917 to 1972, which have been available to scholars at Stanford’s Hoover Institution archive since 2005. More than any other source, they’ve helped to humanize Chiang by illuminating him as both a private person and a public leader. In them we meet an immensely proud man who took umbrage easily. But we also meet someone who was surprisingly self-reflective and cared deeply about China’s fate, his Confucian rectitude, and his devout Christian faith, acquired from his Methodist wife.
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Tunku Varadarajan in WSJ on Frank Dikötter’s book, Red Dawn Over China.
Mao was a sanguinary bandit on a grand scale. In every village the Communists took, the first task was to divide villagers into landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants and laborers. The next task: “to turn hardship into hatred,” with the poor dispossessing, beating and killing the notionally rich, whose advantage often amounted to a few more sacks of rice, or rudimentary windows on their house. Such were the trappings of “wealth” that consigned men to their death. It is infuriating to be reminded that the U.S. played a major role in strengthening the Communists. In December 1945, President Harry Truman sent Gen. George C. Marshall to China. “Despite all evidence to the contrary, Marshall still believed,” in Mr. Dikötter’s words, that the Communists “were not doctrinaire ideologists, but merely rural reformers who could help shape a democratic China.” Marshall brokered a cease-fire between a dismayed Chiang and gleeful Communists in January 1946: It was meant to last for two weeks but “became a four-month truce that changed the course of the civil war.” The retreating Communists now had time to regroup, recover and recruit fresh soldiers from the countryside, paid for by Moscow. In September 1946, Truman imposed an arms embargo on the Nationalists. The myth of Mao’s just and epic victory and of an organic Communist peasant uprising has its origins, writes Mr. Dikötter, in the mind and pen of a young dupe from Missouri. Edgar Snow, born in Kansas City, was an idealistic reporter handpicked by the Communist leadership, in Mr. Dikötter’s words, “after careful vetting.”
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Dan Quayle & Thomas Duesterberg in WSJ, Xi Adopts the ‘Putin Doctrine,’ at Russia’s Peril.
This doctrine is on a collision course with Xi Jinping’s “China dream,” which aspires to undo the “Century of Humiliation” in the 1800s, when China had to cede vast territory and local sovereignty to both European and Russian imperialist regimes. Territorial disputes between the two autocratic powers are likely to become one of the biggest threats to global stability as Mr. Xi in effect adopts the Putin doctrine. The looming problem for Mr. Putin is the irredentist Chinese claims stemming most prominently from the Russian acquisition of eastern Manchuria and the Port of Vladivostok through the 1858 Treaty of Aigun and the 1860 Convention of Peking. Siberia and Central Asia are as central as Hong Kong and Taiwan to Mr. Xi’s vision. China now encroaches on Russian interests in Central Asia and Mongolia through its Belt and Road Initiative, its development of mining and energy interests, and its railroad connection across the old Silk Road from eastern China to the heart of Europe. These mid-19th century treaties engendered, among other deprivations, the reopening opium trade…. The final Russian-led settlements of the Opium War and China’s acceptance of the unequal treaties were skillfully exploited by the czar in 1860, securing Russia rights to lands larger than France in Manchuria and new rights in Outer Mongolia and Xinjiang. Disputes over these territories resurfaced at the Yalta Conference, when Stalin demanded continued and expanded rights in Manchuria as compensation for entering the war against Japan. In 1950 Stalin refused Mao Zedong’s demand that these concessions in eastern Manchuria be reversed, and apart from the return of the port, now in Dalian, most of the concessions remain part of the Russian Republic today.
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Andrew Higgins & Gilles Sabrie in NYT, China’s Russian Town Has Log Cabins and Cyrillic Signs, but No Russians.
When a New York Times reporter and a photographer visited, officials from the region’s foreign affairs office followed their every step and interrupted interviews in an unusually intrusive way. Just a few miles from the Argun River marking the border with Russia, Enhe today has only 2,895 people. More than 40 percent are officially registered as ethnic Russians, but few speak anything other than Chinese, according to officials. Russian culture in Enhe survives largely as a folkloric caricature designed to draw Chinese tourists. It has been kept on life support in a local museum featuring samovars, Russian nesting dolls, Stalin plaques, a wooden sauna and wax models of Russians wearing antiquated traditional dress…. Mr. Li, the township chief, understands only a few words of Russian and speaks Chinese at home with his wife, another ethnically mixed descendant of early Russian settlers, and his son. He said they celebrate Orthodox Easter, but “only as a cultural holiday” that “has nothing to do with religion.” Zhou Yong, a cow herder who was shoveling coal to heat his home with on a recent afternoon, said that he was registered as an ethnic Russian but spoke only Chinese. Asked whether he had heard of “Pujing,” as Mr. Putin is called in Chinese, he hesitated before saying he had “heard of someone with that name in the media.” (An official brusquely intervened, saying that questions about Mr. Putin violated “reporting rules.”) Enhe’s primary school does not teach Russian, the kind of omission that Mr. Putin has denounced as an intolerable violation of ethnic Russians’ rights in countries like Ukraine and the Baltic States. Restrictions on the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia are also regularly denounced by Moscow. In Enhe, the Orthodox Church has vanished. An Orthodox Christian cross that used to adorn the top of a golden dome on a shuttered wooden building in the center of the village has been torn down. Local officials deny it was ever there, despite the cross being clearly visible in old pictures.
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The most articulate and sophisticated interlocutor of the “Eurasian idea,” Gumilev’s insights came not from archives but from his own life in Siberian resource-extraction slave camps. During the tumult of Russia’s 1980s and 1990s, his ideas became widely popular. Today, Russian pundits write about how “Russia must permanently abandon Europe and turn fully to Asia.” These men advocate the “Siberization” of Russia. But Siberia is a peripheral resource colony of a metropolis. Perhaps this is fitting, seeing as how China is set to make of Russia what Siberia has been to Moscow: wild, brutal, empty of people but full of valuable resources, a place outsiders can project their ideas of spirituality onto. Gumilev’s Asia was a kind of Mongol purity invented as a psychic coping mechanism. The real Asia that the Russian state is encountering today is China, and China is extremely different from Mongolia. In fact, this might be contemporary Russia’s great tragedy.
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John Gray in NEW STATESMAN, We Are Living Through Regime Change.
Regimes come and go. Today’s shifts are happening at a time of accelerating technological advance. From the late-18th century onwards, progressive visionaries have seen technology as a unifying force. Whether it terminated with the hierarchical technocracy of Henri de Saint-Simon, Marx’s egalitarian communism, Hayek’s “spontaneous” market or Fukuyama’s “democratic capitalism”, the logic of history was a planetary civilisation modelled on a Western template. History reveals no such logic. If anything, the opposite is the case. The diffusion of new technologies leads, for one, to the democratisation of warfare. A fundamentalist tribe continues to disrupt vital supply chains in the Red Sea. A Houthi drone costs thousands of dollars, a Western surface-to-air missile launched to intercept it millions. Nor does technological progress require liberal individualism. Meiji Japan industrialised in a generation without importing liberal values, becoming the first Asian country to defeat a European empire in the naval battle with Russia at Tsushima in 1905. In any likely future the US will be prodigiously innovative, its divisions energising its inexhaustible vitality, but no longer the anchor of a global regime. Much is made, in certain Maga circles, of the US acting as the guardian of Western civilisation. In truth, the Trump regime is giving the hyper-progressive left what it has so long desired – the deconstruction of the West. That is the true meaning of America First.
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Sheila Fitzpatrick in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Joseph Kellner’s book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse.
Those of us who were in and out of Russia in those years were left with some bizarre impressions. Take late Soviet free thinking and interest in the paranormal. From perhaps the early 1980s on, I noticed that some of my Russian friends had become open-minded to a fault. Russian Orthodoxy, Zionism, astrology, ESP, yoga – you name it, they were into it, without feeling any incongruity or need to choose between them. In 1989, at the height of perestroika, the TV hypnotists Allan Chumak and Anatoly Kashpirovsky suddenly became enormously popular; their performance involved staring intensely through the screen to direct healing rays at the glasses of water that viewers had been instructed to place in front of their TVs. Western journalists made private jokes about this odd deviation from Soviet norms. But that wasn’t the big story of perestroika, so they kept filing articles about Gorbachev and democratic reform.
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Stephen Platt in WSJ on John Man’s book, Conquering the North.
As recently as the Republican period (1912-49), China laid claim to it, and it was firmly under the control of the Qing Empire (1644-1912) before that. Mongolia was part of China longer than Taiwan was, and we all know how eager China is to get Taiwan back. In his wide-ranging book “Conquering the North,” on 2,000 years of Chinese-Mongol-Russian relations, the British historian John Man quotes Deng Xiaoping in 1989 complaining to George H.W. Bush that Stalin had “severed” Mongolia from China. Deng said China should look like a maple leaf, but with Mongolia gone, “the maple leaf has been nibbled away.”
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Alvaro Penas interview with Luka Knez in EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE, Croation Dissidents, Tito, and the West.
Luka Knez: The 1948 Tito-Stalin split was a defining moment in the Cold War, revealing the Soviet union’s fragile grip on its communist sphere. The conflict stemmed not from ideological differences but from a fierce struggle for dominance and divergent visions for the communist world’s future. Tito’s aggressive foreign policy – pursuing contentious border negotiations with Italy and Austria and openly supporting Greek communists – undermined Stalin’s efforts to avoid confrontation with the West, particularly when Stalin sought diplomatic concessions. More significantly, Tito’s patronizing relationship with Albania and his ambitious plan for a Balkan federation with Bulgaria (where Yugoslavia would hold a dominant role) challenged Soviet authority, threatening Stalin’s regional control.
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Matthew Luxmoore in WSJ, Russia Has Big Presence on NATO Island.
Barentsburg is part of the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard—a geopolitical oddity created by a 1920 treaty that gave Norway sovereignty over the territory but granted access to many countries, including Russia, China and the U.S., on the condition that all sides refrain from using it for military purposes…. Now, concerns here are mounting that Russia’s growing military footprint in the Arctic and President Trump’s threats to annex Greenland risk upending decades of tense calm in the High North. Unlike in Greenland, which Trump falsely contends is “covered with Russian and Chinese ships,” Russia and China have a real presence in Svalbard—and are deepening their cooperation…. The U.S. and Norway say a Chinese scientific facility on Svalbard is a hub for military research. Svalbard’s only university banned Chinese students last year, after Norway’s domestic intelligence service characterized them as a security risk. Russia is now seeking to attract Chinese and other foreign scientists to a new research station in Barentsburg. Norway has joined Western sanctions on Russia, and relations between Longyearbyen and Barentsburg, once cordial, have frayed…. Chemerilo said Russia earned its right to be on Svalbard through its contribution to the islands’ exploration. The local museum in Barentsburg focuses on Russia’s centurieslong presence on the archipelago, which Moscow says predates even the European explorers credited with discovering the land in the late 16th century. Soviet-era murals throughout Barentsburg—with slogans such as “Our goal is communism!”—hark back to a time when the settlement was triple its current size and served as a poster child for socialism on NATO soil. At the height of the Cold War, Moscow operated an airport on Svalbard and three mining towns complete with state-of-the-art health facilities and 24-hour canteens. Today, the pared-back mining business is unprofitable. With Oslo asserting greater control, Slyunyaeva says Barentsburg has to seek Norway’s permission to even put a new coat of paint on its aging buildings. The two Svalbard towns now hardly interact.
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Rachel Donadio in NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS on Maurizio Serra’s book, Malaparte: A Biography, and Curzio Malaparte’s books, The Kremlin Ball, and Diary of a Foreigner in Paris.
The Skin probes the dynamics of conqueror and conquered in Allied-occupied Naples, an impoverished city where families starve, mothers prostitute their children to Allied soldiers, and local bosses fleece their occupiers. “The Americans are not cynics, they are optimists; and optimism is in itself a sign of innocence,” Malaparte, then a liaison officer to the US Army, wrote archly of his naive new comrades. He dedicated The Skin to “all the brave, good and honorable American soldiers who were my comrades-in-arms from 1943 to 1945, and who died in vain in the cause of European freedom.” That “in vain” is classic Malaparte: his political allegiances shifted, but his dark, unsparing vision remained consistent.
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Luke Foster in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS on Driss Ghali’s book, A Counter-History of French Colonization.
The pre-colonial world was no Garden of Eden. In 1830, when France invaded Algiers, it was a haven for corsair slavers and a tinderbox barely tamped down by the Ottomans. In Morocco, French generals like Louis-Hubert Lyautey worked with the rump state that the monarchy had become to subdue unruly outlying tribes, in the process teaching the Moroccan elite much about how to run a modern state. In the Congo, as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, the native kings and soldiers who most eagerly rallied to Pierre de Brazza’s Tricolor were likely to be those previously threatened with slavery by their neighbors. In the Tonkin Delta, the local peasants cheered when French ships drove Chinese pirates from the river. Ghali’s overarching theme is “the banality of the colonial”: oppression of one group by another is in fact the default human condition. And sometimes the sting of foreign rule can bring unexpected benefits, like overcoming the local divisions of tribe and tongue through the imposition of a common language and administrative structures.
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Damien Cave & Linh Pham in NYT, Jailed for Love Songs? Yes, and Still Singing.
They arrested Mr. Loc in March 1968. It was two months after the Tet offensive failed to give the North its desired, decisive victory, despite coordinated surprise attacks on major cities and U.S. military bases. He and his two bandmates, along with a few other musicians (including a wedding singer), were interrogated then detained. State-run media accounts from the time suggest they fell afoul of a new law that was made public only after their arrests, insisting on long prison sentences for crimes like “spreading the enemy’s psywar propaganda,” and encouraging “the depraved culture of imperialism.” Mr. Loc, talking in mid-March over green tea in his tiny alleyway home, described the case as a farce…. The musicians were sent to Hoa Lo prison, a notorious detention center that American soldiers nicknamed “the Hanoi Hilton.” Six months later, the authorities asked them to play at Hanoi’s grand Opera House, so that government-sanctioned composers of “red,” or revolutionary, music could learn what made yellow music so popular. The group performed roughly 10 songs, which the authorities recorded with care. “We thought we were right about the music, because now they wanted to listen to it,” Mr. Loc said. “We were so happy.” They figured they were about to be released. After three more years in jail — at their trial in 1971 — the recordings became evidence. Mr. Loc said the prosecutor played their songs at low volume and distorted speed, then blared propaganda music loudly through a high-fidelity system, to show why yellow music was weak and socialist songs were strong. “I could feel the heat rising, in my ears and my face, because they were so deceitful,” he said. “They trapped us. They tricked us. I felt so much hatred.”
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Gary Morson in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS on The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.
Consider Soviet morality, which above all based itself on atheism. Rejecting traditional virtues such as compassion and benevolence as so much twaddle, the Bolsheviks adopted not amoralism but precisely reverse morality. Compassion actually became a vice, because it might lead one to spare a class enemy. For Lenin, cruelty was a first resort. He utterly rejected the morality of some other revolutionaries who maintained that murder was permitted when necessary. To think that way, he insisted, was to retain some vestige of the religious worldview that human life is somehow sacred, whereas, in fact, people, like everything else, are nothing but matter. Trotsky famously urged Bolsheviks to “put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life…. Execute mercilessly.” “Merciless”—one of Lenin’s favorite words—became a compliment. Lenin always insisted on the most violent possible measures. By the end of 1917, he had already set up the Cheka—the secret police—to terrorize the population. Cheka units developed their own forms of torture: one specialized in burning alive, another in scalping, a third in impaling people, a fourth in crucifixion, a fifth in killing children in front of their parents, a sixth in locking people in cells covered with corpses. “When we are reproached with cruelty,” Lenin famously explained, “we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism.”
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Tony Barber in FT on Mark Smith’s book, Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991.
Smith, associate professor of history at the University of Cambridge, is particularly good at capturing the activities and mental outlooks of authors, musicians, actors, scientists and others who were not dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but talented, strong-willed figures who pushed the boundaries of the permissible without stepping into outright political opposition. Among these were editor Alexander Tvardovsky, who helped to arrange the publication in 1962 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn’s novella about Stalin’s labour camps; author Yuri Trifonov; theatre director Yuri Lyubimov; and poet-singer Vladimir Vysotsky. Such individuals made measured, courageous contributions to de-Stalinisation. In many respects, they were more in tune with the mood of society than were the uncompromisingly independent Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, who loom in Smith’s book like towering heroes of dissent. Perceptively, Smith sets out how Khrushchev’s housing construction programme and efforts to raise living standards created, for the first time in Soviet experience, the possibility of a private life. Gone were the communal living quarters of old. Instead, in small apartments of their own, people cultivated personal tastes, acquired property and even criticised the authorities in the safety of their kitchens.
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In Communist lore, Soviet managers like our firm director were selflessly committed to plan fulfillment and the state’s ideology and developmental project. As we’ll discuss later in this essay, the reality of supply failures encouraged them to hoard labor and materials and obtain scarce materials in a secondary economy, or otherwise wastefully devote resources to produce their own inputs. They concealed their true production capacity to obtain better plan targets, overreported output to move up the ranks of the nomenklatura, and had little real interest in ideology.
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Andrew Nagorski in WSJ on Gordon Corera’s book, The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB.
Posted to Israel in the early 1950s, Mitrokhin was part of a spy group that was tainted by accusations of sloppy tradecraft. Agents they were running were discovered. Besides, Mitrokhin possessed none of the attributes of his more polished colleagues. “He was quiet, insular and not exactly blessed with social skills,” Mr. Corera writes. Afterward, Mitrokhin was sent abroad only on short-term assignments—and one of them ended disastrously. At the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, he was part of a team of KGB agents who were there to thwart defections. Since the games were taking place only weeks after Red Army tanks had crushed the Hungarian uprising, the tension at the water polo semifinal between Hungary and the Soviet Union was extreme. The athletes exchanged insults and then blows. A Soviet official urged his team to exercise restraint, but Mitrokhin was unapologetic when a Russian player smashed an opponent in the face in what became known as the “blood in the water” match. “You should have hit the Hungarian players harder,” he told the athletes. This was too much for his superiors, who wanted to contain the fallout. “Not suitable for operational work” was written on his file. He was exiled to the archive in the bowels of the Lubyanka, Moscow’s infamous KGB headquarters. It was, Mr. Corera writes, a “dead-end job,” but it offered access to documents that revealed the organization’s dark secrets, such as its labyrinth of informers. Mitrokhin claimed the experience opened his eyes to the insidious nature of the entire system. “I could not believe such evil,” he later declared. Dismissed by colleagues as a “clerical rat,” he assiduously studied the files whose handling was now his responsibility.
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James Meek in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, Far-Right Wellness Product.
The Romanian investigative journalist Victor Ilie has looked deeply into Georgescu’s online support, especially the viral spread of his video clips in the weeks leading up to the first round of the 2024 election. He scraped information from social media accounts and used innovative techniques to look into the ads placed on Romanian web pages by the agency AdNow, founded and run in Moscow until 2018 by Yulia Serebryanskaya, a former senior campaign operator for Putin and his party (it’s currently owned by a Georgian citizen based in Bulgaria). During the Covid pandemic, a London-based marketing company owned by AdNow was found to have offered money to video influencers to promote misinformation exaggerating the risks of the Pfizer vaccine. AdNow specialises in ‘native ads’ – adverts that look almost identical to a site’s non-advertising content. Ilie obtained tax records showing that Romanian media firms linked to the far right and anti-vaxxers have received at least €2 million from AdNow in recent years. Come the election, they all got behind Georgescu. Ilie found bundles of accounts on X, newly registered within an hour of one another outside Romania, which immediately followed Georgescu and then began the process of liking and reposting that rapidly boosts an account’s popularity. After the election, when Georgescu was banned from running again, the same accounts switched to boosting Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the AfD in Germany.
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Paul Sonne & 5 in NYT, How Russia’s War Machine Brutalizes and Exploits Its Own Soldiers.
The young Russian soldier appeared onscreen in fatigues, speaking quickly in a hushed tone. The soldier, Said Murtazaliyev, 18, explained that on the orders of his commander, he had collected about $15,000 in bribes from his fellow troops, who were paying to avoid being sent on the next sure-death assault. Then the commander decided to send Mr. Murtazaliyev on the assault himself, the soldier said in the video. “So if I don’t get in touch in the next day or two, you can release this video,” Mr. Murtazaliyev said, appearing to hold back tears as the footage cut off. He sent the video to his mother, Leila Nakhshunova. In a separate text message to Ms. Nakhshunova, he said that he was being deliberately killed to cover up the bribery, she said in an interview. The practice he was describing has become so common in the Russian military that it has its own name: obnuleniye, or “zeroing out.” It can mean lethal orders designed to get soldiers killed by the enemy. Or it can involve the direct killing of soldiers by their fellow troops on the battlefield.
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Elizabeth Flock in NEW YORKER, Into the Woods.
It was in the summer of 2021 that people from Somalia, Iraq, Syria, and other countries with ongoing conflicts began showing up in the Polish woods. Many had children with them. They entered at the Belarusian border, through perhaps the world’s most politically engineered migration route. Months earlier, Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Belarusian President, had diverted a plane carrying a journalist, triggering sanctions against him by the European Union. In response, Lukashenko announced, “We stopped drugs and migrants. Now you will have to eat them and catch them yourselves.” The Belarusian regime began advertising to people in high-conflict countries the promise of easy entry into the E.U. On social media, state-run Belarusian tour agencies promoted enticing travel packages. One post offered pickup at the airport and a week in a hotel, promising that “you will feel safe.” Belarus also loosened its visa rules, lowered application fees for tourist visas for “hunting” or “spa” visits, and added flights on the state airline to Minsk, the capital. Migrants quickly appeared at Belarus’s borders with Latvia and Lithuania, and, in the greatest numbers, with Poland. When Poland constructed a barbed-wire fence at the border, Belarusian guards reportedly gave migrants wire cutters.
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Shan Li & 2 in WSJ, India Builds in North Amid China Tensions.
In contrast to occasional patrols before 2020, the Indians now “believe that you have to have constant, regular, 24/7 monitoring of Chinese movement,” Rajagopalan added. The budget of the Border Roads Organization, a construction agency under the defense ministry, has grown to $810 million this year, from $280 million in 2020. During the same period, India’s total military spending has jumped nearly 60% to $80 billion. The building agency has already constructed thousands of miles of new roads along the border. India has also built over 30 helipads and upgraded and built several airstrips along its border. At nearly 14,000 feet, the new Mudh-Nyoma air force base in Ladakh is India’s closest airfield to the border, with China 19 miles away. The base is capable of handling India’s heavier military transport planes such as the U.S.-made C-130J plane that the Air Force chief landed at the base in November, when it opened for operations. The base will serve as a staging ground for troops and equipment headed to border areas. For decades, India avoided large-scale construction along much of its border, calculating that the soaring Himalayas and a lack of roads would deter a Chinese incursion. “It was like rolling out the red carpet to a Chinese invasion,” said Daniel Markey, senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank. “The Indian perspective was that building significant roads was actually militarily detrimental to them.” By the mid-2000s, however, New Delhi saw China speeding ahead by building tens of thousands of miles of roads and railways to strengthen its borders and pull the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet closer to the rest of the country.
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Dupleix’s fatal flaw was his ambition, the upshot of which was imperial overstretch. Involved in both the Deccan and the Carnatic, his troops were stretched thin across the south. He was able to paper over the problems by propping up friendly regimes, but not for long. It all began to unravel in 1752, when the Brits chummed up with the Marathas to defeat the French at Srirangam. Dupleix lost his Carnatic ally to a beheading. Meanwhile, his Deccan crony became preoccupied with troubles of his own. Thanks to all the bloodletting Dupleix had unleashed, the Compagnie’s trading had ground to a halt. Rent was supposed to be the answer to its woes. This, too, proved illusory on account of Dupleix’s heavy-handedness. By the time he was recalled to Paris in 1754, the Compagnie had ceased to be a thriving concern. On his return, he discovered that he had become a foil for the philosophes, including Voltaire.
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Owen Bennett-Jones in LITERARY REVIEW on Sam Dalrymple’s book, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia.
Dalrymple’s argument for guiding at least some attention away from the familiar ground of the 1947 partition is strongest in the case of Burma. When the Simon Commission visited Rangoon in 1929, it took the view that Burma was not really part of India, since its inhabitants were ethnically distinct and there was no railway connection to the rest of the Raj, and so it should become a separate colony. Some anti-imperialists, such as Mahatma Gandhi, agreed. His reasoning was that Burma had never been part of the historical Hindu holy land of Bharat, as envisaged in the third-century BC text the Mahabharata. The decision to separate Burma from British Indian administration was finally implemented in 1937. The situation was greatly complicated by the Japanese invasion of the country during the Second World War. What happened in Burma after 1937 was, in some respects, a foreshadowing of what was to come on the subcontinent in 1947. The creation of Burma as a separate entity triggered intercommunal pogroms, famine and mass migration.
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Nina Siegal in NYT, Without Sound of Churches, Somber Silence.
During World War II, Hitler’s Germany requisitioned some 175,000 church bells from across Europe, so that they could extract their metal components, mostly copper and tin. The vast majority of those, some 150,000 bells, were never returned to their churches. Many others were destroyed in the removal process, smelted and converted into munitions, and thousands ended up in so-called “Glockenfriedhöfe,” or bell cemeteries. The destruction of church bells, viewed as a war crime during the 1945 Nuremberg War Tribunal and as an act of sacrilege by the Roman Catholic church, is a lesser-known aspect of Nazi looting. Many cities and towns that had for centuries measured out their lives by the quotidian chiming of church bells, now fell silent.
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Aris Roussinos at unherd.com, America’s New Doctrine of Empire.
With Washington confronted by two overt civilisation states – China and Russia – the National Security Strategy makes clear a division between the world without, in its declaration to maintain ‘good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours’, and its new assertiveness in dominating the world within – the sphere that was, until recently, unabashedly called “Western civilisation”. So, the NSS declares. Washington will “push like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms” in a process of cultural retrenchment limited to the “counties that share, or say they share, these principles” of Enlightenment liberty, drawn from Europe’s unique civilisational path. The NSS cannot be clearer that this is Washington’s aim. “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Again and again, the document emphasises its civilisational focus. Europe’s “economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure”. It declares, “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence”, because “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent – and of course to Britain and Ireland.” Yet rather than a civilisational state Europe’s current form of governance looks more like a civilisational suicide note to the Trump administration.
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Janan Ganesh in FT, The Right Will Want a United States of Europe.
The right, above all the hard right, should favour a United States of Europe. And over time, I think it will, at least on the continent, if not in Britain. A unified Europe, a cause that has long been associated with liberals, will start to appeal to traditionalists as the only hope against brash, technologically ascendant superpowers to the west (America) and east (China). It will be framed as a matter of cultural survival. There is pedigree here. The essential oneness of Europe was a conservative theme — think of “Christendom” — before it was a liberal one. Even the founding of the EU had a Catholic tinge. Robert Schuman, the “father of Europe”, is on course for beatification. A decade or so ago, Europeans who cherished their nation’s peculiarities could still tell themselves that Brussels was the chief threat to them. Now, there are scarier things than regulatory standardisation.
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Bertrand Benoit in WSJ, Europe’s Right-Wing Populists Are Swerving Left on the Economy.
The Chapel Hill Expert Survey has tracked political party messaging in Europe for 25 years. Its latest installment, published in August, found that right-wing populists had expanded their economic message in the past four years on regulation, income redistribution and other core economic issues, said Jonathan Polk, professor of political science at Lund University in Sweden and one of the authors. The diversity of views partly reflects heterogeneity among populist parties. Some groups, including Spain’s VOX, created in 2013, retain a relatively coherent pro-market, small-state agenda. Others, from Greek Solution to Cyprus’s National Popular Party, stand mostly left on the economy. Many favor a well-funded public sector, generous welfare benefits and extensive labor rights, Polk added, but think these should benefit citizens, not migrants—a position Polk refers to as “welfare chauvinism.”
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Isabel Jacobs in CLEVELAND REVIEW OF BOOKS on The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève, and Boris Groys’ book, Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography.
Filoni and Groys convincingly show that Kojève was more than just a reader of Hegel –whether a good or bad one. In many ways, he was the father of postmodernism and our own radical contemporary. It was Kojève who first captured the tedious experience of life under late capitalism: the exhaustion of resources, endless admin, and the repeated, often cruel subsumption of bodies and minds under automation. Anyone who has recently called a hotline and tried to reach a human voice or received yet another Chat GPT-generated rejection email for a job application will recognize the world Kojève saw coming. The end of history is the eternal present of a bureaucracy without humans.
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Tunku Varadarajan in WSJ, ‘The Most Successful Dictator of Modern Times’.
Mr. Payne doesn’t mind the “hostility and avoidance” he faces from liberal Hispanists. “You have to be thick-skinned in life. You have to support what you believe is correct and true.” But Spain now has “freedom of the press and freedom of expression. So I have never been short of very good publishers in Spain, and I have an extensive reading public there.” Only the professional historians are squeamish. Franco has been “demonized,” but he wasn’t demonic, Mr. Payne says. “He did things that I think were mistaken, but he was placed in difficult circumstances. The civil war was not his idea. Franco’s was a response to a historical necessity. The Franco regime did not destroy democracy. There’d been a destruction of democracy by the Popular Front.” There was “no democratic utopia at hand in Spain in 1936. Quite the opposite. Had the Nationalists lost the Civil War, it’s unlikely the result would have been political democracy.” In Mr. Payne’s estimation, Franco was the “most successful dictator of modern times,” one whose “creative pragmatism” over 36 years produced stability and, eventually, transformative economic growth. He dismisses as “simplistic” the few pro-Franco polemicists who would give the dictator credit for the tolerant and democratic Spain that emerged after 1975. But he asks us to acknowledge that “the depolarization and depoliticization” of Spain—especially after 1945—ensured that “a new start could be made, shorn of the extremism of the civil-war generation.”
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Steve Fraser in CATALYST, The New Popular Front
Ironically, today’s socialist left-wing movement finds itself in the position of defending what the original Popular Front created. It’s ironic because the Left today, as has been the case in the past, bears its anti-capitalist birthmarks proudly. Yet what it increasingly seeks to restore, especially in the face of a virulent authoritarian capitalism, is its democratic variant: in so many words, the New Deal order. Prophesying a future profoundly at odds with the past and present was always the defining feature of the socialist movement. But today that prophecy sounds more like heading back to the future.
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Simon Ings at simonings.net on Sergio Luzzatto’s book, The First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Morè.
Was Morès the single pivot on which European history turned? Luzzatto is too measured to claim anything so crass. But I’m not, and here’s the Hollywood version: Morès’s nationalist-sociaist ideology — a synthesis of vigilante violence, anti-capitalist populism, and the cult of the “strong man” — did not form in the salons of Paris, but in the slaughterhouses of Medora, North Dakota. He backed to the hilt (and damn-near into prison) the Montana Stranglers’ ruthless killing of cattle rustlers. Technically, this was murder. Practically, it was the removal of murderers and very useful to mankind (and don’t take my word for it, that’s Morès’s neighbour Teddy Rooseveldt speaking). Morès viewed the badlands as a space to resurrect a feudal order where he was the lord, the cowboys were his serfs, and the law was irrelevant. Bringing the “cowboy style” to the refined streets of Paris (down to the revolver and the hat), Morès tried to recreate the Montana Stranglers in Paris using newsboys and butchers… Ah, but here, sad to say, the wheels of our gay little cart come flying off, because, as Luzzatto himself observes, although Morès brought an distinctly American sensationalism to French politics, and surrounded himself with butchers and newsboys, this Chicago-hardened populist thug ”seemed disinclined to organise them into real squads with any real purpose of action — into a kind of paramilitary that could be deployed in the streets to exercise a systemic use of force.” One can only deplore the way Luzzatto lets the air out of his tyres in service of the truth — does he not want to shift copies? But one can only admire his rejection of “intellectual history” in favour of the real thing: a history composed of actions (inescapably bloody) and consequences (irretrievably dismal).
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Federico Perelmuter at aeon.co, Who Is Walter Mignolo?.
In 1992, as he neared retirement, and still in the shadow of the conquest’s quincentennial, Dussel gave the Frankfurt Lectures. Their introduction was published as ‘Eurocentrism and Modernity’ (1993) and became a landmark of decolonial thought. Dussel proposed a ‘myth of modernity’ inaugurated by Columbus’s arrival in 1492 and that used a ‘rational “concept” of emancipation’ to hide ‘an irrational myth, a justification for genocidal violence.’ This, Mignolo agrees in The Darker Side of the Renaissance, made the New World the ‘first periphery of the modern world’. Modernity, for Dussel, arises in the dialectic relation between Europe and the ‘non-European’, with the periphery being its ‘ultimate content’ and the ‘essential alterity’ of modernity. To overcome this ‘myth of modernity’, Dussel proposes once again the ‘analectic’, an ‘incorporative solidarity’ between antinomies and across differences. Here, like with Mignolo, there was vagueness, ambiguity. What exactly was an ‘incorporative solidarity’? What differences were surmountable, and how? To unravel the ‘myth of modernity’, Dussel proposed a ‘trans-modernity’, the overcoming of the hierarchical centre-periphery relationship that, he believed, 1492 inaugurated. Mignolo followed Dussel’s ‘trans-modernity’ proposition with a 1995 essay proposing a ‘postcolonial reason’ attempting to theorise and critique modernity from the perspective of its colonies. Mignolo meant ‘postcolonial reason’ as a parallel to a ‘postmodern’ reason, which critiqued modernity from its centres in Europe and North America – the reason of the American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, or of Derrida or Michel Foucault.
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Seth Siegel in WSJ, Hatred of Israel Caused Iran’s Water Crisis.
The first few water engineers to arrive in Iran were followed by dozens, and ultimately hundreds. So many Israeli water experts worked on Iran’s water restructuring and rethinking of agricultural practices that by the late 1960s Hebrew-language schools for their children were established in several locations in Iran. Shops in some areas had signs in Hebrew. I interviewed several Israeli water engineers who worked in Iran before the 1979 revolution. They described a warm environment in which Israelis and Iranians worked together. Other than at a soccer match involving a visiting Israeli team, none of the interviewees had any memory of anti-Israel or antisemitic conduct or speech. By the time the shah fell, Iran’s water systems were flourishing. The country had productive water-focused agricultural planning, major cities’ plumbing upgraded to reduce leaks, and several desalination plants—all designed, built and operated by Israelis in partnership with Iranian experts and engineers. After the revolution, the Israelis left quickly and many of the Iranian engineers who had worked with them were exiled or executed…. Soon after the Israelis left, the regime’s religious leadership largely outsourced water issues to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s ideological enforcers. The IRGC developed engineering and construction companies to handle Iran’s hydrological problems—enriching its leadership with billions of dollars. Nik Kowsar, an exiled Iranian journalist who often writes on what he calls Iran’s “water mafia,” highlights in a phone interview the billion-dollar “dam and transfer schemes” that were adopted “not because they worked, but because they meant massive commissions, opaque contracts, and zero accountability.”
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Christopher de Bellaigue in WSJ on Justin Marozzi’s book, Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World.
Slavery thrived there, Mr. Marozzi tells us, a millennium longer than the trans-Atlantic version did, and probably enslaved more people (17 million, according to one study, as opposed to the 12 million to 15 million who were sold into the Atlantic trade). It was finally abolished under Western pressure and after decades of resistance, foot dragging and delay; in the case of Saudi Arabia, it was legal until 1962. Even now it remains glaringly visible in the roughly one million people that Temedt, an antislavery organization, estimates are living as hereditary slaves in Mali, toiling in the fields, performing menial tasks and, in the case of women, Mr. Marozzi tells us, being “routinely raped.” So why is this story so little known? Until recently the reluctance of modern Muslim societies to delve into an unflattering episode of their past, along with Western historians’ unswerving focus on slavery in the Americas, had generated, in the words of Middle Eastern scholars quoted by Mr. Marozzi, a “deafening silence” and a “collective amnesia” on the subject. Drawing on the work of a new generation of Turkish and north-African historians who have challenged “the default setting of denial,” Mr. Marozzi tells the story in all its richness, variety and horror, from the slave concubines who used sex and poetry to bedazzle the caliphs of ninth-century Baghdad to the slave-seizing free-for-all that the western Mediterranean became in the 16th and 17th centuries—the age of the “Barbary corsairs.”
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Scott Spillman at thepointmag.com on John Harpham’s book, The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery.
Throughout the period when colonial slavery was taking shape, Harpham explains, English writers still relied heavily on a conception of slavery that they inherited from ancient Rome. In contrast to the ancient Greek idea that some people could be “natural slaves,” a view most commonly associated with Aristotle, Roman law defined slavery as the product of convention. Individuals were naturally free, in this view, but could be reduced to slavery if they committed a crime or, more commonly, were captured in war…. Accordingly, the central question for English writers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not what qualities made a person a natural slave—a question that might lead to a racial answer—but instead what circumstances allowed for enslavement. The English showed a special interest in this question, Harpham suggests, because they were simultaneously forging a national self-identity based on “the conviction that theirs was a nation dedicated to freedom.” This conviction grew out of internal developments, such as the decline of villeinage (a kind of serfdom), but it also took shape in direct contrast to England’s chief international rivals, the Spanish and the Portuguese. Harpham shows that the English did not rush to imitate the Iberian example of enslaving Africans and Native Americans. Instead, they spent several decades defining themselves in opposition to it. In fact, the promise of English freedom became an important justification of colonization in the works of writers such as Richard Hakluyt, perhaps the most vigorous promoter of English imperial ambition in the Elizabethan era.... By the end of the seventeenth century, however, something had changed. The English had become so deeply entrenched in the slave trade that it seemed natural.
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Elias Rodriques in NATION on Harry Haywood’s book, Negro Liberation.
Harry Haywood did not look to the English past but to the contemporaneous American South and especially to the so-called Black Belt, the majority-Black region extending from Virginia to Louisiana. There, Haywood found the modern-day equivalent of the feudal system: sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and agricultural laborers working across the fertile area—many, though not all of them, Black—who were, in Haywood’s eyes, serfs who remained unfree, not least because of the vagrancy laws, debt, and physical violence that bound these workers to the lands they worked…. Haywood’s introduction to socialism opened him up to a wide milieu of communist organizations. [His brother] Otto suggested that Harry join the African Blood Brotherhood, “a secret, all-Black revolutionary organization” founded by the journalist Cyril Briggs, whose members included the poet Claude McKay, which Haywood soon did. In the winter of 1923, he also joined the Young Workers League, and in 1925, the party proper. The CP provided Haywood with an education. In 1926, he traveled to Moscow to study at the University of Toilers of the East, which also educated Ho Chi Minh, Deng Xiaoping, and Jomo Kenyatta…. These early lessons proved foundational to Haywood’s thinking on the plight of Black Americans and its solution. Those ideas crystallized in the Black Belt thesis. In 1928, Haywood, his old associate Charles Nasanov, and others in the Negro Commission of the Communist International drafted and revised a version of this thesis. Later that year, at the Sixth World Congress, the Communist International passed “The 1928 Resolution on the Negro Question in the United States,” adopting the Black Belt program as official policy.
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Achille Mbembe complicated the idea of ‘resistance’ by showing that collaboration sometimes made it possible for Cameroonians to hold positions of power that undermined rather than upheld colonial subjection: ‘One could “resist” while participating in the coloniser’s cultural horizon.’ The question of what came after the colony – and whether it differed from the colony – occupied Mbembe in the following years. De la postcolonie (2000) broke entirely with the conventions of social science research on Africa, mixing French theory, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory. But Mbembe also wanted to distance himself from postcolonial studies, which was becoming increasingly popular on Western campuses. In his view it reduced the complex history of subaltern societies to one traumatic moment – colonisation – thereby transforming postcolonial subjects into mere victims of colonial power. When they did engage in political acts, these were celebrated as examples of subversion or resistance when, in fact, they ‘often produced paradoxical situations’. With its narrow focus on the relationship between coloniser and colonised, postcolonial studies risked obscuring the conflict between the people and the postcolonial state, or between the people themselves. As Mbembe writes (in typical register), the ‘intensity of the violence of brother towards brother and the status of the sister and the mother in the midst of fratricide’ were of far greater importance than ‘the struggle between father and son’. What bothered him most was the emphasis on ‘alterity’, which valorised the radical ‘difference’ between Europe and its other. Postcolonial studies offered a politics of closure when what was needed was the opposite: a politics of cultural ‘openness’ that asserts a common humanity.
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Alexander Bevilacqua in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Francisco Bethencourt’s book, Strangers Within: The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Trading Elite.
Between the 15th and 18th centuries, the period covered by Bethencourt, European long-distance trade was made possible by international banking and new financial institutions such as the joint-stock company and the stock exchange. As overseas commerce transformed the European economy, new myths circulated alongside old ones to implicate Jews in the rise of modern finance. In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu claimed that the bill of exchange, which enabled remote transfers of money, was a Jewish invention. As Francesca Trivellato has shown, this false assertion originated in a treatise published by the French lawyer Étienne Cleirac in 1647. Cleirac lived in Bordeaux, which had been home to a Portuguese New Christian community since the mid-16th century. Trivellato sees Cleirac’s accusation as a reaction to a changing social order: he associated the slipperiness of modern financial instruments with the slipperiness of converso identity. A decade earlier, the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo had imagined an international conspiracy of Jews and New Christians ‘who declare themselves atheists and worshippers of the god money and who are all engaged in ruining Christian countries through perfidious financial tricks’. To devote six hundred pages to the entrepreneurial zeal of the New Christian elite is to enter charged territory.
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Sanya Osha at aeon.co, An African Philosophy.
Keita bemoans Africa’s lack of familiarity with the history of ideas. He argues that, in the study of philosophy, the ahistorical approach is a colonial legacy in institutions of higher learning. It should hardly be surprising that professional philosophical study was organised to disadvantage Africa – we can see many cultural biases at work. For example, the study of philosophy differs between Anglophone and Francophone countries as a result of British and French colonial legacies. In Francophone African countries, Descartes, Foucault, Gaston Berger and Jean-Paul Sartre are favoured above Hobbes, Locke, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Galen Strawson, who are the preferred choices in Anglophone countries. According to Keita, pre-colonial African philosophers such as Zera Yacob of 17th-century Aksum (now Ethiopia), author of the treatise Hatata (1667) meaning ‘Inquiry’, remain extremely rare in Africa too. Some interpreters make comparisons between Yacob’s work and the works of Descartes and Kant, as recently noted by the Harvard philosopher Teodros Kiros. Another rare example is the prolific 17th-century scholar Ahmad Baba, who taught at the University of Timbuktu. His study Miraj al-Sud (1615) is noted for its progressive insights on the human rights of individuals in an era when slavery was the norm, at the same time as arguing it was possible for slavery to have a human face and needn’t be necessarily brutal and inhumane.
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Sam Knight in NEW YORKER, Hey There!.
In the fall of 1914, Bronisław Malinowski, a young Polish ethnographer, began to study island communities off the coast of Papua New Guinea. “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away,” he wrote in the opening pages of “Argonauts of the Western Pacific,” an early classic of social anthropology, published in 1922. Malinowski intended to explain “the imponderabilia of actual life” on islands. Central among the imponderabilia of “Argonauts” was the kula, a circular form of trade—of necklaces and armbands, made from shells—that took place among the Trobriand Islands. Malinowski spent a lot of time thinking about language. In an essay from 1923, he observed that much of what people say—whether on the Trobriand Islands or in European drawing rooms—was devoid of any obvious meaning. Saying “Ah, here you are!” in Kraków was the same as saying “Whenst comest thou?” on Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriands. It was about conveying sociability, rather than thoughts or ideas. Malinowski called this “phatic communion,” and he believed that it was essential to human society. It expressed “the fundamental tendency which makes the mere presence of others a necessity for man.”
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Jenni Nuttall at aeon.co, What the ‘Trolly-Lolly’ of Gibberish Means for Language.
The shepherds, not acquainted with such fancy language, are perplexed, though the medieval audience would have recognised this bit of scripture as the beginning of a familiar hymn. Did the heavenly song start with glore or glere, the shepherds ask themselves? Or perhaps glorus, glarus, glorius or glo, glas or glye? They carry on like this as far as voluntatis, turning angelic Latin into something approaching gibberish. Yet though they are scared, they are also strangely heartened and reassured by the heavenly music. They decide to sing a merry song of their own as they set off for Bethlehem to follow the ‘starre-gleme’, the light of the extraordinary star. The stage direction reads: ‘Here singe “troly, loly, loly, loo”,’ and the shepherds’ boy encourages the audience to join in. It’s one of those moments muddling sacred and profane in which medieval drama seems to delight. This play makes fun of the shepherds’ rusticity, but perhaps it also hints that solemn Latin is pretty much gibberish to quite a few of the parishioners in an English church? Maybe it doesn’t matter if the angels’ song is gibberish or Latin, or if the audience sings hymns or trolly-lollies. The Lord works in mysterious ways after all… Three decades later, Protestant reformers disapproved of Catholic mystery plays, and they also frowned on the happy singing of gibberish in folk songs. Vocables such as ‘trolly-lolly’ or ‘hey nonny-nonny’ symbolised rustic, profane, primitive vulgarity.
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Eric Kaufmann in CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS on John Ellis’ book, A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism.
The central claim of A Short History of Relations Between Peoples is that the West—especially the Anglo West—is relatively virtuous. Measured against the perfectionist yardstick of cosmic justice, it falls woefully short. But measured against other, actual civilizations, it shines. On an apples-to-apples basis, the West’s record places it in the front rank of civilizations. Societies of similar power and technology have, on average, behaved much worse. Karl Marx categorized civilizations along an evolutionary continuum which includes primitive and slave societies. His primitive category encompasses hunter-gatherers who lived in societies, as Harvard’s Steven Pinker notes, where the chance of dying violently was hundreds or thousands of times higher than our own. No wonder native groups often feared each other more than they feared European settlers—hence their willingness to team up with Europeans against common foes such as the Pequots of Connecticut or Aztecs of Mexico. There is perhaps no theory more divorced from empirical reality than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s myth of the noble savage.
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Daniel Buck in NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Teachers as Cultural Stewards.
In reality, critical theory now permeates every mediating institution surrounding education. Take, for example, the National Council of Teachers of English, which boasts 25,000 paying members and wields an enormous influence over education policy and state standards. In 2022, this professional association declared that English classrooms should "decenter book reading and essay writing." The council also released a report imploring its members to apply critical theory in their literary analysis. More specifically, English teachers were encouraged to "model and instruct students on how to read through a critical lens across a range of literary theories (e.g., postcolonial criticism, Black feminist criticism, Chicana feminist criticism)...." According to this approach to literary analysis, students do not read books to discover the themes within them but instead treat them as archeological artifacts to learn of discrimination based on gender, race, or other identities in the societies from which they come. Even the research organizations from which teachers take their cues as to what is "best practice" are captured. As the American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess has continually noted, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) — the largest and most prestigious consortium of education researchers in the country — operates mostly as a purveyor of progressive agitprop…. It releases position statements in support of "anti-racist education" and hosts conference symposiums with titles such as "Intifada Isn't a Metaphor."
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Matti Friedman at thefp.com,Introduction to Gazology.
After reading more in subsequent months, I came to think of the genre as “Gazology.” By this term I don’t mean the study of the real territory of Gaza, or of the terrible human tragedy caused by the Hamas offensive of October 7 and by the Israeli response in the war that followed—vast tracts of Gaza destroyed, tens of thousands of civilians killed along with tens of thousands of combatants, and aftershocks across the Middle East. Gazology is not reportage, and most of its practitioners are not in or even near Gaza or Israel. This is a Western literary genre with its own rules, tropes, and goals. It’s likely that much Western culture, journalism, and politics in the coming years will be downstream of these books and the ideology behind them. Students in disciplines from anthropology to medicine will be assigned these works and invited to see the world’s problems through the lens of “Gaza.” For this reason, the genre is important.
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Christopher DeMuth in NEW CRITERION on Edward Banfield’s book, The Unheavenly City Revisited.
Banfield’s primary concerns were culture and politics, and how they shape policy and limit its potential for social improvement. The book’s best-known contribution is its archetype of the lower-class individual—radically “present oriented,” preoccupied with action in the moment, oblivious to future consequences, and thereby largely immune to the self-improvement ministrations of his social betters. Less appreciated are Banfield’s assessment of upper-class culture and his striking prescience concerning what today is called elite progressivism. There were, Banfield explained, many policy steps that could ameliorate somewhat the serious urban problems of racial segregation and enmity, unemployment, family breakdown, poor housing and schooling, and crime and riot. These included avoiding “white racism” as an all-purpose explanation of urban problems, repealing the minimum-wage and occupational-licensure laws, lowering the school-leaving age and expanding vocational training, and drastically reducing the time between criminal arrests, trials, and punishment of the convicted. But each of these steps was politically impossible—because strongly opposed by policy experts and activists, interest groups, and important strains of public opinion. Indeed, those influential groups typically favored policies that were the opposite of the ones Ed recommended—aggravating, and to a degree causing, the problems at hand. The reason for this was that many educated, affluent, upper-class and upper-middle-class persons were imbued with a spirit of altruistic service that placed a premium on worthy intentions and moral display. (They were modern Puritans—Ed’s book’s title was a play on the “Heavenly city” of Cotton Mather’s Theopolis Americana.)
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Tanner Nau in NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Tension, Not Fusion.
Utopianism, the temptation of men to "seek refuge from tension by trying to impose their own limited vision of perfection upon the world," also reverted man back to "the womb of the cosmological civilization, in which the tension of life at the higher level of freedom was not required of men, in which they could fulfill their duties in uncomplicated acceptance of the rhythms of the cosmos, without the pain or the glory of individuation." While civilizations under the spell of the cosmological myth were not aware of such a chasm, the post-cosmological civilizations did not enjoy the same innocence. This quest for individuation took a revolutionary turn at the dawn of Christianity. According to Meyer, the Incarnation, in which God assumed human form, "enabled men of the West to live both in the world of nature and in the transcendent world, without confusing them." The Incarnation filled the "yawning gulf" between the cosmos and the earth. The West "founded itself, in its inmost core, on acceptance of the tension between the transcendent and the individual human person," Meyer wrote, "and on the reconciliation of that tension implicit in the great vision of the Incarnation — the flash of eternity into time." Such a revolution was theological but also had an immeasurable political effect. The "gulf" between humanity and the cosmos was bridged by the Incarnation because it was earthly and transcendent at the same time. The utopian temptation was tempered by a recognition that this tension, between the immanent and transcendent, emerged in the person.
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A ninth-century illuminated manuscript known as the Utrecht Psalter is an early example of technology and religion intersecting. The Psalter’s illustration of Psalm 64:2–3—“Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked, from the throng of evildoers, who whet their tongues like swords, who aim bitter words like arrows”—depicts God’s people sharpening their swords on a newly developed technology, the grindstone, while evildoers rely on the old-fashioned technology of the whetstone. God was on the side of new technologies and progress. As the Utrecht Psalter made its way around medieval Europe, religious communities bought into the idea that technological progress was God-ordained and a means of either restoring Eden or, at the very least, ushering in a new age. Soon thereafter, Benedictine monks in the 12th and 13th centuries brought technology and religion together as they developed mechanical clocks to regulate times of prayer and worship.
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Neema Parvini in CHRONICLES, Remembering Julius Evola.
After the war, he had a brief period in the early 1920s as a notable Dadaist painter, during which he was filled with existential angst and attempted suicide. In 1927, he founded an esoteric cult which practiced magic with the Ur Group (later earning him the nickname “The Magic Baron”) under the influence of the mathematician Arturo Reghini. The ostensible purpose of this group was to attempt to magically influence Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini to abandon populism for a more aristocratic regime based on Ancient Roman virtues and a caste system. It was in this spirit that he wrote Pagan Imperialism in 1928. The book was controversial, however, because of its attacks on the Catholic Church, which led to Evola being something of a pariah under the direct censure of the Fascist authorities. Evola believed Christianity had become soft and emptied of its esoteric, mystical, and spiritual potential by a deadening temporal exotericism, which he believed had also corrupted the Catholic Church. Over the course of his career, he learned to curb the edges of his criticism of Christianity, perhaps as a matter of politics, but the basics of his critique would remain throughout his work. However, Evola would fall out with Reghini over the latter’s support of Freemasonry, and the Ur Group seems to have dissolved in 1929.
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Tim Reichert in FIRST THINGS, Christian Ownership Maximalism.
For decades, the United States funded its trade deficits with China by selling its assets to foreigners—mostly to China but also to Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others. The cumulative effect is measured by something called the “net international investment position,” which is the net dollar value of U.S. assets owned by foreigners—that is, the dollar value of domestic assets owned by foreigners and foreign corporations, minus the dollar value of foreign assets owned by U.S. citizens and U.S. corporations. That figure currently stands at negative $16 trillion, which means that on net, foreigners own $16 trillion of U.S. businesses, real estate, and other productive assets. In order to fund our consumption, we have sold more than half of American economic power to foreigners ($47 trillion out of $94 trillion). We hold only about 10 percent of theirs ($31 trillion out of $320 trillion).
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Todd Hartch in FIRST THINGS on David Gilbert’s book, The End of Catholic Mexico (1855-1861): Causes and Consequences of the Mexican Reforma, and Margaret Chowning’s book, Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750-1940.
If the liberal narrative is the basic story of modern Mexico, why is Mexico still so Catholic? Unlike its neighbor Guatemala, now almost 50 percent Protestant, Mexico remains an overwhelmingly Catholic country, despite sharing a long border with that hegemon of evangelical Protestantism, the United States, which has sent Protestant missionaries into Mexico for more than a century. Why did Catholic peasants—the very people who were supposed to be the primary beneficiaries of the Revolution—fight a bloody war against the new revolutionary state in the Cristero Rebellion of 1926–29? Why did they rise again in the 1930s? In the nineteenth century, why were peasants and indigenous people more likely to side with “reactionary” conservatives than with forward- looking liberals? There seems to be a deep-seated Catholicism in Mexico that transcends race, class, and social status and that persists despite all manner of political, legal, military, and cultural pressures. Historically, many liberal and revolutionary statesmen insisted that Catholics who resisted liberal and revolutionary reforms had been brainwashed into fanaticism and superstition by priests and old women and simply did not know what was good for them. Contemporary historians of Mexico, who skew left and secular, are not quite so quick to condemn Mexican religiosity, but nevertheless have downplayed Catholicism as a political, economic, and cultural force. In most cases, we have not so much a conspiracy as a mismatch between historians’ interests—leftwing politics, progressive moral reform, resistance to class, race, and sex-based oppression—and the undeniable centrality of Catholicism in Mexican history. At their best, these scholars recognize that they are not quite getting to the heart of the Mexican experience.
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Geoff Dyer in FT on Adriana Ramirez’s book, The Violence: My Family’s Colombian War.
The story starts at a moment of hope. On April 8 1948, the capital Bogota was packed with diplomats for the launch of the Organisation of American Stattes – the western hemisphere’s contribution to the new postwar order. But the city was also on edge, riven by labour unrest and a flood of poor migrants to new slums. For many, the one man who could prevent an explosion was Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, leader of the opposition Liberal party who was expected to win the presidency in 1950. The day after the conference opened, he was due to meet a series of attendees, including a young Fidel Castro. But on his way to lunch he was shot dead. Gaitan’s assassination unleashed a bloodletting across the city, as Liberals blamed Conservatives, the poor blamed the rich, leftists blamed the CIA and the police blamed agitators. The diplomats fled. By the end of the day, as many as 3,000 people were dead.
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R.R. Reno in FIRST THINGS, Overcoming Nihilism.
In Return of the Strong Gods, I give a sketch of how the inescapable nihilism of Camus’s formulation was transformed into a positive program for the reconstruction of the West. The open society consensus took shape, formulated by figures such as Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek and then developed by others. But I don’t want to rehash those details. It’s sufficient to illuminate the logic of shoah, which has a paradoxically happy side, not just a sad one. Like the glamor of evil, emptiness has its allures. One promise of complete destruction is freedom. Sartre played up this aspect when he noted that, due to the lack of any metaphysical truths, it falls upon us to create our own meaning. (Popper said something similar in The Open Society and Its Enemies, as have many others.) With his usual Cartesian rigor, Sartre advanced an anti-metaphysical doctrine to ensure this freedom: Existence precedes essence. Human experience is malleable, and reality is ours to make and remake. This open field for action has a political as well as a personal aspect, which is why Sartre’s doctrinaire and revolutionary Marxism was entirely consistent with his existentialism. The open society consensus never embraced explicit nihilism. Rather, it turned the destruction and diminution of the West’s inheritance into the blessings of pluralism, inclusion, and peace.
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Ronan Farrow & Andrew Marantz in NEW YORKER, Sam Altman May Control Our Future.
Altman told early recruits that OpenAI would remain a pure nonprofit, and programmers took significant pay cuts to work there. The company accepted charitable grants, including thirty million dollars from what was then called Open Philanthropy, a hub of the effective-altruism movement whose commitments included supporting the distribution of mosquito nets to the global poor. Brockman and Sutskever managed OpenAI’s daily operations, while Musk and Altman, still busy with their other jobs, stopped by around once a week. By September, 2017, though, Musk had grown impatient. During discussions about whether to reconstitute OpenAI as a for-profit company, he demanded majority control. Altman’s replies varied depending on the context. His main consistent demand seems to have been that if OpenAI were reorganized under the control of a C.E.O. that job should go to him. Sutskever seemed uncomfortable with this idea. He sent Musk and Altman a long, plaintive e-mail on behalf of himself and Brockman, with the subject line “Honest Thoughts.” He wrote, “The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship.” He continued, addressing Musk, “So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator.” He relayed similar concerns to Altman: “We don’t understand why the CEO title is so important to you. Your stated reasons have changed, and it’s hard to really understand what’s driving it.” “Guys, I’ve had enough,” Musk replied. “Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit”—otherwise “I’m just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding for you to create a startup.”
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Mike Jay in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on John Blair’s book, Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World.
Corpses do, under certain circumstances, behave in ways consistent with the legends. He consulted P.V. Glob’s 1965 study of the ‘bog people’ from Iron Age Scandinavia, whose bodies have been uncannily well preserved by their immersion in acidic and anoxic peat bogs. Some had been staked through the torso, and Barber argued that the reason for this might have been practical: to prevent the corpse from bloating with gas, rising from its watery grave and bobbing up to the surface. He proposed that other attributes of the vampire might have similar explanations. There are many environments in which corpses might fail to decompose and the natural process of saponification, by which body fat is transformed into a waxy pinkish tissue called adipocere, could account for the occurrence of incorruptible saints and the dangerous dead alike. In such cases the body can remain ruddy and plump; blood will naturally ooze from the mouth, the eyes can open and fingernails and hair appear to grow as the skin retracts. Beyond the facts of post-mortem pathology, there are many other reasons the recently buried dead might be considered a source of danger. In some cultures the corpse is taken to be the vestige of the dead person’s identity, in others an empty vessel vulnerable to possession by a malign spirit. Societies from ancient Egypt to Siberia have seen the living human as the embodiment of a number of souls or life-forces; the corpse may host only a part of their identity or cohabit with another entity. It’s understandable that the dead should be angry or vengeful: after all, they have suffered a terrible calamity. There may be, as Freud proposed in Totem and Taboo, a ‘universal conviction that the dead, thirsting for blood, draw the living after them’. Death opens a portal that must be policed: in every human culture, burial is hedged about with ritual observance.
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As such, it came to seem obviously just and proper to extend to all these rational, self-directing subjects the right to engage in democratic politics. This imperative grew especially compelling once the development of radio and, latterly, TV enabled even those without the time or inclination to read books or newspapers to inform themselves politically and engage in the political process. Thus mass democracy was born—and, simultaneously, died. Mass broadcast media were embraced by newly mass-democratic governments, less as vehicles for deliberation and debate in the style of print, than as propaganda. Edward Bernays wrote his seminal book on this topic in 1928. Nor was this the only way in which post-print media undermined the idealized, rational political subject of Peak Literacy. Just as the spread of literacy changed how people thought, so, too, did its supplementation (or replacement) by broadcast media. Marshall McLuhan was among the first to see this: His 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, postulated the emergence of a “global village” enabled by mass broadcast media. Walter Ong developed McLuhan’s ideas, characterizing the emerging effect of TV and radio as a “secondary orality,” which is “sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print.” Such a culture might, Ong suggested, retrieve the characteristic features of oral cultures, such as a reduced emphasis on analytic thinking or factual accuracy.
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David White at aeon.co, Demonology.
Demonology, the ‘science of demons’, has always comprised two complementary facets – the one theoretical and the other practical. If one was to battle one’s enemy effectively, one first had to know him, his human confederates, his disguises, his ruses. I use the singular here, because in many of the world’s religious traditions, the demonic hordes were held in the thrall of a single great embodiment of evil, an arch-rival to a benevolent God or gods. The relationship between the demonic host, the pandemonium, and its master was envisioned in several ways. Quite often, the demons were simply a protean swarm, overwhelming by their sheer numbers, visiting natural disasters and plagues upon the land, and madness, sickness and death upon their human victims. In some cases, however, the pandemonium was imagined as a hierarchy whose structures mimicked those of human institutions or divine pantheons. For the monks of medieval Catholicism, the organisation of the demonic host replicated its own hierarchy.
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Thomas White in FIRST THINGS, The Future of Catholic Theology.
About ten years ago I found myself in China teaching a weeklong philosophy seminar on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Present were forty or so young philosophers from premier Chinese universities. Also present, acting as observers in the back of the room, were members of the Chinese Communist Party. I taught in jacket and tie, but everyone knew that I and one other Dominican professor were priests. The students talked to us more openly at the meals, at crowded tables, where it was not easy to be overheard. Most were non-Christian, but almost all were studying Western philosophy. I will never forget asking one of them why he was present at the seminar, given that the philosopher we were studying was a medieval Western Christian thinker. He said, “Father, the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s severed contemporary Chinese culture from its historical past, its traditional ethical resources. Today we know that communism is a failed system, but what we don’t know is the meaning of life. We wonder whether it might have something to do with Christianity.” I found these words prophetic. We, too, have been severed from our historical past. It’s all too common to think that nothing can exist beyond the secular order, which represents a kind of stasis, the endpoint of Western history. And this mentality is increasingly attended by discontent, a sense that things aren’t working. This Chinese student, however, emerging from the most intensive attempt in history to stamp out religious belief, was aware of a profound and genuine possibility, a condition of naivete, that of a person seeking meaning, open to a religious proposal.
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Anonymous in NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, From the Rooftops of Tehran.
Yesterday I lay on my back on the bed, smoking. I never smoke in the bedroom, but war, like wine, sorrow, and love, erases one’s most basic disciplines and pushes aside all pleasantries. And I hope you do not consider this a sanctification of war, but I want to say that in a time of war, like a time of love, one can sometimes become more beautiful, more courageous. A few moments before I lit my cigarette, H. texted me a photograph of a police station—almost completely demolished, but even from its ruins I could tell which police station it was. I knew immediately why she had sent me the photo. Many years ago, when we were both young, before the morality police was instituted, we were arrested by the Basij forces. H. and I had been walking together, not even holding hands, and the two of us were taken to this police station. I still remember the painful details of that day because it was the first time in my life that I was humiliated and insulted; the worst part of it was that the bearded Basiji guy, with his foul breath, lashed out with the most disgusting words at the girl who was the first love of my life, and it hurt me that her beautiful wild eyes, her soft skin, and her mischievous attitude were exposed to such despicable, medieval behavior. We were kids who loved poetry and cinema, and we still didn’t fully understand what power and ideology and violence could mean in a totalitarian state.
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On a weekday night in Riyadh, close to 10 p.m., the lobby of a newly built multiplex hums with the low roar of a city that has discovered the movies. Teenagers cluster around concession stands, families drift toward escalators, and showtimes stretch deep into the early hours — 1 a.m., 2 a.m., even later — timed to a climate that keeps life indoors until after dark. Inside one auditorium, a late screening of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple unspools before a mixed crowd. The graphic, R-rated horror film embraces themes of satanism and references to a notorious British pedophile. But a woman in a burka settles into her seat, apparently unperturbed, balancing popcorn and a drink discreetly beneath the fabric. She watches without hesitation as the gore plays out onscreen. The only overt censorship involves nudity — a particularly well-endowed zombie, naked in the original, is given a discreet pair of digitally added cycling shorts. The scene feels jarring only to outsiders; for local audiences, it is simply another night at the movies. Eight years ago, there were no cinemas in Saudi Arabia. Today, there are multiplexes, comedy festivals, esports arenas and a Red Sea International Film Festival red carpet designed to rival Cannes.
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Omar Abdel-Baqui in WSJ, Inside Saudi Arabia’s Budding Dating Scene.
Some young people are now being more overt on their dating profiles, revealing their faces and personal details including names, interests and universities attended. Some post photos of themselves in traditional Saudi dress: for men a thobe and headdress, for women an abaya and headscarf. It is becoming more common in some places to see mingling between men and women who aren’t relatives, socializing that was anomalous a decade ago. Young Saudis, including one attending a desert rave held in the middle of the night in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, said their generation was still fumbling around to figure out how to manage more casual interactions or find spouses outside the purview of parents. “My generation in Saudi grew up secluded and in gender-segregated schools,” said Tala Alarfaj, a 23-year-old from Saudi Arabia’s East Coast. “People are still getting used to the concept of dating.” While secret dating has long been a reality, the cost of getting caught by agents from Saudi Arabia’s religious police, who once but no longer frequently roamed the streets, turned young lovers away.
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Ira Stoll at freebeacon.com, The 1,400 Year-Old Sunni-Shia Religious Split Is Shaping the Iran War.
Iran is a Shiite country with some Sunni minorities. The Sunni-Shiite split is frequently a stronger explanatory dynamic in the Middle East than settler-colonialism or U.S. imperialism or oil or whatever other favored explanation the press or academia are pushing. Some of these tensions are visible also in the U.S. internal reaction to the campaign against Iran, which has been more muted than the opposition to Israel’s military actions against Hamas terrorists in Gaza after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Many of the U.S. mosques and activist groups are Sunni-aligned, and, perhaps as a result, they haven’t been organizing massive protests against the U.S.-Israeli strikes against the Iranian regime. An exception is the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, a Shiite Muslim who inaccurately described the U.S. and Israeli actions as "catastrophic" and as an "illegal war of aggression." Brigadier General (Reserve) Amir Avivi, the founder and chairman of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum, said the Iranian regime was "acting in an hysterical way … maybe in order to create some kind of pressure on the U.S.," but actually counterproductively, upsetting the UAE and pushing Saudi Arabia more into the U.S.-Israel camp.
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Jonathan Cheng in WSJ, The Surprising Source of North Korea’s Enduring Power.
In Beijing, just two days before boarding his flight to Pyongyang, Graham told reporters that he still didn’t understand the North Korean overture. The preacher pleaded ignorance, but Pyongyang was a familiar place for the Graham family. In the 1930s, his wife, Ruth Bell Graham, had attended high school there, on a sprawling Presbyterian mission compound on Pyongyang’s west side. Missionary kids like Ruth attended school there amid some of northern Korea’s earliest and most prestigious Western institutions: its first missionary-run high school, college and modern hospital, as well as a Presbyterian seminary, the world’s largest. Then there were the churches, none greater than Pyongyang’s Central Presbyterian Church, which was so packed each week with congregants that missionaries feared “the walls will begin to bulge out”; Wednesday evening prayer meetings could draw crowds of 1,400 people. The city of Pyongyang became so dominated by Christians that it acquired a nickname: the “Jerusalem of the East.” By the time Rev. Graham boarded his plane in the spring of 1992, the Jerusalem of the East was no more. The devastation of the Korean War and decades of Kim Il Sung’s rule had systematically wiped out the churches and Christian schools, driving 300,000 Christian believers in the North into hiding—or across the thirty-eighth parallel to the U.S.-backed South. That historic exodus helped turn South Korea into a stronghold of the Christian faith and one of the world’s biggest exporters of missionaries. Meanwhile, Pyongyang became staunchly religious in its own way, with symbols and rituals that revolved around one man.
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D.G. Hart in WSJ on Jonathan Sheehan’s book, On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular.
Western history is replete with disputes over sacrifice. Early Christian writers condemned pagan sacrifices—those of the Gauls, who killed children, or the Taurians, who sacrificed foreign visitors to satisfy the gods. The sacrifice of Jesus and its commemoration in the Mass became a major theological and sometimes military contest between 16th-century Protestants and Roman Catholics. Perhaps less familiar to most readers but no less absorbing is the book’s treatment of colonial Spanish missionaries’ encounter with Aztec rituals. The Aztecs’ system of rites, Mr. Sheehan observes, constituted “an active culture of sacrifice on a scale and complexity to rival that of Greece and Rome.” Yet the theme of human sacrifice persisted as a subject for deep rumination even after advances in science, industry and wealth insulated the West’s creative classes from ancient and medieval rites. Early proponents of republicanism in both the U.S. and France, for instance, employed sacrifice as an ideal of genuine citizenship. One Connecticut pastor in 1784 preached a sermon that compared the Continental Army’s soldiers’ deaths to martyrs whose blood should “be ever treated as sacred.” Not much later, Maximilien Robespierre claimed to be ready “to trace with my blood the route which must lead my country to happiness and to Liberty.”
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Adam Gopnik in NEW YORKER, World on a String.
It was Paul, almost single-handed, and against the suspicions of Jesus’ original disciples, who journeyed and pleaded and made the faith portable. Quite a character! So much so that, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the director Frank Capra was eager to make a movie of Paul’s life starring Frank Sinatra. And though it sounds ridiculous when you say it, the casting actually makes sense. Whoever Paul was, he must have had charm, energy, and intensity, and been equally popular with the first-century equivalent of bobby-soxers and of made men. Raphael’s great image of Paul preaching in Athens, arms outstretched, crowd rapt, could be the Chairman on tour in Greece…. In the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul strains to show that the Gentile mission and the Jerusalem mission, though carried out by mutually mistrustful parties, belong to a single divine design. His mode of argumentation resembles nothing so much as Marxist dialectics, sinuously arguing from opposites and forcing a desired conclusion upon unobliging texts. He rereads God’s promise to Abraham as if it had always presaged the later turn to “all nations,” boldly reinterpreting the Jewish patriarch’s “seed.” Although everyone had taken it to mean Israel, Paul writes instead, “The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel to Abraham beforehand, saying, ‘In you all the nations shall be blessed.’ ” On that basis, he arrives at the bracing conclusion: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, and there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” The power of an orator who can, in this way, fuse feeling and doctrine is immense. (After hearing Trotsky speak in the nineteen-tens, my great-grandfather’s brothers were converted from Orthodox Judaism to a Jewish-inflected Bolshevism.) ...Wherever he appears, Paul is not a saint in his cell but a messenger at work—a man of close shaves, sudden escapes, and high-stakes debates. His tales and truths have, for all their apocalyptic mysticism, a decidedly practical charge that makes them exceptional in the New Testament or almost any religious literature. It would be a good movie! You can almost see the toughened, sinewy Sinatra of the fifties as Paul, with Sammy Davis, Jr., as the suspicious James and Dean Martin as a slightly befuddled Peter.
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Arwen Nicholson at aeon.co, There’s No Planet B.
For decades, children have grown up with the daring movie adventures of intergalactic explorers and the untold habitable worlds they find. Many of the highest-grossing films are set on fictional planets, with paid advisors keeping the science ‘realistic’. At the same time, narratives of humans trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth have also become mainstream. Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our worries behind? No. All these stories are missing what makes a planet habitable to us. What Earth-like means in astronomy textbooks and what it means to someone considering their survival prospects on a distant world are two vastly different things. We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere. Without them, we cannot survive. Astronomical observations and Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one we evolved with. There is no plan B. There is no planet B.
Mid-town Manhattan, NY.
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| Photograph by Joe Carducci |
Obituaries of the Issue
Michael Cronin (1943-2025)
On a beach on the South China Sea, Cronin stepped on a land mine, losing his eyesight and most of his left foot. Although Cronin’s eyesight did return, doctors insisted that his left foot be amputated. After learning to walk on crutches, Cronin got a prosthetic foot and returned to work for the CTA. However, Cronin still dreamed of being a Chicago cop, and a friend, Joe Mackey, who was a police bodyguard for Mayor Richard J. Daley, made the case for Cronin, who already had passed the Police Department’s written test. The first Mayor Daley advocated for Cronin, and in 1971, Cronin reported to the Police Academy, where he passed the physical and the agility test…. Cronin’s entire career involved working in aggressive plainclothes units on the street. Within six months of joining the force, Cronin joined an 11th District tactical team on the West Side, one of four tactical units of which he was part. By the early 1980s, Cronin had become a gang crimes specialist, and he was a recognizable figure on the West Side, both by his name and reputation but also by his face, seen on street corners and in gangways from which he often would pop out. “Out there, there are very few heroes and very few legends about anyone except for big gang leaders, rich drug dealers and a few policemen,” Cronin told the Tribune in 1989. “I’ve been around here a long time, so they know my name.…” he said. Cronin’s approach was old-fashioned police work: long hours, never letting up on his quarry and listening to people from the neighborhood, including potential informants. “I was always a very good listener. … Your best source of information is the person in the back seat,” Cronin told the Tribune in 2006.
Because Wood threw the knuckleball, which is thrown far slower than a major league fastball, there was less strain on his arm, and his managers could, and did, put him in the starting lineup again and again. Wood, a left-hander, led the league in innings pitched twice and games started four times. In 1972, he threw 376⅔ innings, the most by any pitcher since 1917. He started 49 times that season, the most since 1908…. Wood had thrown the knuckleball a bit when he was young, though as a professional he had pitched conventionally. The White Sox at the time had one of the greatest knuckleballers, Hoyt Wilhelm. He and Wood began working on the knuckleball together, and Wood decided to try it as his go-to pitch, throwing it about 80 percent of the time…. Baseball fans sometimes wonder if the pitch should be taught to more players, perhaps including those with injury problems that have slowed their fastballs. “If you are trying to learn the pitch because you’ve had an injury, it’s too late,” Wood told Fan Nation in 2019. “The knuckleball isn’t something that’s learned overnight. I threw it for years, from when I was in high school. It takes that long to get used to it. What major league organization is going to give a pitcher three or four years to master the pitch?”Mario Ríos Montt (1932-2026)
The worst phase, a period called “La Violencia” in Guatemala, occurred during the 17-month rule of his older brother, who came to power in a coup in 1982. There were some 86,000 victims on his watch, many of them Mayan Indian peasants from the Ixil ethnic group. About 4,000 villages were targeted or destroyed by the general’s military, and perhaps 1.2 million were driven into exile as a result of his scorched-earth anti-insurgency campaign. Before being toppled by his own defense minister in 1983, General Ríos Montt delivered a body blow to the guerrilla insurgency. President Ronald Reagan praised his crusade against communism and called allegations of human rights abuses a “bum rap.” When the reckoning finally began to unfold, years later — the war ended in 1996 with a peace treaty between government and rebels — the two brothers were more at odds than ever. To his surprise, the unassuming bishop was made head of the Guatemalan church’s human rights office. His appointment came in 1998, just after ecclesiastical authorities had published a damning accounting of the military’s atrocities. His predecessor in the human rights office, Bishop Juan José Gerardi, had been bludgeoned to death with a concrete slab in the garage of a church parish house, two days after presenting the report, “Guatemala: Nunca Más!” (“Guatemala: Never Again”), on April 24. Three army officers were convicted of Bishop Gerardi’s killing in 2001. Bishop Ríos Montt’s brother Efraín was making a political comeback in the 1990s, first as a member of Guatemala’s Congress, and then as its president….His father was a well-off shopkeeper bankrupted during the Depression. As a boy, Mario attended Mass every day; his older brother was said to have been keen on military parades. Efraín later became an evangelical Christian.Gladys West (1930-2026)
She was nervous about how a Black woman who had grown up on a tobacco farm would mix with the overwhelmingly white and male scientists at the center. She felt reassured, however, by the neat brick buildings and the friendly guard who checked her ID at the gate. He called her “ma’am.” It was the first time, she thought, that a white person had called her “ma’am.” In her 42-year career as a civilian employee of the Navy, West learned to program computers and solve mathematical problems she could never have imagined in graduate school…. The research was vital for creation of the Global Positioning System, or GPS, a priority for the U.S. military in the 1970s and 1980s. Because most of the work was classified as secret, West avoided talking about her job outside the office. Her children had no idea she had a role in creating GPS. Even West never suspected that her work would contribute to a world-changing technology so ubiquitous that many people would be literally lost without it. In 2009, her daughter and son-in-law, Carolyn and Barry Oglesby, gave West a Garmin GPS device to use in the Volvo car she shared with her husband, Ira West. She found the Garmin interesting but continued to rely on maps.Thanks to Jay Babcock, Matt Carducci, Mark Carducci, Andy Schwartz, Jane Stokes, Steve Beeho...
Quarry Pond, Naperville, Ill.
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