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Photograph by Joe Carducci Ricky Sepulveda (1956-2026) Ray Farrell Goodbye Ricky Sepulveda. We were in the band Supersession, later renamed Psing Psong Psung. Raymond Pettibon created the band as a collaboration with musicians to play music to accompany his spoken word texts. Our iteration of the band started simply. Raymond called me saying, “I’m starting a band. You’re my bass player. My friend Ricky sings and plays guitar. We’ve written a bunch of songs. Dirk Vandenberg is the drummer.” My reaction? As Lou Reed sang, “I wanna play footpaull for the coach.” Raymond gave us dozens of xeroxed texts – mostly songs yet to be set to music, a few short plays, and texts that could  Raymond’s Supersession project did not begin with us. Blast First! Records in the UK released a picture disc album spoken text backed by Supersession. We were aware that there was another assemblage in L.A. that Raymond played with occasionally. Our paths crossed a couple times. That’s another story. Our band was very different. Ricky wrote songs. We did not jam. We didn’t have solos. Raymond lived in Hermosa Beach. I lived in Glendale. Ricky and I got together in Ro Hurley’s garage on weekend afternoons. I think it was in Goleta. A distinct memory that I wish I’d photographed – there was a van parked across the street with a rear bumpersticker that read: “Drumming And Sex Are What I Do Best.” Ricky set up a mic, guitar, Casio keyboard and rhythm machine. He recorded basic demos with overdubs. The recording quality was basic – the songs sounded like early ’70s sound-on-sound recordings where some of the tracks degrade with overdubs. I loved the songs and enjoyed coming up with bass lines. His early demo of “Pip Of A Pipe” sounded like a lost song by The Incredible String Band.  At some point Ricky and I joined Dirk in his shed on the grounds of a South Bay airport. Raymond regularly came to practice, a few times with guests – Top Jimmy came with a pal. I think we tried playing a blues with him. Another guest was Pat Smear on second guitar; this was pre-Nirvana, of course. We played a bunch of shows in L.A. and Long Beach including a KXLU broadcast. We opened for fIREHOSE on several gigs. Jack Brewer, our biggest booster to the end, had us on his bills a few times. Except for the Roxy, all of those clubs are long gone. After a bit, the band fizzled out. I got married, had kids, moved to SF, NY, and finally Encinitas. Flash forward to 2016: Raymond called to say that he’d like to re-engage in order to finish the project. This means getting the band back together. I called Dirk. He says, “Yeah even if we only record B.I.B.L.E., it’s worth it.” We’re on the same page. (B.I.B.L.E. stands for Basic Instruction Before Leaving Earth.) We’d been listening to our demo for the past twenty years. Of course Ricky's in. Mike Watt offers his prac pad in the Angels Gate Cultural Center at the former Ft. MacArthur. He's been using this pad since fIREHOSE days. Mike helped start a Pedro recording studio, Casa Hanzo, owned and operated by Pete Mazich. We recorded the album titled Only Fan with Peetzo at the board. Over the years Ricky had developed several of our original songs, and wrote music for a bunch more. I drove up to Pedro for band practice. Ricky and I spent four or five hours practicing in his living room before we hit the band’s pad. Rick and I are the same age. We liked a lot of the same pre-punk music. It was like 1974 to me – as if I was in high school meeting someone who had the same taste in music. He’d try different arrangements – he’d say, “Let’s do this one like the Bobby Fuller Four, or do you know that Kevin Ayers song? Let’s use that rhythm.” He surprised me every visit, playing a cover while I set up. He never announced the songs, he just played them. One day it was John Cale’s “Hanky Panky Nohow.” Another time, I was surprised to hear him sing an obscure song by Harry Toledo called “John .jpg) Like many bands, we had a short list of cover songs we might do to fill out a live set. Rick worked out arrangements of Walker Brothers’ “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” The Rutles’ “I Must Be In Love,” and a few T. Rex tunes including the obscure b-side “Raw Ramp,” one of the handful of “R” rated Marc Bolan tunes. I was thrilled to work on that one. Ricky loved this story: The A-side, “Bang A Gong” was a hit while I was in high school. We had dances in the gym. The DJs were two old balding guys in suits. They brought hundreds of singles. All were in the current top or past Top 40 charts. I requested the b-side of “Bang A Gong” and got it. It was fun to read the room while it played. I thought I was sending a subliminal message to the girls. The song is on YouTube. It took a long time to record our album. Raymond initially thought it should just be us playing live in a room. At the time it wouldn’t work in the studio. But that was a good thing because Ricky loved writing multiple guitar parts. The album highlights his songwriting chops. We could be a different band on every song. 
DuPage River, Naperville, Ill
Jon Ryskiewicz (a.k.a. Jon E. Risk) 1958-2025 Jon died in Holland on July 3, though he was so isolated there that authorities didn’t manage to inform his brother Joseph (a.k.a. Joseph Pope) for five weeks. Jon had been living in what he referred to as “old people’s housing” in Leiderdorp, between Amsterdam and The Hague. He’d stayed in Holland when their band, Angst, broke up in 1989 after their last European tour. Angst was formed in 1980 in San Francisco by Jon and his younger brother Joseph. They’d had a band prior to that in Boulder, Colorado called The Instants (1978-79) who have two songs on the Rocky Mountain Low compilation documenting the Colorado punk scene of the late 1970s which Joseph put together in 2009. In Boulder Jon befriended Eric Boucher (a.k.a., Jello Biafra) in high school in 1974 and Jon was putting most of his energy into playing the guitar as well as meeting the German girl who would become his wife, while Joseph worked at a Peaches Records shop and saw live music and roadied for The Ravers, who became The Nails after moving to New York. .jpg) Jon was a great singer-songwriter and didn’t require a second guitarist. He sang half the band’s songs and he’d retained Kentucky accent traces that Joseph did not. The band was more classically song-based rather than rock jam-oriented and over the course of their records the blending of their voices improved. They played with an active rhythm section of Joseph on bass and Michael Hursey (RIP) and later Andy Kaps on drums. Their self-contained trio with brother harmonies in songs with varied country, punk, pop and rock influences were what impressed Frank Black at The Rat in Boston when he was putting his band, The Pixies, together. Angst made it look easy and anyone who tries knows that it is not easy. Frank has been generous about crediting them as important inspiration.  After I left SST they did two more albums, Mystery Spot with Michael, and Cry for Happy with new drummer Andy. Both were recorded with Vitus Matare, formerly of The Last and he brought out more of the band’s pre-punk side which goes all the way back to their California childhood interest in surf bands. I’d see Angst play at their Chicago dates and they’d worked up a version of a lyric I had written for a D. Boon solo album that never happened. Mike Watt grabbed “Jesus and Tequila” for the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime but never got to the other two I’d written so I gave the lyrics to “Better to Die” to Joseph and they were playing it in their set when I last saw them live. I was trying to write perfect country lyrics and I thought that one sounded just about perfect coming out of Jon’s voice. 
 Perhaps Abe Gibson had the last significant email exchanges with Jon for Abe’s forthcoming SST Records book, Here to Blast Your Concept - An Oral History of SST Records, due in late 2026 or early 2027. Abe writes: “To be honest, Jon made me nervous. He was really angry – at Joseph, Frank Black, SST & the world in general that he felt owed him more or something like that.”  “I know that Joseph loved Jon a lot & I think he was hoping that if I got him talking about Angst then maybe he’d reach out & the rift would be healed.... Joseph has told me a lot of stories about how they grew up & one really sticks with me: One time as a teenager or even pre-teen he got the chance to see Hoyt Axton perform. Jon had already been playing guitar & after the gig Pope went home and told Jon – ‘You’re better than him!’ I think it’s one of the sweetest things I’ve ever heard & illustrates how much Pope believed in his brother’s talent & wanted to encourage it.” Fate threw a curve as Jon didn’t die of alcoholism or related misadventure, he died of some cancer-like stomach ailment, something Jon kept from Joseph and likely anyone else it may have mattered to (an ex- wife, an ex-girlfriend in Holland, ex-bandmates, Jan Wenner...). While back in Boulder caring for his mother Jon did tell Joseph, “I would never have left my bedroom if it wasn’t for you.” Joseph tells me he nearly fell off his chair. One hopes Jon rests in peace, but also that his brother in music and life Joseph can now move on in peace. Angst is right.  [Angst zu Hause flyer by Jon E. Risk ca.1981; Angst photograph by Naomi Petersen ca. 1984 – Michael, Joseph, Jon; Black Flag flyer by Raymond Pettibon 1982; Dead Kennedys flyer by Kevin Clark 1984; Angst with van on "Pillar Of Salt Tour" in front of Systematic Record Ditribution photograph by Mike Hill 1984 - Joseph, Jon, Michael; Days Like These CD cover/insert artwork by Jon E. Risk 1997]
Morton Arboretum, Lisle, Ill.
 Reaction Shots 2.0 Joe Carducci -Materialists make the best zealots. -Dictators no longer leave power for exile thanks to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. -The New York Times used to ground its political temper in arts and letters but today that coverage is too thin to keep anyone grounded. -Democratic Party elders think the radicals are committing political suicide while the radicals think the elders are sell-outs; they should agree to agree and start over. -The Republican Party’s center of gravity moved to its insurgents while the Democratic Party’s center of gravity resisted its insurgent reformers and is unchanged. -The American Left tied to the public sector is thereby and unknowingly tamed. -Watching television isn’t as easy at it looks. -Social media isn’t as easy as it looks. -A.I. isn’t as easy as it looks. -Full disability is tenure for the working class. -Birth control and abortion trims numbers on the Left and incentivizes the teachers union to fail the Right’s children. -Judging by social media memes Native Americans now favor immigration. -Conversion therapy is directionally incorrect, while transitioning is directionally correct. -The 1950s American ideal was the social product of the 30s New Deal, cemented in place by the World War II mobilization, but the Democrats disowned “the 50s” while the Republicans who fought the New Deal adopted that ideal. -Modern medicine’s ultimate effect is to dull the Darwinian scythe and weaken the species proving the point of the Amish, determined to submit to God’s will and maintain a hardier consistency contra nature. -The original meaning of the Russian term, Intelligentsia, describes the cultural class that thinks it is thinking. -Marxists’ current hope is that A.I. will allow the state the information transfer now accomplished by markets and will increase productivity to eliminate work, requiring a universal basic income and finally making men as gods. -The ultimate achievement of feminism seems will be leaving the planet to Islam. -Those who tout American Exceptionalism politick as if we’re not, while those who deny America is sui generis argue as if we are. -The intellect prefers running along well-trod ruts because these restrict the apparent number of variables at play. -A.I. will allow writers to produce nonfiction without detaching from the infostream, which will mean the books produced will refuse to attach to the grand historical narrative for the politick of the moment. -Private corporation reporting standards imposed on the public sector would trigger an autogolpe.
-It’s racist to deny the undocumented a chance to partake of all this racist country has to offer.
Snowy Range, Wyo.
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From Joe Carducci at the Wyoming and DuPage desks...
Paul Galizia in FT, Love, lies and punk.
The revolution began in a rundown house at 31 King’s Avenue in Clapham, London, where Westwood and McLaren sat by a bar-heater, eating beans on toast and downing whisky into the night. She’d just left her marriage, moving into the house McLaren shared with Westwood’s brother, an art student. McLaren was initially horrified that a young mother had moved in, her son in tow, but soon began lecturing her on the politics and power of art and fashion. She was 24, he was 19. It was 1965. Unlikely as it might have seemed, McLaren’s anarchic ideas echoed Westwood’s dissatisfaction with her upbringing in a small Peak District village, the broken marriage and her lack of formal education. “I was a coin and he showed me the other side,” Westwood, who was training as a teacher and selling costume jewellery on the side, told her biographer Jane Mulvagh. “I was intrigued by her,” McLaren once recalled, “because she hung on my every word.” It was next to the bar-heater that one of the most culturally consequential relationships of our time took shape. McLaren told Westwood about his childhood, which still gave him screaming nightmares loud enough to have had him evicted from previous lodgings. As they drank, he shared things he rarely told anyone. It was a childhood he would try to untangle to the end. “Don’t forget I’m a war baby; that means I don’t have feelings towards family. Mine, for what it’s worth, fell apart after the war when I was one year old.” McLaren’s father left the family in 1947. His mother, said to be “man mad”, was absent. His grandmother — mad mad — raised him. She kept him out of school until the age of 10, made him sleep in her bed and threaded silk ribbons through his pubic hair to ward off girls. She drilled into him that to be bad was good because to be good was boring. Mischief became his virtue and mothers an issue.
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Duncan Seaman in VIVE LE ROCK, Singles Going Steady.
Geoff, a Cambridge graduate, had worked as a drama teacher before opening the first Rough Trade record shop in Ladbroke Grove. His inspiration, he says, was San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, the home of the Beat writers. “Also, growing up in London, when I was at school at the Angel Islington at lunchtime we’d sometimes go down to Soho and go to Musicland and to One Stop Records – and the great thing about those was that they were the great import shops in the centre of London, so they had all the latest American records which was very exciting, but they also had listening booths and you could take the records in and listen to them, and I loved that. Then as time went on, record shops got more like Wimpy Bars where you were encouraged to be in there for, like, ten seconds and get out really fast, and I really didn’t like that about it. I always thought record shops should be a hub where you could hang around and listen to the music and maybe meet someone and talk to people behind the counter, so that’s what I wanted the shop to be like.”
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Jonah Raskin in COUNTY HIGHWAY on Dennis McNally’s book, The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties.
The Diggers are the heroes of The Last Great Dream. “The primary reason for asserting San Francisco as the most influential source of countercultural ideas was the presence of the Diggers, whose critical thinking about freedom and materialism put a certain intellectual spin in the often-vague effect of the San Francisco Scene,” McNally writes.... But while the Diggers deserve a lot of credit for creating the counterculture in San Francisco, they were not the only group that helped to define that world. The Beats were a decisive influence as anyone who reads The Dharma Bums or Howl recognizes.
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David Dusenbury in WSJ on Bernd Roeck’s book, The Quest for Perfection Is Stunting Our Society.
True perfection is an illusion, just as true safety is an illusion. Seeking perfection keeps us from exploring, even when we sense that we would be happier and more fulfilled if we did so. It makes us live smaller lives and stymies our creativity, both as individuals and as a society. It is the enemy of art. I am a musician, so it is in the musical arena that this phenomenon disturbs me most. The point of a concert is for performer and audience to share something genuine and unrepeatable. A great performance is one in which the player has absorbed the music so deeply that his choices seem not like choices, but inevitabilities. This inevitability can and should change from performance to performance. The preparatory work should be freeing, not constricting, revealing and making accessible the music’s limitless possibilities. The player should discover the work anew in each performance, and make the listener feel the full wonderment of that discovery. I have been to many such concerts. Each has included wrong notes, or other events that the performer might rue the next day; each has been exhilarating, consciousness-altering. I have been to many more concerts where I felt that the player’s primary goal was to avoid mishaps, to play the piece exactly the way it went in the practice room the day before. I remember little to nothing.
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John McWhorter in NYT, The Dusty Boxes of Aging Papers That Changed American Music and My Life.
Now referred to, with some awe, as the Secaucus find, it was one of the most important discoveries in the history of American musical theater. I feel lucky to have grown up in its wake. A great many of these scores were brought back up on their feet; some have also been recorded. Immersing myself in their sound has been one of my very favorite aural experiences. This was music possible only in America: music that imposed the tones, harmonies, instruments and rhythms of jazz on the traditional structure of a light classical orchestra. It was the product of communal, subconscious genius — spontaneous, emergent and gorgeous. It first made me swoon when I was 20 and listened to the magnificent cast recording of the 1983 revival of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s 1936 musical “On Your Toes.” The recording was conducted by Maestro John Mauceri, using the original orchestra parts. Check out the title song: It opens with a dance teacher bringing in the instruments one by one (“First, we’ll hear the two pianos!”) as if to introduce the modern listener to the aural ingredients of the style. Then the lead singer chimes in and the dancers tap to no fewer than six choruses, each served up with different instrumental colorings, getting denser and hotter with each one. Since hearing it that first time, I have considered those eight minutes to be one of the apotheoses of recorded sounds. Thirty years later, a friend surprised me by expressing the very same view. But when full-length recordings of shows caught on in the 1940s, Columbia updated several of the old hits in the 1950s to the tastes of the period. Those tastes, including ballads in sludgy, sentimental tempos, have rarely aged well.
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Aris Roussinos at unherd.com, Kubrick’s masterpiece has found a new audience.
n the film, the widowed Lady Lyndon, whose fortune and surname Barry would forcefully acquire, represent the outsider hero’s conquest of English high society. Yet in the novel, the Lyndons themselves — their title, castle, vast estates and fashionable townhouse — are Irish. All the wealth driving the novel’s plot, the fortune gained and lost, has been extracted from the wretched tenantry. The novel is suffused, as the film is not, with the rural outrages of a mobilising peasantry: Thackeray was drawing, without realising it, a society stumbling its way towards revolution. None of this Irish context, keenly felt by Thackeray, survives Kubrick’s adaptation. Yet even when pushed to the background, Ireland’s history has a way of reinserting itself to the foreground: Kubrick’s year-long location shoot in Ireland was brought to an abrupt end by an anonymous threat, purportedly by the IRA. The director would never film outside southeast England again.
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Sebastian Milbank in THE CRITIC, Welcome to the Omnistory.
At some level, just as with smartphones, porn and social media, we know that the “adult” activities that we find sophisticated arguments to defend are morally and psychologically corrosive. There is a reason that the plotlines of the Omnistory don’t make their way into children’s TV and it’s not just because of the sex and violence. We want our children to develop moral sensibilities, we want them to understand the difference between right and wrong, and we know that they are naturally attracted to the clear and compelling structures of traditional storytelling. Like the nihilism lurking in many modern horror films, we enjoy and feel catharsis at the telling of the Omnistory, because we are both attracted and repelled by it. We fear that it is the truth, but it is still too ugly a truth for us to want to communicate it to our children.
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Will Pavia in TIMES OF LONDON, Why the billion-dollar cowboy behind Landman and Yellowstone rules TV.
Sheridan was born Sheridan Taylor Gibler Jr and grew up in Fort Worth. His father, Sheridan Taylor Gibler, a cardiologist, “raised his [three] children on Monty Python, John Waters and Clint Eastwood films”, according to an obituary. Dr Gibler and his wife, Susan, bought a weekend ranch in a little place called Cranfills Gap, near Waco, when Sheridan was eight and as a teenager he worked on a neighbouring ranch. There was also a spell with pneumonia, when he was 13, when he was confined indoors watching westerns. “You see the same one nine times and you start kind of studying it,” he told Andrea Fappani, an Italian equestrian who sold Sheridan several horses, and who hosts a podcast called “Along for the Ride.” Sheridan acted in high school, after he was injured playing for the school’s American football team. In Austin, where he found work as a landscaper after dropping out of college, he was approached by a model scout, who sent him to audition in Chicago. This led to spots in advertisements and parts in a few soap operas in New York. He moved to Los Angeles, where he was able to make a living as an actor, keep his hand in as a horseman, and begin dating a model from Wyoming named Nicole Muirbrook. It was only when Muirbrook was expecting their first child that he began to fret about his prospects.... He was appearing in a crime drama called “Sons of Anarchy” where his salary lagged behind the other actors. The producers made clear to him, in a fraught conversation, that they could not imagine him commanding a higher one. He quit, sold his horses and moved with Muirbrook into a smaller flat, storing much of their stuff in his horse trailer that he parked at a friend’s house. Then he began to write scripts.
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Dasl Yoon in WSJ, North Korean TV Tries a Light Dose of Realism.
The result is a new television series that honestly depicts the everyday corruption that is rife in North Korea. Local officials embezzle grain, farmers fail to meet quotas and people bribe their superiors. It also portrays family conflict in contrast to official support for family harmony. The series has proven a hit with domestic audiences, according to state-run media. “The show captivated its audience because, above all else, it was true to life,” according to an article in a North Korean monthly magazine. “We have never seen Party failings and personal failings depicted so starkly,” said Chris Monday, an associate professor at South Korea’s Dongseo University who studies Russia and North Korea. The 22-episode “A New Spring in Paekhak Plain” was the first new TV show to air in the Kim regime since 2023. The North Korean mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment. The story centers on a Workers’ Party official fighting against corruption and bureaucracy at Paekhak farm in the western county of Sinchon, to help the village produce more crops. His wife is disappointed to learn the family is moving to a rural area, where infrastructure isn’t well developed and fewer students have the opportunity to attend university. People offer bribes for favors and one woman pressures her son’s girlfriend, who is from a different social background, to leave him. Such plotlines hit on the social disparities between people in the city and rural areas, as well as widespread distrust of corrupt party officials. Meanwhile, the romantic subplot involves flirtations and heartbreak, unusual themes in North Korean TV. Typically, characters in North Korean dramas show emotion mostly when expressing loyalty or commitment to party ideals.
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Slavoj Zizek at unherd.com, The family values of the radical Left.
It’s telling that The Company You Keep is about the hero’s legal rehabilitation, about his effort to become a normal citizen with no dark past haunting him. He’s grasping for a happy ending, and the film provides on in Hollywood style: the main figures go public, are soon liberated, and find a place in society. In One Battle After Another, however, as the title of the film clearly indicates, the battle goes on: Willa takes the torch and continues the underground struggle. There is another change: in The Company You Keep, Weathermen fight against the imperialist system itself, while in One Battle After Another, the contemporary descendants focus on helping the illegal Latino immigrants to avoid expulsion and find a place in the US homeland. In other words, they are not working against the system as such, they work to enable immigrants to integrate into the system.
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Blake Smith at aeon.com, Harold Rosenberg exhorted artists to take action and resist cliché.
Like many on the Left, he was bitterly discouraged by the Soviet Union’s show trials and purges, its pact with Nazi Germany and its invasion of Finland. He was disappointed, too, by the narrow, doctrinaire attitudes of Stalinist-inspired activists on the US art scene, and the bland, backward-looking art subsidised by the WPA. Its murals of heroic farmers and workers resemble nothing so much as the art promoted by Stalin and Hitler in their own regimes. The Popular Front, in politics and aesthetics, seemed to have reached a dead end. The artists in Rosenberg’s circles shared his sense of disillusion. One of his closest friends in the 1930s was Barnett Newman (1905-70), a substitute public-school teacher who painted in his free time. Like Rosenberg, Newman was a Marxist of an increasingly freethinking bent. He ran for independent mayor of New York City in 1933, promising that ‘men of culture’ like himself would deliver ‘action’, the term that would later become Rosenberg’s watchword. Those capable of ‘aesthetic experience’, Newman argued, should rally together in defence of the common man against the moneyed interests. His platform offered free art schools, ‘a civic non-commercial art movie studio’ and similar programmes. By the end of the decade, Newman lost faith in the Left and in politically engaged art. In a conversion that would inspire Rosenberg, Newman destroyed his paintings and began to search for a new style that would lead to his breakthrough work of austere abstraction Onement I in 1948. Yet, as Newman would later recall, Rosenberg pressed him throughout this crisis to ‘explain’ what his new style, devoid of any figures or symbols, ‘could possibly mean to the world.’Appearances notwithstanding, abstract painting, as a response to political impasse and the apparent collapse of hope for a progressive Left, was still political – indeed, Newman told Rosenberg that, if properly interpreted, his work would mean the end of ‘all state capitalism and totalitarianism’. However much its message now required deciphering with help from a sympathetic intellectual like Rosenberg, Newman’s painting could still be a political act. As the two friends navigated their mutual loss of ideological certainty, Rosenberg was helping Newman find a new artistic method – while inventing for himself a new persona as an art critic.
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Jon Baskin & Michael Lipkin at substack.com, Is Humanistic Knowledge Useless? .
One irony, I think, of calling on the humanities to be more “useful” or “interesting” is that the past fifteen years or so has seen probably the widest circulation of academic ideas to the wider public I’ve known. The fascism debate, common-good conservatism, the reawakening of the labor movement, the destruction of the gender binary, all began their life as ideas in the humanities. On their own merits, too, I would argue that, in the last thirty years – notwithstanding some falloff in the past ten, because of the sheer turbulence of the job market – the humanities are better than they’ve ever been. To me, at least, since deconstruction, readings have become more iconoclastic and creative, as well as more tolerant of textual ambivalence. Since New Historicism, the zones of research around literature and philosophy have expanded in all kinds of thrilling ways. And it seems inarguable to me that the post-Theory, pre-wokeness moment, stretching from the late Eighties to the early 2010s, was better suited to meet the political and cultural situation of the present than the wider world of ideas was.
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Sam Kriss in the NYT, Why Does A.I. Write Like... That? .
A.I.s really do like the verb “delve.” This one is mathematically measurable: Researchers have looked at which words started appearing more frequently in abstracts on PubMed, a database of papers in the biomedical sciences, ever since we turned over a good chunk of all writing to the machines. Some of these words, like “steatotic,” have a good alibi. In 2023, an international panel announced that fatty-liver disease would now be called steatotic liver disease, to reduce stigma. (“Steatotic” means “fatty.”) But others are clear signs that some of these papers have an uncredited co-author. According to the data, post-ChatGPT papers lean more on words like “underscore,” “highlight” and “showcase” than pre-ChatGPT papers do. There have been multiple studies like this, and they’ve found that A.I.s like gesturing at complexity (“intricate” and “tapestry” have surged since 2022), as well as precision and speed: “swift,” “meticulous,” “adept.” But “delve” — in particular the conjugation “delves” — is an extreme case. In 2022, the word appeared in roughly one in every 10,000 abstracts collected in PubMed. By 2024, usage had shot up by 2,700 percent. But even here, you can’t assume that anyone using the word is being puppeted by A.I. In 2024, the investor Paul Graham made that mistake when he posted online about receiving a cold pitch. He wasn’t opposed at first. “Then,” he wrote on X, “I noticed it used the word ‘delve.’” This was met with an instant backlash. Just like the people who hang their identity on liking the em dash, the “delve” enjoyers were furious. But a lot of them had one thing in common: They were from Nigeria. In Nigerian English, it’s more ordinary to speak in a heightened register; words like “delve” are not unusual. For some people, this became the generally accepted explanation for why A.I.s say it so much. They’re trained on essentially the entire internet, which means that some regional usages become generalized. Because Nigeria has one of the world’s largest English-speaking populations, some things that look like robot behavior might actually just be another human culture, refracted through the machine.
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Max Tani at semafor.com, “Iterate through’: Why The Washington Post launched an error-ridden AI product.
But in an industry whose currency has historically been trust, most news brands have been leery of turning their core relationship with their readers over to unreliable LLMs. The Post is the exception, racing to experiment with live tools. In February, the company launched “Ask The Post” AI, a bot that answers users’ questions about the news but can make basic errors. The company also plans to roll out an AI writing coach called Ember to readers who want to submit columns to its new opinion app, according to The New York Times. Leaders on the editorial side of the paper expressed alarm about the AI podcast errors, which some in the newsroom said would be fireable offenses if made by a human journalist on staff. In a message to staff shared with Semafor, Post head of standards Karen Pensiero wrote that the mistakes have been “frustrating for all of us,” while another editor noted that it was a particularly poor time for the Post to produce shoddy content, given scrutiny from the Trump administration. “It is truly astonishing that this was allowed to go forward at all,” one Post editor wrote in Slack messages shared with Semafor. “Never would I have imagined that the Washington Post would deliberately warp its own journalism and then push these errors out to our audience at scale. And just days after the White House put up a site dedicated to attacking journalists, most notably our own, including for stories with corrections or editors notes attached. If we were serious we would pull this tool immediately.”
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David Denby in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Ronnie Grinberg’s book, Write Like a Man: Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals.
The Trillings were never party members, but many of their friends had been and they had participated in cultural events organised by party members. After the war, Trilling could not have been mistaken for a radical. But the annoyance directed at him was a hidden acknowledgment: the New York group, with the notable exception of the democratic socialist Howe, was moving to the right. They were still liberals (most of them), but they had shed any pretence of radicalism. During the war, they had been intellectually inert. At first, they were mostly isolationist, worried that US participation would lead to fascism at home. They repeated the old Leninist analysis of the new war as a battle between competing imperial powers. They underestimated Hitler and Stalin (Arendt straightened them out on this). Except for Kazin, who was sure of it early in 1942, they didn’t register the extent of the Jewish slaughter. Kazin remained bitter about this for the rest of his life. The wartime numbness was succeeded by a half-embarrassed, half-relieved acceptance of their unequal, philistine, dishevelled but vibrant country. America had lost 400,000 men in the war, but had not been invaded; the rudiments of democracy had held, the rudiments of a welfare state had been established, racism was now openly discussed as a national scandal. And, as the US became the bulwark against Soviet expansion in Europe, the Marshall Plan was a masterstroke. Most seriously, American capitalism, as the New York group reluctantly acknowledged, was more flexible and adaptable than anyone had imagined, absorbing and selling back any form of rebellion as an exciting new lifestyle. Modernism, they thought, was dissolving into parody and spectacle. Trilling’s abandonment of radical critique was necessary to his own equilibrium, but some of the others insisted they were merely confronting reality. Alienation, the fallback state of American artists and intellectuals for decades, began to seem smug or irrelevant (Bellow mocked it), an ersatz version of the French intellectuals’ war against the bourgeoisie. The abandonment of critique was accompanied by increasing individual security: jobs and sometimes tenure in the universities. They had decent book contracts, well-paying articles in the New Yorker or Esquire, vacations in Europe rather than in the Berkshires. Zionism didn’t take hold among them: America was Zion enough.
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David P. Goldman in FIRST THINGS, Is America a Creedal Nation? .
Sanctification of ethnicity can only end in tragedy. Rosenzweig wrote that“the love of the peoples for their own ethnicity is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death . . . They foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.”That is why the tragic heroes of the Old World, from Oedipus and Antigone to Hamlet and Wallenstein, act out the tragic fates of their peoples. Rather than wait for the tragic denouement, the American lights out for the territory. That helps explain why Americans never mastered tragedy as a literary form. Eugene O’Neill, our most self-conscious tragedian, produced plays that aspire to tragedy but betray the structure of a situation comedy. The Iceman Cometh is Cheers with murder and suicide, and A Long Day’s Journey into Night is Leave It to Beaver with addiction and tuberculosis instead of a window broken by a baseball. America has no ethnicity and therefore no fear of extinction. We look forward to the journey rather than backward to our roots. Our journey is the Christian journey to the Promised Land, which is bound up with the journey to America: the Pilgrims’ journey to New England, the flight of slaves to the free North, the westward migration of the landless.
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Sasha Mudd in PROSPECT, The lost music of childhood.
More and more now, when I walk in on my daughter mid-soliloquy, the spell breaks. She goes silent, embarrassed. The self-consciousness that defines adulthood flashes across her face like a shadow. If I am present, she cannot help but see herself from my point of view, and the freer, more unbounded self she was experimenting with retreats. It is precisely this fluid, exploratory approach to self- and world- making that I will miss: that creative plasticity that stiffens once the judging gaze of the other becomes internalised, and once the authority of the outer world comes to script the inner. The day is nearing when my daughter will trade her unicorn-kitten with wings for the goal of becoming a vet or a pilot. And with that shift, her speech will narrow to its officially sanctioned purpose—communication. Contemplating this change feels like watching the door close on a magical kingdom. The older I get, though, the more I think that kingdom never disappears completely; it just becomes harder to find our way back to it. Winnicott agreed. He thought that writing, painting, singing and praying all offer a return, however fleeting, to the original porousness we experience between our inner states and the complex, objective world we inhabit.
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Leo Robson in NEW STATESMAN, Laura Mulvey returns to the male gaze.
Taking on Hollywood was always going to attract dissent. When Mulvey wrote her essay, it was considered sacrilegious in parts of the French and Anglo- American intelligentsia to imply that there was any limit to the sophistication and self-awareness of commercial movies. The critical movement known as auteurism had been developed by critics like François Truffaut in the magazine Cahiers du cinéma to prove that directors working with qualified freedom and within narrow genre constraints had produced great works of art. Mulvey herself admits she spent the Sixties – her twenties – “following the spirit of the Cahiers du cinéma”. But by the Seventies, Mulvey, like many cinephiles of her generation, found it hard to reconcile her love of Hollywood movies, an aesthetically radical venture, with emerging forms of political radicalism. So her most famous statement functioned as an attack on “the traditional film form” which had made her want to be a critic in the first place. There was one strain of Hollywood cinema that squared the circle, enabling Mulvey to be both auteurist and feminist. This was the genre concerned with women and family life known as “melodrama”....
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James Kimmel Jr in WSJ, This Is Your Brain on Revenge.
We’ve all experienced the urge to punish people who violate social norms or mistreat us. Most of us control these urges, perhaps briefly fantasizing about the deliciously terrible things we’d like to do before moving on with our lives, leaving the pain of the past where it belongs, in the past. But not everyone is so successful, not all grievances are the same or experienced in the same way, and we’re not always able to control our revenge cravings. Human history is filled with horrifying examples of compulsive revenge seeking, from cruel acts of interpersonal violence to nation-sized conflicts. Now that we know the addictive underpinnings of revenge-spurred violence, we also can begin to use addiction-recovery approaches to counteract it. These might include public health campaigns and school programs to warn about the addictive danger of revenge, as well as addiction treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, self-help programs and possibly anti-craving medications, similar to those in the GLP-1 family that are so successful against overeating. Neuroscience has also recently shown a simpler and more potent method of addressing revenge addiction and violence. It’s called forgiveness. A brain-scan study at UCLA found that participants who chose to forgive rather than retaliate reduced activity in their brains’ pain network and reward circuitry, and increased activity in their self-control circuitry. This suggests that forgiveness is a freely available wonder drug that reduces—rather than merely covering up— the pain of grievances, eliminates revenge craving and bolsters executive function. We now have neuroscience support for the ancient forgiveness teachings of Jesus and the Buddha.
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Pranav Baskar & Leily Nikounazar in NYT, Iran Promotes Trans Surgery Forced on Its Own.
Iran became a pioneer in gender transition operations by forcing procedures on L.G.B.T.Q. Iranians. Desperate for cash, the Islamic republic is hoping to attract trans patients from around the world. For 40 years Iran has performed more gender transition surgeries than many other nations, largely a result of pressuring gay and gender-nonconforming citizens to undergo unwanted operations or risk the death penalty. Now, faced with an economy crippled by war and sanctions, the Islamic republic is promoting its expertise to a global audience, hoping to attract transgender foreigners with the promise of inexpensive surgeries packaged with luxury hotel stays and sightseeing tours.
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Andrew Sullivan in NYT, Gay People Won. So Why Does It Feel As if We’re Losing? .
As I watched all this radical change, I wondered if I was just another old fart, shaking my fist at the sky, like every older generation known to man. Why not just accept that the next gay and lesbian generation has new ideas and has moved on and old-timers like me should just move aside? ...But this new ideology, I believed, was different. Like many gays and lesbians — and a majority of everybody else — I simply didn’t buy it. I didn’t and don’t believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology. My sexual orientation is based on a biological distinction between men and women: I’m attracted to the former and not to the latter. And now I’m supposed to believe the difference doesn’t exist? I’m more than happy to accept that there are some people — not all that many — who don’t fit in that binary and want to be protected from discrimination and allowed full access to medical interventions in order to live lives that are true to who they are. And I’m with them all the way. After all, I, too, am a part of a minority; most people live their lives governed by heterosexual desires. Thanks to the gay and lesbian movement, I’m not being asked to. But abolishing the sex binary for the entire society? That’s a whole other thing entirely. And madness, I believe. What if I redefined what it is to be heterosexual and imposed it on straight people? Or changed what it means to be a man or a woman, for that matter? Then it ceases to be accommodation of a minority and becomes a societywide revolution — an overreach that would soon lead to a potent and sane backlash, against not just trans people but gay men and lesbians as well.
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Ben Appel in WSJ, ‘Transgender’ Kids Usually Grow Up Gay.
Childhood nonconformity with sex roles is one of the most dependable predictors of homosexuality in adulthood. Every major study to date confirms that the majority of children who express confusion about their sex will desist by the end of puberty and grow up to be gay or lesbian. Preventing a child who expresses confusion about his sex from going through puberty prevents him from reaching the stage where that confusion might naturally resolve. Doctors who “lock in” this confusion with drugs and surgery then congratulate themselves for getting the diagnosis right. Adult gays and lesbians don’t need studies to tell us any of this. So many of us can look back on our own childhoods—how different we felt from our peers, and how strongly we preferred the toys and activities of the opposite sex.
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Leor Sapir at thefp.com, ‘We’re All Just Winging It’: What the Gender Doctors Say in Private.
At WPATH’s 2022 annual conference, two contributors to the Eunuch chapter, Thomas W. Johnson, a professor emeritus of anthropology at California State University, Chico, and Michael S. Irwig, a physician with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, presented their work. (This video was first released by journalist Wesley Yang.) Johnson explained that the causes of eunuch identity include “desire to be not male, but. . . not. . . female either,” [or] “feeling that [one’s] genitals are not a proper part of [one’s] body” and “an extreme fetish or paraphilic disorder.” Irwig, an endocrinologist, said that he became interested in this topic because “a lot of eunuchs do get castrated” and seek ongoing treatment from doctors like him. An image from a conference presentation. During the Q&A session of the eunuch talk, the only objection came from an audience member who thought Johnson and Irwig’s use of the word castration was “stigmatiz[ing].” Another audience member, Thomas Satterwhite, a prominent gender surgeon, recalled how Johnson helped him overcome his doubts ahead of the first castration he performed on a gay man. “Since then, I do perform a fair number of these procedures as well as other forms of genital and gender- affirming surgery that’s, um, quote, unquote, nonstandard,” Satterwhite said. Satterwhite, who founded Align Surgical Associates in San Francisco, a private clinic specializing in gender surgery, wanted to know how the field can “get more surgeons on board” with such procedures. Irwig responded that the inclusion of a Eunuch chapter in WPATH’s latest Standards of Care, “is so huge because it’s now in the official guidelines.” There are, Irwig said, a lot of doctors and surgeons who don’t want to be seen as being “rogue and doing things that. . . may get them into trouble or that. . . may get their licenses pulled.” The new guidelines, he said, help “alleviate some of their concerns.”
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Pamela Paul in WSJ, The Growing Divide in the Rainbow Coalition.
There have always been fault lines within the rainbow coalition. But in the past 10 years, ever since the right to gay marriage was secured in 2015, further divisions have emerged and expanded, along with growing rancor and vitriol. All of which belies the overriding image of inclusion touted by advocacy groups. “For those of us who work in this field as advocacy- focused political activists, these are hard conversations we have to have as a movement,” said Cathy Renna, communications director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, which was founded in 1973 as the National Gay Task Force. “To me, this is often about fear of the other, and nobody understands that better than queer people.” As for gay people who don’t believe in gender identity, Renna says, “It’s fine not to believe in it, but why do you have to impose what you believe on everyone else?”
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Colin Wright in WSJ, Evidence Backs the Transgender Social-Contagion Hypothesis.
I shared a link to an article from the Guardian with the accompanying quote: “Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare confirmed a 1,500% rise between 2008 and 2018 in gender dysphoria diagnoses among 13- to 17-year-olds born as girls.” My commentary was brief: “Two words: social contagion.” Within hours, colleagues denounced me as a “transphobic” bigot. Anonymous activists emailed universities to poison my job prospects. A professional job board even published mock job listings warning others not to hire me. My academic career never recovered. But I wasn’t making an offhand remark or comparing a group of people to a disease vector, as some accused me of doing. I was referring to research published by Lisa Littman, a physician and researcher formerly with Brown university, who had coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in a 2018 peer-reviewed paper to describe a newly emerging cohort of adolescents – overwhelmingly girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria or even sex nonconformity – who suddenly began describing themselves as transgender, often after friends in their peer groups did the same. Dr. Littman proposed that this pattern was best explained by social contagion, meaning the spread of ideas or behaviors through peer influence. The term isn’t an insult; it’s a well-established sociological concept used to describe how trends such as eating disorders and even suicide clusters can spread.
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Helen Andrews at compactmag.com,
The Great Feminization.Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization. The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before? Possibly because, like most people, I think of feminization as something that happened in the past before I was born. When we think about women in the legal profession, for example, we think of the first woman to attend law school (1869), the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court (1880), or the first female Supreme Court Justice (1981). A much more important tipping point is when law schools became majority female, which occurred in 2016, or when law firm associates became majority female, which occurred in 2023.... The same trajectory can be seen in many professions: a pioneering generation of women in the 1960s and ’70s; increasing female representation through the 1980s and ’90s; and gender parity finally arriving, at least in the younger cohorts, in the 2010s or 2020s. In 1974, only 10 percent of New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent. Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46 percent. So the timing fits. Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.
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Stephen Presser in CHRONICLES on Ilya Shapiro’s book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites.
What are the consequences of the feminization of America’s legal profession? It is politically incorrect to pose such a question; after all, feminist theory now teaches us that gender is socially constructed. But what if that’s wrong? Psychologist Carol Gilligan led a groundbreaking study into gendered approaches to dispute resolution, finding that little boys and girls approached dispute resolution “in a different voice.” As she put it in 1985, boys speak “about equality, reciprocity, fairness, rights,” while girls speak “about connection, not hurting, care, and response.” In an even more intriguing observation, Gilligan pointed out that the results of social science research change if they are limited to male subjects rather than both sexes:If you want to support what has been in the Western tradition since Plato—that is, the notion of a unitary truth, that virtue is one, that its name is justice, that it is part of the sense of one right answer upon which we all, in the end, can agree—then you will select an all-male sample. It is a very interesting thing. The inclusion of women will challenge this tradition and make it impossible to sustain a unitary view.Gilligan also observed that, in the right environment, men can learn to speak in the “different voice” of women. What this means, I think, is that many women and some men in the now-coeducational legal academy have adopted the “woman’s voice.” They’ve come to believe that objective rules for determining merit do not exist, and that the left’s ethic of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is better than anything else on offer—and especially better than the uncompromising meritocracy favored by male traditionalists.
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Ivan Krastev in FT on Julia Ioffe’s book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy.
How relevant was feminist tut-tutting about the rights of women after the fall of communism for a country in which women got the right to vote already in 1917, the right to divorce in 1918, and where children born out of wedlock had the same legal rights and status as their legitimate counterparts? How could pro-choice rhetoric à l’américaine resonate in a country in which as many as 80 per cent of women had had at least one abortion? Ioffe may be right. Russia needs a revolution, a feminist revolution perhaps, and one rooted in its own progressive tradition. But how different is her dream for feminist revolution in a country falling in love with conservatism than Lenin’s dream of proletarian revolution in the absence of proletarians.
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Jessica Grose in NYT, Why the Free Birth Movement’s Popularity Threatens Public Health.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Free Birth Society tends to attract the kinds of mothers the Make America Healthy Again movement targets: women who are suspicious of the medical system because of truly bad and disempowering experiences and who decide that they can trust only themselves and their own research or intuition. The entire medical freedom movement — which believes the government has no role to play in public health — rests on similar Hyper- individualistic foundations. It would be easy to just dismiss the free birthers as bonkers, which I have to admit is my knee-jerk reaction. But with the medical freedom movement making inroads into our government in the form of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and gaining power by the day, it’s worthwhile to look back at the history of medical freedom in the United States. This history helps explain how we got into this very dark period, when medicine has been thoroughly politicized, experts are suspect and an unfortunate few are enticed by the promise of a return to an idealized nature, putting themselves at unnecessary risk. They seem to forget that nature can be cruel.
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Caroline Kitchener in NYT, The MAHA-Fueled Rise of Natural Family Planning.
Since the birth control pill gained widespread acceptance in the 1960s and 1970s, mainstream political voices have rarely expressed opposition to the medication celebrated for giving women more control over their reproductive lives. For decades, only certain traditional Catholic and Christian circles publicly rejected the pill and other forms of contraception, believing that some methods came too close to abortion, or that the act of intercourse should always have the potential to bring about new life. But a practice known as “fertility awareness” or “natural family planning” — originally devised over 50 years ago by doctors with ties to the Catholic church — is now gaining support among a broader group of social conservatives and adherents of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement. The rising interest comes as many prominent conservatives are encouraging women to abandon birth control pills and other forms of hormonal contraceptives.
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Camilla Cavendish in FT, Corporate egg freezing won’t break the glass ceiling.
A 2024 BBC investigation found that 32 out of 78 fertility clinic websites in the UK did not make it clear what a patient’s chances would be of actually having a baby. Most advertised successful thaw rates of 80-95 per cent, but didn’t spell out that because there are many stages to go through before an embryo can be implanted, the chances of having a baby are actually very much lower. There can also be additional costs for storage, insurance and IVF procedures. I’ve met many fertility doctors who believe passionately in what they do; and what they can do is wonderful. But this is a very different kind of benefit to a discounted subscription, or a holiday in Venice. At its most cynical, this feels like yet another way of trying to control women’s bodies, dressed up as a perk. And that’s not what a perk should be.
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John Burn-Murdoch in FT, Why progressives should care about falling birth rates.
A striking study published this year by a group of US researchers comes to a similar conclusion. At best, falling birth rates will have a negligible impact on global temperatures and come far too late to affect climate goals. At worst, the net effect is to slow progress, putting the planet on a dirtier, warmer path. This brings me to the second part of the progressive population paradox. Recent studies find that the left’s lack of concern over falling birth rates is likely to be pushing societies in a more conservative direction. Extending previous analysis of the interplay between political ideology and family formation, I find that the assumption that birth rates are falling across society in general is not really true. From the US to Europe and beyond, people who identify as conservative are having almost as many children as they were decades ago. The decline is overwhelmingly among those on the progressive left, in effect nudging each successive generation’s politics further to the right than they would otherwise have been. This may ultimately mean more curtailing of individual freedoms, not less.
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Elaine Moore in FT, What the internet did to Gen Z’s love life.
But the real villain is the internet. Growing up with access to an online content free-for-all appears to have produced a generation with progressive attitudes and puritanical habits, who are increasingly likely to be teetotal, prefer not to see nudity in films and opt out of relationships. Dr Amanda Gesselman, research scientist at the Kinsey Institute, has described the change as a shift towards “self-sourced intimacy”.
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Emily Glazer, Katherine Long & Amy Marcus in WSJ, Why 94 is the new 54 for moguls.
In 2018, UBS Wealth Management asked 5,000 people who had at least $1mn in investable assets how long they expected to live. Fifty-three per cent thought they would reach 100. Among those with billions to invest, expectations are probably higher. The current lot of tech tycoons, minted by their twenties, is set to be the longest-lasting in business history. Their main limitation – mortality – may eventually be lifted. They certainly have no intention of bowing out at the tender age of 94. British and French prime ministers will come and go like fruit flies in comparison.
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Eva Fu in EPOCH TIMES, China’s 981 Project: Dark Connections Behind Quest for Longevity.
Chinese communist cadres get free premier health care in VIP patient wards for those at the top, a select panel of nutrition experts deliberates on what they should eat, Chinese media reports show. In 2006, Chinese state media quoted a former deputy Chinese health minister as saying that four-fifths of Chinese health care dollars serve the 85 million Chinese Communist Party members. The official later walked back the statement after a nationwide backlash. The Epoch Times cannot independently verify the claim.
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John Burn-Murdoch in FT, France and Britain are in thrall to pensioners.
Ageing populations are hardly unique to the shores of the English Channel. In fact, France and the UK have some of Europe’s more favourable demographics. The problem is how they have been handled, and in the primacy of the pensioner in both societies. In the UK, the problems are twofold. First is the trashing of both major parties’ attempts to move some of the eye-watering costs of elderly care on to those most able to afford it. Britain’s health and care bill for over-65s has doubled since the turn of the millennium, and absent commensurate increases in revenue is both squeezing out spending on infrastructure and increasing borrowing. Second is the “triple lock’” on the state pension, which guarantees that payments rise each year by whatever is the highest out of inflation, wage growth or 2.5 per cent — an extraordinary deal which guarantees that pension spending growth outpaces pensioner population growth, and ensures elderly living standards increase at a faster rate than everyone else’s. In addition to slowly suffocating Britain’s public finances, this has created a society where children are now more likely to live in poverty than their great-grandparents. The picture across the channel is even more extreme. Not only do French pensioners receive larger cheques from the government than their counterparts anywhere else in the west, they start getting them several years earlier. The result is a situation in which over-65s now have higher average incomes than the working age population — unique both internationally and in France’s own history.
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Valentina Romei in FT, Ageing populations will lower living standards, warns study.
France recently had to suspend reforms to raise its pension age from 62 to 64 in the face of bitter opposition. Other governments are also facing similar resistance to policies designed to address their demographic crises. The EBRD study echoes a warning earlier this year by the OECD, which estimated that demographic pressure will reduce GDP per capita growth in the 38-country grouping from 1 per cent a year in the 2010s to 0.6 per cent a year on average over the 2024‐60 period. The EBRD suggests that 42 per cent of the over-65s, mostly in the regions in which it invests, would like governments to prioritise public spending on healthcare and 25 per cent on pensions, but only 18 per cent mentioned education. Older voters also have stronger anti-immigration sentiment, both in the EBRD regions and advanced European economies. “The time to act is now before demography closes off your options. Because there may be this spiral that’s being created as voters get older, as leaders get older, they care more about issues of interest to the elderly, in particular pensions, and therefore it becomes harder to do any pension reforms,” said Javorcik.
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David Pilling in FT, Demographic discontent is a ticking time bomb.
Tanzania is the latest African dictatorship masquerading as a democracy to shoot its own children. In a country that portrays itself as a stable backwater fit for surf-and-safari holidays, the ruling party has overseen a bloody crackdown on election day protesters, using live ammunition on young people objecting to an electoral farce. In what has become known as Tanzania’s “Tiananmen Square moment”, testimony pieced together by human rights groups, including the UN Human Rights Office, suggests that several hundred people were shot in cold blood. Many of them had not yet reached their 20th birthday. Samia Suluhu Hassan, the incumbent, was hurriedly sworn in this month for a second presidential term at a military parade ground devoid of a cheering public. Electoral authorities had declared she won 98 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 87 per cent – an exercise in magical realism that would make a novelist blush.
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Rupa Subramanya at thefp.com, This Land Is Not Your Land.
Bal Batth has lived in a modest, two-story house here since 1974, when he was 8 years old. His parents bought seven acres after immigrating from Punjab, India, by way of England. By day, his father was a paramedic. On days off, his parents farmed blueberries and vegetables. “My kids were born here. There’s a whole history here,” Batth, 59, told me while sitting in a living room with walls covered in family photos. He always hoped to pass the property down to his children, as his mother and father did for him. In October, though, Batth received an alarming letter in the mail from the Richmond mayor’s office. The letter announced that a ruling by the Supreme Court of British Columbia could “negatively affect the title to your property.” After an 11-year legal battle and a 513- day trial that is the longest in Canadian history, a judge ruled in August that the indigenous Cowichan Nation holds “Aboriginal title” over 800 acres of land— including a swath along Road No. 6 that includes Batth’s house and fields. The decision was a seismic shift in Canadian property law, declaring for the first time that indigenous land rights are greater than the rights held by private owners like Batth. It seemed unimaginable, but it was real.... The Cowichan Nation called the judge’s ruling a “historic victory” and praised “the generations of leaders who fought with . . . one mind, one heart, and one spirit . . . ever since the Crown began its unauthorized alienation of our lands” in the 1870s. Tom Isaac, a well-known expert in indigenous law who advises businesses and governments, said that the judge’s ruling “erased 99 percent of the words” on property titles held by the current owners in the black zone. “It makes us the only jurisdiction in the Western Hemisphere where a supposedly guaranteed and indefeasible land title is defeasible.”
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Barton Swaim in WSJ, Our ‘Digestible’ Immigrants.
The Somali fraud story is in some respects akin to the so-called grooming scandal in Britain, in which gangs of mostly Pakistani men sexually abused young girls, even as the country’s government and news media looked the other way, terrified by accusations of racism or “Islamophobia.” In the Twin Cities, state authorities couldn’t rouse themselves to stop the theft—hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned from Medicaid, housing and other welfare programs. It is to the great credit of the U.S., under administrations of both parties, that it didn’t allow the perpetrators’ race, religion or country of origin to hinder the prosecution of crime. Both scandals, in the U.K. and Minnesota, raise a question most of us would rather not consider: that of large-scale immigration from predominantly Muslim countries.... From Mr. Rosen’s essay: “Bad actors within the community would approach potential coconspirators without any fear of betrayal. Even the people who said no to phenomenal offers of tens of thousands of dollars in free taxpayer money didn’t inform the authorities that a major, community-wide fraud against the public was in progress. Potentially criminal oddities . . . went almost totally unreported to anyone in government. The FBI learned about Feeding Our Future”—a nonprofit that was one of the main vehicles of fraud—“from a whistleblower in the Department of Education, and not from any of the scam’s ground-level witnesses or participants.”
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Louise Perry in FIRST THINGS, Indigenous London.
There’s a speech that’s often circulated by British nativists on social media, including those who cheered on this summer’s disorder.... The speech is taken, curiously enough, from a BBC drama first aired in 2001 and now impossible to get hold of. From what I can gather, the character who delivers it was written as a villain, the head of a shadowy far-right organization responsible for a string of violent crimes. Here is our old cockney villain again—a fictional character we all know so well. It’s odd, then, that the speech is so poignant. The character – Laurence – describes his family tree, going back centuries in Bermondsey, an area of cockney London adjacent to the Thames. A family of Georges, Edwards, and Victorias, all based in the same area and working in the fish trade. “I stand here, in front of you, as a representative of all of them,” he says, speaking for a family“who understand well their own country. Who understand even better their own capital, London town, as we used to call her. As we strolled in her parks, as we marvelled at her palaces, as we did business in the city, went west for a dance, took a boat on the river. The pale ale and eel pie of old London. The London of my family for as many generations as I know.”Put these words in the mouth of any other indigenous character, and that character would immediately be understood by a BBC audience as tragic. A new audience of online nativists has chosen to read this piece of fiction against the grain, I think because George expresses their complaint with unusual clarity. As the speech details, cockney animosity is mostly not directed at immigrants. These newcomers are understood as instruments of a class warfare waged by the British elites, a view that was frequently voiced by the cockneys interviewed in The New East End. Those cockneys spoke bitterly of the “middle-class do- gooders” who had provoked communal tensions by favoring immigrants over natives and then labelling as racist anyone who resisted the new regime. The crowds in Epping, Canary Wharf, and Diss keep telling journalists much the same thing.
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A.M. Fantini in EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE, Interview with Marc Jongen.
That the Germans, of all people, want to teach the U.S.A. about democracy, and that the U.S.A. – of all countries – is now teaching Europe the lesson of the multipolar world order is not without its world-historical irony.
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Michael Hanby in FIRST THINGS on Paul Kingsnorth’s book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.
In an age when transnational capital “parrot[s] slogans from a leftist framework,” the left is dominated by the middle classes, and the cultural elite seek technocratic means to police populist movements, it is clear that that the technocratic left and global capitalism amount to the same thing: “engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine.” Had Kingsnorth written his book a few months later than he did, he might have seen more clearly that the Machine’s war on reality and its destruction of “customary ways of living” is transforming America into a nation of sociopaths—angry, murderous spirits “liberated” from their bodies and from human attachments and affections.
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A.M. Fantini in EUROPEAN CONSERVATIVE, Interview with Nicola Procaccini.
You’ve stated in the past that the greatest crisis is a cultural one. While politics is downstream of culture, culture itself is downstream of the spiritual. Are today’s political battles actually expressions of deeper spiritual battles? I believe what unites European nations is, above all, their roots – a common cultural and spiritual root. Otherwise, it would be hard to understand why we’re together. It’s not just a geographical matter, but above all one based in culture and identity. We Europeans have common roots, including Christianity and the Benedictine legacy. I’ve often criticized the fact that the European Parliament has rooms dedicated to everyone except St. Benedict. Europe’s patron saint. He’s not just a saint; through Benedictine abbeys, he enabled our civilization to survive, be preserved, and be known. St. Benedict also coined the word ‘parliament,’ yet there’s a sort of damnatio memoriae regarding him and Christianity in general, particularly Europe’s patron saint – an ostracism to which I deeply object.
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Barton Swaim in WSJ, The Weekend Interview with Allan Massie.
Mr. Massie recalls a scene from the Italian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” (1958). The novel follows the latter years of Don Fabrizio, a haughty and dissolute but dutiful Sicilian prince during the Risorgimento, the period in the latter half of the 19th century when the modern state of Italy was coalescing, modernizing and democratizing. In the novel, Chevalley di Monterzuolo visits the prince and asks him to join the nascent Italian Senate—the great modernizing body of the new era. Don Fabrizio declines the offer and launches into a memorable defense of unreconstructed Sicilian society. “Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep,” the prince says—Mr. Massie quotes the line, in translation—“that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts.” The simile is arresting: modern European proponents of welfare-state liberalism likened to a dying class of 19th-century hereditary nobles, confident in their rightness and desperate to rest. The socialist outlook—I use the word in the broadest sense— may inspire struggle in the immediate present, but the practical goal is tranquility, perpetual rest in an equality of outcomes: an attitude not so different from that of a predemocratic, precapitalist European noble hoping to keep his subjects more or less content with little gifts from his largess.
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Tucker Carlson in SPECTATOR, The strange death of England.
Here’s what you recognize. The people of Great Britain are going through a series of crises, and they’re all internal. Drug use, alcohol use. Their appearance has changed. People are no longer as well kept, the streets, the landscape is not tidy anymore. It’s got lots of litter and graffiti in some places. To technocrats, these are not meaningful measures of anything. Who cares if you’ve got graffiti? Does that affect GDP? Well, maybe. Maybe not, but it’s definitely a reflection of how people feel about themselves.... This is the behavior of a defeated people. This is what it looks like when you lose. This is what it looks like when you’re on your way out to be replaced by somebody else. This is what it looks like to be an American Indian.... Read any account of early American settlers, people who were pushing west, who came into contact with Indians and yes, were often scalped and forced to eat their own genitals and roasted over open fires. I mean, these were cruel people. But even the people who were in danger of being murdered by them respected them. Because the Indigenous Americans had a great deal of self-respect. They had what we call dignity. And now, hundreds of years later, the opposite is true. The poorest people in the United States are American Indians.... Why? Because the Iroquois and the Navajo weren’t impressive? No, they were the most impressive.... And now they are by any measures, the saddest people in the United States. Why is that? Some inherent genetic predisposition to patheticness? They couldn’t deal with modernity? Well, they probably could. They were defeated. And in some deep, the deepest way, they wound up destroying themselves. And it’s not unique to them. That’s the point.
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Gareth Roberts in SPECTATOR, Britain is frozen by fear.
The fear of violence is the enormous elephant in the room of Britain. When you see, for example, Jess Phillips harassed at her election count last year by supporters of the local ‘Gaza independent’, you begin to see why she behaves in the peculiar way that she does. She is terrified. The government’s own working party to define ‘Islamophobia’ is, we hear, in trouble. A phobia, after all, is an irrational fear. It’s taboo to admit that we’re actually frightened, to the point of inertia, by Islamism. None of us has ever had to square up to anything like this. We’d really rather not. So we look for crumbs of solace, chuntering on as Starmer does about diversity being our strength, our marvellous British values of tolerance, etc. The horrors of the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 in Israel are so far beyond our modern western understanding of the world that we simply cannot comprehend them. Last year the Henry Jackson Society polled British Muslims and found that 39 per cent disputed the truth of the events, and that 46 per cent sympathised with Hamas. Only 28 per cent said it would be undesirable to outlaw homosexuality. Demographic forecasters say the UK’s Muslim population could treble between 2017 and 2050. How is that going to turn out, when so many Muslims hold these kinds of views? Is being afraid of this really irrational? A ‘phobia’?
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Ryan Zickgraf at unherd.com, Who created our cultural Dark Ages? .
W. David Marx argues for the revival of old norms, but he overlooks who was largely responsible for their demise in the first place. For most of the 20th century, flouting norms was a New Left pastime — from the counterculture to punk, queer avant-gardes, and the art world. The point was to Question Authority, mock propriety, scandalize the bourgeoisie, and liberate the individual. And they won. So decisively, in fact, that by the aughts, the bourgeois values were simply ... gone. Outside of new social taboos created by the race-and-gender-obsessed professional-managerial classes, there was nothing left to rebel against. By rejecting moral language in the name of liberation, the Left ceded moral authority to the market, argues Ana María Cisneros in Damage Magazine. “We surrendered to the only morality the market recognizes: preference and purchase.” ...Yet Marx makes the case that if we’re in a Dark Age, it’s because our artists are now conservative and lack a “genuine countercultural ethos.” Indeed, Blank Space makes the absurd claim that the early-aughts hipster era — the American Apparel, Vice, Williamsburg, Terry Richardson, “indie-sleaze” years — was Patient Zero of the new conservative culture. His evidence is that the early-aughts hipster scene was snarky, cynical, and displayed a kind of libertine hedonism lacking utopian imagination, prefiguring the amoral MAGA-friendly art scene of post-Covid lower Manhattan. Sure. But that makes the early aughts post-political, not conservative.
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Jacob Savage at compactmag.com, The Lost Generation.
Like me, Matt moved out to Los Angeles in 2011—but unlike me, by 2014, he’d landed a job as a staff writer on a network TV series. “I thought I would be one of those mediocre white jabronis who just floats to the top and works forever,” he said. He earned more money from that single episode of network TV than he’d seen in his life. He felt he was on a familiar trajectory: write some specs, network around, get your break, and then work steadily until you get your own show. But he couldn’t outrun the culture. In the fall of 2014, the Oscars nominated only white people for acting awards, and #OscarsSoWhite was born. The New York Times ran story after story. The Academy promised reform, as did the studios—and they delivered. In 2015, Matt was looking for a follow-up job as a staff writer or story editor. “I couldn’t crack anything,” he recalled. “It was like, almost immediate... There was a real disillusionment because I thought it was just kind of me for a while.” It wasn’t. Hollywood was in the midst of a revolution. As #OscarsSoWhite bled into #MeToo, the mandates only intensified. “You could read a white guy’s script,” a former assistant to a Gen-X white male showrunner told me. “But there was no way in hell that person was going to get staffed on the show. Showrunners only had a couple of spots for white people, and they kept those for the 40- or 50-year-old white guys they’d known for years.” A whistleblower sent me a document from early 2017, an internal “needs sheet” compiled by a major talent agency, that shows just how steep the headwinds were.... As in other industries, upper-level positions—writers with experience and credits—could still be filled by white men. But the entry-level jobs, the staff writer and co-producer positions that Matt and thousands of other aspiring writers were competing for, were reserved for others. “The studios had these quotas they felt pressure to fill,” a veteran talent manager told me. “It was always the lower and midlevel people.”_____
Snowy Range, Wyo.
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| Photograph by Joe Carducci |
From Steve Beeho at the London desk...
Gareth Roberts at SPECTATOR, The BBC has been taken over by middle-class brats.
The old guard of BBC News – John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen, Nick Robinson – were bad enough, but now they have become the dupes of horrible, entitled middle-class brats. The BBC’s problem is the same as everybody else’s: a critical mass of progressivism among the uni-educated middle class. The BBC should’ve seen this and stamped on it when it first became evident around 2012. Instead it ran riot there, worse than anywhere else. It faced the test of a spread of mass delusions – gender, Black Lives Matter, Israel-hatred – and it went all-in on all of them. This younger, progressive workforce are more interested in using the institution to advance their cause than in anything else. This is something so many outsiders (and indeed older insiders) do not understand, so I must put it into italics: they think that is their job.
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Graham Majin at quillette.com, A Journalism of Deception.
[John] Birt reinvented journalism at the BBC and introduced a new methodology. Scripts would now be written by senior journalists in the newsroom, and then reporters would be dispatched to shoot supporting interviews and footage. In this way, reality would conform to the pre-determined narrative. In Uncertain Vision, her book about Birt’s BBC tenure, Georgina Born describes a meeting at which Birt told producers he wanted to see far more “scripting and planning in advance.” When he was asked which BBC current affairs shows he liked, he replied, “To be honest, there’s nothing I like.” His implication, she reports, was that the truth of a news story “could be arrived at intellectually.” Narrative construction and management became the most important journalistic skills. Born reports that older journalists complained of “Stalinist pressures to take the ‘BBC line’ editorially.” And as the news agenda was increasingly worked-out in the office by teams of senior staff, many reporters began to feel uncomfortable. One admitted that he frequently had no idea if the stories he reported were true or not. “It’s bizarre,” he told Born; “you become a kind of virtual journalist, stuck in a bureau reprocessing material and not actually going out and witnessing events, not experiencing what you’re reporting.”
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Tom Mangold in SPECTATOR, How the BBC covered up rhe Bashir scandal.
Still, serious questions remain to this day about the way the Corporation covered up the scandal. We are asked to believe, for example, that John Birt, then the BBC’s DG and overall Head of News and Current Affairs was never told that Bashir was a liar – something he has consistently denied. Birt was an executive obsessed with every detail of his BBC empire. He once personally corrected a single line in one of my Panorama scripts. Was he really not told that the biggest scoop in the history of the Corporation was based on deceit and lies? Really? [...] Bashir was under the complete control of his producer. But, and it’s a huge but, his producer was the editor of Panorama himself, Steve Hewlett, my old boss. Hewlett is a journalist for whom I had and retain the utmost affection. But by becoming Bashir’s producer, he removed the crucial firewall between producer and editor, created precisely to protect the BBC against bent reporters. This perhaps explains the lengths the BBC went to in order to bury the story. Once it knew the truth about Bashir, it could easily have turfed him out. But what to do about his producer who carried full editorial responsibility for the disaster? They couldn’t just hang out to dry the editor of “Panorama,” then one of the most powerful journalists in Britain. That would seriously tarnish the BBC’s most influential current affairs programme, along with all the BBC brass right up to the DG himself. So Bashir eventually took the full brunt, and the BBC simply airbrushed Hewlett out of the entire plot. To this day it has failed to produce one single internal memo written by or to Hewlett during the biggest scandal in its history. As for Tony Hall, his inept investigation into Bashir didn’t stop him from rising to BBC Director General.
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John Gray in NEW STATESMAN, Why I am not a post-liberal.
We all know the quotation from Lampedusa’s The Leopard, where the prince’s nephew Tancredi says: “If we want things to stay as they are, things must change.” A more pertinent quote – since things are not going to stay as they are, whatever anyone wants – may be an observation the prince himself makes: “The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect. Their vanity is greater than their misery.” The same is true of our progressive ruling classes. Their self-love is greater than their love of power. Blinded by their subjective certainties, they are preparing the ground for their own extinction. The downfall of liberalism will not open a path to any Rajasthan of the imagination. Post-liberalism had another fatal flaw: most people in this country do not want to live in integral communities. The world they have lost is one in which they could rub along together, forming families and communities along the way. If what Hobbes called “commodious living” cannot be reinvented by a strong state, our future will be a war of all against all, fought out not between individuals but identity groups – a life that might not be solitary or necessarily short, but will be nasty, brutish and certainly poor.
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Wolfgang Munchau at unherd.com, Europe’s humiliation over Ukraine.
Trump, like the Europeans, is not a strategic actor of the kind I describe, but this is for different reasons. Trump’s politics are transactional. He likes peace because war is bad for business. Trump could not care less about whether Putin broke international law. To the European diplomats who huddle in the antechambers of the peace process, Trump’s attitude is disturbing and alienating. The Germans, with their special business relationships with Russia, used to be more like Trump. German politicians had their own private channels with Russian counterparts, just as Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, does today. The Germans used to be the largest crowd in the St Petersburg International Economics Forum, Russia’s answer to Davos. Now I am hearing that the hotels in Moscow and St Petersburg are filled with Americans hoping to strike lucrative deals with Russia. It is an ironic twist of fate, for it was the US that tried to force Germany to abandon the Baltic Sea gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Now there is talk of the Americans injecting themselves as the middleman to sell Russian gas to Germany. You could not make this up. [...] Like no US president before him, Trump exposes Europe’s delusions, its lack of a strategic thinking and action. This is why the Europeans hate him so much. And to no avail.
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Kate Clanchy in PROSPECT, The story of betrayal.
When the split was first mooted, Pan Macmillan could imagine only joyous consequences. They composed a set of celebratory FAQs for the press. “Will the Orwell Prize [sic] be revoking the prize?” would, they imagined, be first question. “We have to refer you to the Orwell Prize (sic) for that,” answered Imaginary Macmillan, magisterially. A little further down: “Did you take into account the fragile state of Kate's mental health?”. Imaginary Macmillan’s response: “What we can say is that Kate’s team at Picador provided round the clock support to her...” When the announcement was made, though, those weren’t the Qs most FA. “I think the [newspaper] curated the comments as there is literally only one comment that has anything negative about Kate,” they wrote in puzzlement. Who could these people be who thought differently from Pan Macmillan? Who perceived that I had been abandoned unfairly? And so many of them! Pan Macmillan authors started contacting the firm, angry and afraid, another consequence no one had foreseen. One was even rude to the CEO. No one within the company could recognise my account of the story in interviews with UnHerd and the Sunday Times, either. They apologised over her head? What rhubarb! Libellous! But when they looked closely, they couldn’t find the libel. Mysteriously, all documents confirmed that they really had apologised without telling me first. The BBC enquired whether it could possibly be true that no one had read the book before issuing the apology. The comms team did a quick round robin. “That’s no comment?” asked the PR firm—and it was.
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Fred Sculthorp in THE CRITIC, An Evening with Nish Kumar and The Guardian.
It was all too easy. The room was howling with laughter as Kumar began to lampoon the Daily Mail as the cause of all of our ills. On stage, a faithful Guardian reading couple had appeared to discuss their disagreement over whether it was necessary to iron their tea towels. Never, perhaps since the eve of the First World War, has such a naive, dull, provincial, gentle and misguided view of Britain on the eve of such profound upheaval enchanted so many people. It was time to leave. Outside, across the Kings Cross skyline a new London was being built. The station was fronted by a mixture of lost asylum seekers, seedy tramps and self-confessed demonic mendicants well beyond the wit of Nish Kumar. I had, with some relief, escaped back to reality.
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Ed West in SPECTATOR, Starmerism was always doomed to fail.
While Starmer was viewed by commentators as a technocrat who would rule sensibly after a chaotic succession of Tory governments, then, as Ganesh has also pointed out, you can be boring and bad. In fact his lack of hinterland is surely part of the problem – he doesn’t seem to have any vision of the country or what he wants to change, and his tweets in particular feel like the empty slogans of a dying consensus. Starmer’s core belief, if there is one, is in a system of human rights enshrined by the post-1997 constitution, and the idea that decision-making should be moved away from democratic bodies towards various units, councils and other unelected institutions, both national and international, which take account of rights, needs and principles of equality and fairness. None of these core beliefs offer a solution to the multiple problems facing the country, whether it’s poor growth, an inability to build, illegal immigration or badly performing public services – indeed, they are frequently a stumbling block to the proposed solutions, making them either illegal or ruinously expensive. A consensus dies when a vanguard of intellectuals come to see that no improvement will come until comfortable assumptions are discarded, and the previously unthinkable is the only available alternative. The country is on the cusp of such a psychological leap, but it requires a statesman with vision. Someone who can dream.
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Matthew Crawford at nnherd.com, The Death of Hollywood.
Managerialism is a form of political economy in which the middle-man steps in with a claim that he has some special competence, through the exercise of which new efficiencies can be realised, or some process of production or distribution can be optimised through quantitative rigour. But a funny thing then happens. His metrics easily come detached from the underlying things they are meant to track, no doubt because the incentives of the manager are tied to metrics, rather than directly to the thing. Concern with the thing is characteristic of the craftsman, via the “internal rewards” and satisfactions that are intrinsic to some skilled practice (such as making good television), as opposed to the “external rewards” of money, or social position, or other goods that may be a second- order consequence of getting to be really good at something. But you can’t get good at something while focused on external rewards. You have to go deep into the practice itself. [...] It is hard to see how the deadening effect of managerialism might be overcome, as our class structure is built on it. Due to the overproduction of degree-holders, the layer of people engaged in the meta-work of abstraction grows ever thicker. It generates its own demand, parasitical on the economy of the real. If the cumulative effect is culturally suffocating, this needn’t be taken as a judgement of the personal qualities of those with bullshit jobs. Rather, they are trapped within a system that demands that they suspend what comes most naturally to a human being: taking an active and affectionate interest in real things.
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Julie Burchill at spiked-online.com, Beware poshos cosplaying as punks.
Punk was many things, but it could not have caught fire without the presence, intelligence, beauty and rage of the young John Lydon. I would thereby be inclined to take his word on anything to do with the subject – and his words are bracingly populist these days – far more so than the wretched Chris Sullivan, who in the introduction to his ghastly excuse for a book tells us all we need to know about the prissy, prescriptive, pinky-wagging conformity of it. We are told that being against Israel and Trump is punk, following a religion or fighting a war is not punk, and that when ‘a friend’s 16-year-old daughter’ remarked that her mother’s criticism of Liz Truss and her obscene mishandling of the country’s finances was ‘Very punk rock, mum’, we should all slobber ourselves silly in a mindless orgy of youth-worship. Personally, I feel that this child – if indeed she exists – needs a dry slap and an Outward Bound course, the unspeakable little know-all.
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Byron Coley interview at pitchfork.com, Digging Through Steve Albini’s Closet.
How has sorting through Steve’s belongings altered your lifelong vision of him? The collective feeling that I get is that he was not static. I mean, he was static in certain regards, and he and I argued about music all the time. I thought he had about the worst taste in music of anybody that I knew and knew less about records than many, many people [laughs]. This was something we would endlessly go at it over. But he had certain fixed ideas about how things should be done: Do things as well as you can and create something that could last—not to create a legacy, but because there’s a philosophy that creating good things makes it more likely for other good things to happen. Similarly, if you create bad things, it creates more opportunity for bad things to happen. There’s an ethereal balance of actions and products. He was shockingly dedicated to creating good things, whether it was a meal, a record, a piece of art. I loved his art. He made this incredible sculpture when my wife and I got married in 1986. He got to the wedding late because they wouldn’t let him on the plane with this kinetic sculpture, a big motor with a grinder wheel on it and a ball-peen hammer that was held to the grinder wheel with springs. If you reached inside to turn it on, all of a sudden there was a tower of sparks flying everywhere and you couldn’t fit your hand back inside to turn it off. It was incredible. He had it super packed up, and when they tried to get it onto the plane, TSA was like, “I don’t know what that is, but it’s not getting on a plane.” So Steve took the whole piece apart and rebuilt it later.
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Nate Rogers in NYT, Black Flag’s Latest Reboot Has Everyone Talking (Even Greg Ginn) .
“I decided that it would be a good time where I should explain stuff,” Ginn said in a video call from the band’s practice space, his hair silver, his smile crooked. “Even though, honestly, I find it distasteful.” [...] As a business-oriented punk entrepreneur — an oxymoron if there ever was one — Ginn has never made much sense as a hardcore icon. He’s written some of the fastest, nastiest songs in the rock canon, and yet he loves cats, the Grateful Dead and his natural fertilizer business. His scuzzy, improvisational guitar playing often has more in common with jazz musicians than Johnny Ramone. And he speaks at a glacial pace, like someone about to fall asleep, but has enough energy to drive the tour van every day by himself. At this point in his unusual career, does he feel understood? “Of course not,” he said, adding that he doesn’t really know what people think about him at all. “I’m more interested in growing plants and stuff.”
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Stevie Chick interviews Bob Mould and Greg Norton at thequietus.com, Plans That They Made.
In the autumn of 1983, Hüsker Dü finally became SST’s first non-west coast signing with the release of the “Metal Circus” mini-LP, which continued their crawl towards sophistication. Hart led the offensive, his ‘It’s Not Funny Anymore’ a scarcely veiled broadside at hardcore groupthink, while ‘Diane’ – a slow- burning, melodic piece exploring the mind of the real-life killer who had murdered Diane Edwards, a young woman Hart had been acquainted with – became a cult hit on college radio. This suggested hitherto-unimaginable potential for the group’s less-ferocious, more song-based impulses. Their next release would hurtle full pelt towards traditional songcraft in the same breath as delivering the most savage hardcore within their discography, an ambitious double concept album. The group had signalled their ambitions to do “something bigger” in a 1983 interview with Big Black’s Steve Albini for Matter. “I don’t know what it’s going to be – we have to work that out,” Mould admitted. “But it’s going to go beyond the whole idea of ‘punk rock’ or whatever.” Mould wasn’t merely talking a good game. The resulting album [“Zen Arcade”] would rightly be celebrated as one of the greatest works of its era, a landmark that would help bring their subterranean scene to the attention of a mainstream that had been doing its best to ignore the ugly noise stirring in the underground.
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Thurston Moore interviewed by Alexis Petridis in GUARDIAN on the book, Now Jazz Now.
In the 1980s, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore asked his friend, the writer Byron Coley, to furnish him with a selection of jazz tapes to listen to on tour. Moore had experienced New York’s fabled avant-garde jazz loft scene first-hand in the late 1970s but “wasn’t so clued in”, he says. “Perhaps I was too young and too preoccupied by the flurry of activity in punk and no wave.” Now, he was keen to learn more. The tapes, “of Coltrane, Mingus, Dolphy, Sun Ra, Monk et al”, led him by degrees to free jazz: the style of jazz unmoored from standard rhythms and phrasings, resulting in arguably the most challenging and far-out music one can listen to. “A music both liberated and yet wholly indebted to the learned techniques of its tradition” is how Moore enthusiastically describes it. “In some ways, it’s similar to noise and art rock, where the freedom to experiment with open form comes from a scholarship of the music’s historical lineage ... truly a soul music, both political and spiritual.”_____
Obituaries of the Issue... Mike Cronin (1943-2025)
A product of a North Side Irish Catholic working-class neighborhood, he asked to be assigned to the busiest part of the city — the West Side. He became a tactical officer in a gang unit. Mr. Cronin, who used a prosthetic to walk, didn’t just do his job and go home. He came to know more about particular gangs than many of the gangs’ members and leaders. He wrote his observations in notepads that fit in his breast pocket, filling hundreds of them. “Mike Cronin was probably the best street cop I’ve ever met,” said former police Supt. Phil Cline. As a cop, he learned nicknames and gang lingo, monitored gang activities and drug sales, helped put Chicago gang leaders behind bars and built a reputation for fairness and fearlessness. “He was a hero over in Vietnam, and he was a hero here in Chicago for all the cases that he made and the information he had, and nobody was better at developing informants,” said Cline, noting that Mr. Cronin also became proficient at securing and running wiretaps.... As technology became a key part of fighting crime, he remained convinced that the best information still came from just talking with people. People who knew him said he treated everyone with respect, including gang members. Gang members knew him as “Cronie.” “He wasn’t a hardass, he was someone people could talk to, and his forte was creating an intelligence network of people who would tell him things,” said his brother Jim Cronin. “It was an all-consuming job for him. He was a bulldog. He never married, didn’t have children, and he put hours and hours in.”Joseph Byrd (1937-2025)
After honing his craft in performance “happenings” in downtown Manhattan lofts, Mr. Byrd returned to Los Angeles. With Marxist leanings and a fierce opposition to the Vietnam War, he saw rock music as “a logical step to seek a bigger audience, to turn art in a more socially radical direction,” he said in a 2013 interview with It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine. There, he created the United States of America in 1967 with the folk vocalist Dorothy Moskowitz, a former romantic and artistic partner, and the composer Michael Agnello, an anarchist. Mr. Agnello later quit the band after it signed with Columbia Records — in Mr. Agnello’s view, a sellout to the corporate masters. Yet the spirit of rebellion lingered. “Using the full name of the country for something so common as a rock group,” Ms. Moskowitz once explained, “was a way of expressing disdain for governmental policy. It was like hanging the flag upside down.” While revolution was in the air in the rock world by 1968 — look no further than the Beatles’ “Revolution” — Mr. Byrd did not consider his band to be followers. “There was no ‘school’ in which we considered ourselves,” he said in an interview with the culture site Clouds and Clocks in 2004. Rather, he added, “I regarded the avant-garde art community as my peer group.”_____
Thanks to Joseph Pope, Ray Farrell, Andy Schwartz, Mark Carducci, Steve Beeho, Jane Schuman, Mike Vann Gray, Abe Gibson, Will York, Nancy Lisa Sepulveda...
Snowy Range, Wyoming
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| Photograph by Joe Carducci |
