"The Role of a Humanist Is to Preserve Knowledge, Safeguard Learning From the Market and the Tides of Popular Interest, and Ward Off Coarse Appeals to Economic Utility"

"Depending on whom I asked, the move to scale back humanities doctoral programs is either a prudent acknowledgment of the cratered job market for tenure-track professorships and a wise attempt to protect the university's humanities division from looming financial and political risks, or it is a cynical effort, under cover of the Trump administration's assaults, to transfer resources away from 'impractical,' unprofitable, and largely jobless fields (such as, say, comparative literature) and toward areas that the university's senior leadership seems to care about (such as, say, STEM and 'innovation'). One faculty member I spoke with mentioned a consulting firm that was brought on to help Chicago as it considers changes to its humanities division, including possibly consolidating the departments from 15 down to eight. Many professors worried that the move to impose uneven changes—reducing admissions in some while halting them in others—may be an attempt to create circumstances that will ultimately make it easier to dissolve the paused programs. 'Let no good crisis go unleveraged,' Holly Shissler, an associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies department, said with a dark laugh. 'You engineer a situation in which there are no students, and then you turn around and say, "Why are we supporting all these departments and faculty when they have no students?"'"

Tyler Austin Harper at The Atlantic asks, "If the University of Chicago Won't Defend the Humanities, Who Will?"

Demeritocracy

"If we sort people only by superior intelligence, we're sorting people by a quality few possess; we’re inevitably creating a stratified, elitist society. We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people's motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society."

In a 2024 Atlantic article, David Brooks writes about "How the Ivy League Broke America."

While at The Hill, Jenna Robinson argues that "[i]t's well past time to bring back standardized testing" in college admissions

"'I Was in Paradise'"

"For Telegraph's record stores, too, the road has been rocky. The shops have faced a procession of existential threats (eBay, MP3s, Napster, Amazon, Spotify—the list goes on), and many have shuttered. Yet, somehow, Amoeba and Rasputin have weathered it all. The latter celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. The two shops share something in common: a commitment to vinyl, the medium that refuses to die."

In a 2022 California article, Coby McDonald tells the story of Berkeley's record stores.

"The Revisionist Narrative Also Has the Potential to Become a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy"

"If people are convinced that public-health measures don't work in the first place, they will be less likely to follow them, which, in turn, will render them even less effective. This dynamic could even undermine the one measure that the non-right-wing COVID revisionists generally support: vaccines. After all, if people are convinced that the public-health establishment is full of lying ideologues, why make an exception for vaccines? Unchecked COVID revisionism, in trying to correct the errors of the last pandemic, might leave us even less prepared for the next one."

Rogé Karma at The Atlantic gives a warning about the next pandemic.

"A Signifier of Something Beyond Music"

"If you buy the idea that what the Britpop brand represents is optimism, positivity and youth culture winning without compromise then you can see its appeal to a 17-year-old in 2025. Who wouldn't hanker after the notion of a prelapsarian world before the scrutiny of social media, 9/11, the rise of the 'alt-right' et al? And the era’s 'fuck you, we're gonna have a good time' excesses look alluring in an age of wellness influencers and constant cameraphone surveillance."

Alexis Petridis at The Guardian attempts to "explain why we're all still in thrall to the ​m​ad-fer-it 90s."

"You Cannot Solve a Problem You're Unwilling to Name"

"But the failures of liberals to adequately address urban crime—or to appreciate its significance—are much less appreciated. Some went so far as to deny that crime was even rising. Others relativized the crime by pointing out that muggings and thefts—however unpleasant—were trivial offenses compared to the greater injustice of systemic racism. Liberals frequently used crime increases as a rationale to advocate for programs they already favored. Increased funding for education, daycare centers, low-income housing, healthcare, and poverty reduction were all said to be necessary parts of a comprehensive crime reduction agenda.  These pieties about root causes have never been helpful. Most people are not interested in long-term solutions to immediate problems caused by muggers, thieves, addicts, and the bedlamite homeless."

John McMillan at Compact warns Democrats about the politics of crime.

As does Michael Powell at The Atlantic.

"Frustrated and Underemployed Elites Are Uniquely Well-Positioned to Disrupt Society"

"The day after The New York Times posted Mack's op-ed, Smith re-posted a 2022 piece about Turchin's theory of elite overproduction. It noted that demand for lawyers and government employees (the bulk of whom work for state and local governments) levelled off after 2008; that employment in publishing crashed in 2001 and never recovered; and that university job postings in the humanities crashed during the 2008 financial crash and never recovered. (If there's a poster child for elite overproduction, it's the humble university adjunct.) In the 21st century the professional-managerial class has experienced a loss of economic power that's analogous to (though of course much more muted than, and conducted at a much higher level than) the working class's loss of economic power starting in the late 1970s."

Timothy Noah at The New Republic considers "the rage of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich once labelled the professional-managerial class."

"He Is a One-of-a-Kind Grotesque"

"The text and the caption depend for their power upon—indeed they would be totally unintelligible without—Trump's built-in assumption that millions of people would find themselves almost inexpressibly outraged by his naive identification of Cinco de Mayo with all Hispanics, whom he claims to love in some absurd blanket sense—how when he is such an obvious gutter racist?!—and his uncouth assumption that 'taco bowls' are a real food to which superlatives might be applied at all and that the pseudo-salads are a part of Mexican cuisine. (This is probably not an exhaustive list of the number of micro-aggressions or dog whistles implied in this masterpiece of rhetoric.) The atmosphere of knowingly perverse cultural insensitivity—probably the closest thing we have nowadays to the teashop Orientalism of The Mikado—is heightened by the contrast between the high-school cafeteria quality food and the white napkin and silverware, to say nothing of the golf trophies and the view of the Manhattan skyline from the window behind him and his ludicrous grin. This, played with a thousand variations over the half decade or so in which he has been at the center of American public life, is the essential Trumpian conceit: playing a poor person's idea of what being rich is (having real linen!), a woke person's idea of racism (liking déclassé foods), a worker's idea of what a boss is (someone who fires people), and doing so without ever acknowledging the performance to any of the not-always overlapping segments of his audience, who in turn refuse to acknowledge it to one another."

In a 2020 article at The Week, Matthew Walther argues that Donald Trump "is essentially a camp figure."

"Addiction Is the Goal"

"Sure, let's give it a name, something like TikTok depression or Silicon Valley zombification or whatever. The key fact is that users can feel it, even if they don't have a label or a diagnosis. They feel it even if the technocrats refuse to tell them about it. Just listen to the words people use to describe their toxic online interactions: doomscrolling, trolling, doxxing, gaslighting, etc.
"In the year 2024, this is what we do for fun."

Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker in 2024 writes about "dopamine culture."

At Culture: An Owners Manual, W. David Marx discusses internet-driven fads.

As does Amanda Mull at Bloomberg.

Have I Got an Act for You

"Provenza and I talked about that a little bit, and I said, 'It's interesting, we hear Miles Davis and Coltrane play over the same changes, but we never hear different comics tell the same joke.' That sentence was kind of revelatory."

Brian VanHooker at Cracked presents "An Oral History of 'The Aristocrats' with Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza."

"In American Politics, That Is an Unforgivable Sin"

"Trump is smashing up things on a scale that is almost unimaginable, and he seems completely untroubled by the daily hardships and widespread suffering he is leaving behind. And the president is hardly done. The pain and the body count will rise, and rise, and rise. It will be left to others to clean up the mess he has made. Some of the damage may be repaired with time; some will be irreparable. Democrats should say so. It's their best path to defeating his movement, which is the only way for the healing to begin."

Pete Wehner at The Atlantic asserts that "Americans already understood Trump to be corrupt, and proved themselves willing to tolerate that. But now they are coming to believe that he is inept."

"Political Education Is Going to Take Place Mostly Outside of Universities Now"

"The term white privilege was invented in the 1960s by leftists, by Ted Allen and Noel Ignatiev. I was very sympathetic to that term. But then as it got into the universities and got to be spoken mostly in the universities, I think we forgot that it only really made sense inside of a social movement, that otherwise if you just go up and tell a poor white person you're privileged, that's not organizing, that's just labeling. It had to be part of a social movement. And even now I'm trying to say 'white advantage' instead of 'white privilege' for that very reason. But the main thing that your question points to is that over the long haul, we on the left in social movements lost out to a more therapeutic and individualistic approach to diversity training." 

Olivia Weeks at The Daily Yonder interviews historian David Roediger.

And at The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch writes about "The Elite University Presidents Who Despise One Another."

"Make America Manifest Destiny Again"

"It's why Trump and his agents respect no legal citizenship lines; some of them have called for the denaturalization and deportation of New York City's Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Trump’s State Department is creating an 'Office of Remigration,' employing a term favored by extremists who call for, as Mother Jones puts it, 'the forcible repatriation or mass expulsion of non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of immigration status or citizenship, and an end to multiculturalism.' And Trump wants the power to exile by personal fiat: 'We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time. . . many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too.' Who is deciding, without due process, who the 'bad people' are?"

Douglas Sackman at The Bulwark argues that racial nationalism "grows darkly at the heart of MAGA."

"Arguably the Most Sartorially Influential Person to Ever Hold the Presidency"

"Whether sailing off the coast of Hyannis Port or hosting a glamorous black-tie dinner at the White House, Kennedy's innate charisma and charm were merely enhanced by the approachable way in which he outfitted himself. 'JFK was almost unaware of clothes being of any great importance,' remarks Deeda Blair, whose husband served as U.S. Ambassador to Denmark during the Kennedy administration. 'He always was well dressed and I would even say distinguished, but effortless and easy—unremarkable ties and I suspect no fussing about pocket squares.'"

Andrew Nodell in a 2017 Women's Wear Daily article discusses President John Kennedy's clothes.

July 2025 Acquisitions

Books:

Torunn Gronbekk et al, Catwoman Vol. 1: Who Is Selina Kyle?, 2025.

Robert E. Johnson and Janet L. Bryon, Berkeley Walks, 2023.

Sven Kirsten and Peter Moruzzi, Palm Springs Tiki: Polynesia in the Desert, 2024. 

Jeanne Theoharis, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South, 2025.

The Pocket Oasis, 2025.

Movies:

Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, 2003.

Don't Look Back, 1967.

Kiss Me Deadly, 1955.

Music:

Barracudas, The Complete EMI Recordings, 1990.

Fishbone, In Your Face, 1986.

Durand Jones, Flowers, 2025.

Sly Stone, Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 2025.

Paul Weller, Find El Dorado, 2025.

X-Ray Spex, Germfree Adolescents, 1978.

Various, Come to My World: A Brief History of Indie Pop 1985-2023, 2024.

Various, These People Are Nuts!, 1989.

"A Liberty That Would Be Easily Understood by the Scots-Irish of Appalachia but Would Perplex the Puritans of New England"

"California's convoluted policies toward drugs and mental illness have combined to exacerbate its colossal homelessness problem, setting it apart, once again, from progressive Yankee states. California has the highest rate of unsheltered homelessness, followed by Oregon, whose settlement history and politics are very similar to those of Northern California. By contrast, New York City, whose upstate region was settled by Yankees, has the third lowest rate of unsheltered homelessness in America. Its success in bringing its homeless population indoors is thanks to its 'right to shelter' law—a classic top-down Yankee solution to an urgent social problem. Neither California nor Oregon has such a law."

Leighton Woodhouse at UnHerd claims that California's political problems stem from the influence of two groups from back East.

"Had I Planned This, I Would've Failed"

"He knew he was onto something when he got a surprise check for $1,000 for photos he had turned over for one of Dick Clark's Rock and Roll Years specials at ABC in the early 1970s. 'I gave him the stuff for nothing, expected nothing,' he said. 'I thought, hmm - this could be a business here. Then I began to take it real seriously and started fanatically trying to find as many photos as I could.'"

Mike Barnes at The Hollywood Reporter writes an obituary for archivist Michael Ochs.

"Both Ideological Groups—the Left and Center—Mistakenly Believe They Can Conquer the Other Faction to Achieve Electoral Glory"

"Having examined the strengths and delusions of both factions for several decades now, the most plausible path I can see to bridge these divides and reach more independents is for both the left and the center to drop their cultural, foreign policy, and single-issue demands and concentrate on restoring Democrats as the party of economic uplift for working-class Americans."

John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot asks, "Can Democratic Factions Coexist and Win Over Independents?"

Ruy Teixeira argues that "today's progressives have abandoned their former goals of universal uplift based on universal values and aspirations."

And Justin Vassallo offers advice on "How To Rebuild the Democratic Coalition."

"This Is What We Are, and What We Are Going to Be"

"The more banal fallout of this all is that America remains a nation split between red and blue, with neither party gaining a decisive advantage. Republicans cannot triangulate or realign the electorate in such a manner to doom the Democrats to irrelevancy. Democrats can't seem to excite voters enough to revive the promise of an Obama-esque landslide. Democrats have the edge to flip the House next year, while Republicans should be the favorites to retain Senate control. The 2028 race is probably going to be a closely divided slog, no matter whom the major parties nominate."

Ross Barkan at New York looks at the state of American politics, six months into Donald Trump's second term.

As does Andrew Sullivan at The Weekly Dish. 

"In the 1935 Telling, Redistribution Was the Mechanism of Abundance"

"Even in those invocations of abundance, the stark differences between the socialist abundance movement of 1935 and the moderate abundance agenda of 2025 are apparent. The concept of 'production for use' is in contrast to the capitalist profit motive. In socialist thought, one of the core issues of a capitalist economy is that profit motives result in wealth accumulation becoming divorced from the creation of actual economic value. A production for use system makes production and allocation decisions based on need (or 'use value'), rather than market prices."

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis at The New Republic describes "An Altogether Different Kind of Abundance Agenda."