You Got Two Ways to Go

"Ceasing to think of freedom as the possession of many options would be no small rupture. What might take its place? Abandoning a consumerist worldview might not be the worst thing for humanity, and for Americans in particular—it might lead to a sturdier value system, maybe one more concerned with the common good. But the resulting vacuum could just as easily be filled by Trump's idea of freedom, one based on power and sovereignty over others, and on screwing the other guy before he screws you. The cruelty of this vision almost demands a reinvigoration of choice, an effort to salvage what had made this human impulse so liberating to begin with."

Gal Beckerman at The Atlantic reviews Sophia Rosenfeld's The Age of Choice.

"Three Ms Are Key: Messaging, Medium and Movement"

"Mamdani may not win the Democratic nomination. Even if he does, Cuomo will stand as an independent candidate, although the socialist challenger may do this, too. His campaign's weaknesses reflect those of the wider US left: too little inroads among Black and older voters, as well as those with little online political engagement. But Mamdani's against-the-odds success underlines why the far-right surge doesn't have to weaken the left–far from it."

Owen Jones at The Guardian discusses the rise of Zohran Mamdani in New York City politics.

Holly Otterbein at Politco gets Bernie Sanders's reaction to Mamdani's success.

"Has the Emotional Armature of an 11-Year-Old Boy"

"This is your 'peace president.' He tore up a painstakingly negotiated settlement that was working and whose demise, thanks to Trump, led to Iran getting back into the game of nuclear enrichment. Then—to his partial credit—he seemed to be involved in serious negotiations of his own. But then Netanyahu moved his queen aggressively across the board, and Trump didn't want to be stuck in back just playing around with pawn."

Michael Tomansky at The New Republic reacts to Donald Trump's bombing of Iran.

"Little Trumps"

"Our national crisis will not be correctly perceived, let alone solved, until we recognize that the root of the problem lies in that supposed repository of virtue, the American people. The prestige media's rote expeditions to rural diners in Iowa to discover the Real America are wearing distinctly thin at this juncture, because what lies at the core of Trump's support is a not-insignificant fraction of would-be totalitarians who possess the same mentality as those who lynched Black people in the Jim Crow South, mobbed Jews during Kristallnacht and beheaded professors during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution."

Mike Lofgren at Salon warns of an "America slid[ing] into totalitarianism."

"A Subterranean Marx"

"The tension between the personalistic vs. scholastic approaches in the book is an outgrowth of the country's tension regarding Marxism itself: as compared to the rest of the world, the United States has never had a mass communist party or even a mass-member, expressly left-wing, viable political party. There have been transformative Marxist politicians, like Eugene Debs, whom Hartman covers in great detail, but there have not been transformative Marxist political parties in the United States on a scale to impact national policy. The backlashes against Marxism have tended to have far more political significance since World War II than the actual inciting theory. What this means for the book is that Hartman devotes a substantial part not to Marxism and American Marxists per se, but to the powerful anti-Marxist political forces and intellectuals of the twentieth century. Chapters five and six, 'False Prophet: Midcentury Liberalism,' and 'Red Menace: Postwar Conservatism,' are overwhelmingly focused on anti-Marxist intellectuals and the forces of American liberalism and the American right that were united in their mutual anticommunism after World War II. At times it seems the book would be more appropriately titled Anti-Marxism in America."

Mathias Fuelling at The Baffler reviews Andrew Hartman's Karl Marx in America.

"Trumpism Has Become a Form of Nihilism That Is Devouring Everything in Its Path"

"The pathetic thing is that I didn't see this coming even though I've been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative—they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference."

The News Talkers runs David Brooks's essay in The Atlantic called, "I Should Have Seen It Coming."

"A Farce Masquerading as Serious Political Theater"

"The media's conundrum was obvious: How to cover a candidate who inflates the truth when he isn't inventing it out of whole cloth, a candidate who promises salvation but offers no pathway to reach it, a candidate who takes special delight in trolling his opponents rather than engaging with them on substance? 'Take him seriously but not literally,' seemed to be the order of the day. Or literally but not seriously. Or sometimes seriously and sometimes literally. Or both. Or neither. Or something."

Michael Ian Black at The Daily Beast marks ten years since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for US president.

California Sons

At Variety, Chris Morris offers obituaries for Sly Stone and Brian Wilson.

David Bauder of the Associated Press makes the connection.

"There Is a Class War Going On. The People on Top Are Waging That War"

"Sanders' charge to the Democrats now is twofold. 'Their weakness is, I think, that their credibility is now quite low. And they don't have much of a message for working people, other than to say Trump is dangerous. I think that's just not enough.' He point blank refuses to get into Trump's administration–its excesses, surprises, non-surprises, without first walking through everything that was already wrong with the US. 'What the Democrats have to absolutely make clear is this: we're going to take on the billionaire class. They're going to start paying their fair share of taxes. We're going to have healthcare for all people as a human right. We're going to have a strong childcare system that every American can afford. We're going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. We're going to create millions of jobs transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel. We're going to build housing–boy, housing is like it is here, just a huge crisis. We're going to build millions of units of low-income and affordable housing. Do Democrats say that? No."

Zoe Williams at The Guardian interviews Bernie Sanders.

May 2025 Acquisitions

Books:
Raeghan Buchanan, The Secret History of Black Punk, 2023.
David D. Burns, The Feeling Good Handbook, 1999.
Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord, 2025.
Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Tales, 2009.
Molly O'Neil (ed.), American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes, 2009.

Music:
Alarm, Standards, 1990.
P.P. Arnold, The First Lady of Immediate, 1968.
Bootsy Collins, Album of the Year #1 Funkateer, 2025.
Cory Band, Britpop Brass, 2018.
Various, Another Splash of Colour: New Psychedelia in Britain 1980-1985, 2016.
Various, Paul Weller Presents That Sweet Soul Music, 2025.
Various, The Indie Scene 1981, 1992.

"Guy Tasked With Censoring British Rap Song in Way Over His Fucking Head"

"'I've gotta be honest, I have no fucking clue what I'm doing here,' Boyd said helplessly as he combed through the lyrics to the song 'Hasslin' Grassers.' 'Not only do I have to find the swear words, but I also have to discern their severity to see if they need to be blocked out. I mean, "plonker"? "Chav"? Are these bad, and if so, how bad? We can say "hell" and "damn" here, but we can't say "shit" or "fuck," so how do these British words compare to those? My boss needs me to have this done by tomorrow, so I'm at a total loss as to what I'm going to do.'"

From The Hard Times.

"A Defunct Canon"

"It's not surprising that these authors found their way to so many teenage readers. Many, after all, were bestsellers. Perhaps even more important, a good number were key figures in the postwar U.S. counterculture. Certain titles, like Heller's Catch-22, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, were practically required reading for participants in the antiwar movement and the generational upheaval of which it was a part. Even Hesse's novels, published in the early twentieth century, came to be, according to critic Adam Kirsch, 'literary gateway drugs' and hippie talismans for young people, with Timothy Leary recommending them as good preparation for trying LSD. Even after the counterculture dissipated, these authors remained ubiquitous, as baby boomers passed them on to the next generation of readers. Telling adolescents not to trust grownups is apparently an evergreen rhetorical move, even when it takes the form of a book recommendation by a parent or teacher."

Timothy Aubry at The Point discusses "the gateway books" for late-twenieth-century high-school students.

"A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine"

"The way I see it, we're family. It really does disappoint me that so many brilliant colleagues—whose genuine breakthroughs I've profited from for years—would be so quick to condemn this newer, stupider way that I and others like me can make money off your life's work, through stealing."

So writes Amanda Bachman at McSweeney's.

"An American Intimately Familiar with This Nation's Better Angels"

"'All of this points to a pope that understands global leadership through dialogue instead of isolation; who understands power through service, instead of domination,' he said. 'It is hard to imagine a sharper contrast with the current administration in the U.S.'"

Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman contrasts Pope Leo XIV and Donald Trump.

"Is Our Democrats Learning?"

"I hate to be a tough grader on all this but that's how it looks right now. The progressive moment is still over. It's just Democrats don't seem to realize it. When they'll wake up is anybody's guess."

Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot assesses the Democratic Party six months after the 2024 presidential election.

"Performing a Character"

"The genuinely complicated factor in these negotiations is that 'winning' with Trump is often impossible, because the relationship itself is lose-lose. Trump does not appear to recognize the possibility of a positive-sum engagement, and his attempts to turn a productive connection into an exploitative one create losses for both sides. This is most obvious in trade, where Trump's protectionist instincts have spread pain around the globe without generating any gains. His extortion of domestic firms and civil society has likewise undermined some of America's most admired sources of innovation, for no offsetting benefit other than the expansion of Trump's own power."

At The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait reacts to Donald Trump's backing down from the trade war with China.

"Proto-Trumpian Themes"

"The left dissented from Obama's optimistic analysis, seeing American history as a long and bloody reprise of racism and exploitation with no clearly defined trajectory. Buchanan adopts a similar analysis, except that he presents the qualities derided by the left as necessary, even praiseworthy. America is 'the product of ethnonationalism,' he asserts without judgment. 'No American war was fought for egalitarian ends, postwar propaganda notwithstanding.' Likewise, 'no one would suggest the Indian wars were about equality. They were about racism and subjugation.' Lincoln, he reminds the reader, was a white supremacist. As a descriptive account, Buchanan's history hardly differs from what you'd encounter in a text such as the 1619 Project or Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, only with the moral valence of the events flipped."

Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic calls Pat Buchanan "The Godfather of the Woke Right."