"But the Crucial Difference Is at the Top"

"Different rules apply. After an act of violence, Democrats must be gracious, empathetic and call for calm on all sides, while Republicans can mock the victims, blame only one side and demand more violence. And there's a further asymmetry: a single post from a random, anonymous user online will be treated as a statement from 'the left', while the outpourings of the right's most powerful voices, in politics or the media, and including the president himself, somehow get a free pass."

Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian writes that "[t]he US is on the brink of another era of political violence–and Donald Trump 'couldn't care less.'"

"The United States Has Entered a New Era of State Capitalism"

"The real question is no longer whether the state will act, but whose interests it will serve. Will it merely prop up incumbents and invite capture? Or can public ownership and golden shares be harnessed for resilience and equity? If progressives don't seize this moment to define a democratic, public-minded industrial policy, they will find themselves living in one designed by the Trump administration."

Todd Tucker at The New Republic tells Democrats, "Don't Let Trump Define What State Capitalism Can Be."

"The First Step, Which Is Often the Hardest, Is to Get Our Thinking Straight"

"The vast majority of us are global consumers and, at least indirectly, global investors. In these roles we should strive for the best deals possible. That is how we participate in the global market economy. But those private benefits usually have social costs. And for those of us living in democracies, it is imperative to remember that we are also citizens who have it in our power to reduce these social costs, making the true price of the goods and services we purchase as low as possible. We can accomplish this larger feat only if we take our roles as citizens seriously."

Back in a 2009 Foreign Policy article, Robert B. Reich describes "[h]ow Capitalism Is Killing Democracy."

August 2025 Acquisitions

Books:

Horace Clarence Boyer and Lloyd Yearwood, The Golden Age of Gospel, 2000.

Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s, 1991.

Music:

Chairmen of the Board, The Best of Chairmen of the Board, 2002.

Chi-Lites, The Best of the Chi-Lites, 2007.

Dr. Feelgood, Down by the Jetty, 1975, 2025.

Aretha Franklin, Live at Fillmore West, 1971.

Franz Ferdinand, The Human Fear, 2025.

Randy Newman, The Natural, 1984.

Wet Leg, Moisterizer, 2025.

"'A Lot Has Changed in the Past Ten to Fifteen Years'"

"Other moral panics in recent history—around comic books, Satanism, and marijuana, for instance—fell by the wayside after they became so unhinged that reasonable people turned away.  But the Sensitivity Era appears far from over. The unavoidable takeaway from Szetela's sharply-etched and powerfully argued book is that left-wing illiberalism has been institutionalized. It's already deeply entrenched in schools, libraries, literary agencies, and publishing houses."

John McMillan at The Dispatch reviews Adam Szetela's That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing.

"It's Nice to Hear Someone Do Something Different"

"The real reason that indie started to die, or at least felt as though it did, is Spotify. As streaming supplanted downloads and album sales, it automated music discovery. Instead of reading Pitchfork or asking a record-store clerk for recommendations, more and more people began to let algorithms suggest their next obsession. This had a variety of consequences. One is that it's become harder than ever for challenging music—music that you need to listen to a few times in order to love—to gain a foothold. The prestige associated with doing something different has started to fade."

Spencer Kornhaber at The Atlantic reviews Chris DeVille's Such Great Heights: The Complete History of the Indie Rock Explosion.

"'We Have Gone From Zero to Hungary Faster Than I Ever Imagined'"

"There's something else, too. Trump's dictator-like behaviour is so brazen, so blatant, that paradoxically, we discount it. It's like being woken in the night by a burglar wearing a striped shirt and carrying a bag marked 'Swag': we would assume it was a joke or a stunt or otherwise unreal, rather than a genuine danger. So it is with Trump. We cannot quite believe what we are seeing."

Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian states that "the US is entering full authoritarian mode."

"'The Past Is the Key of the Present and the Mirror of the Future'"

"Today, the writing and teaching of history has been drawn into the vortex of the culture wars. Why is history so controversial? The French historian Ernest Renan had an answer. Historical analysis, he famously wrote in the late 19th century, has always been linked to broader ideas about the nation-state. National consciousness, or at least the sense of unity and patriotic pride that accompanies nation-building, he argued, rests in part on historical mythology. Indeed, Renan wrote, because 'historical error' plays a significant role in the creation of a national consciousness, advances in the field of history—including the replacement of myth by accurate accounts of the past—are often seen as 'a threat to the nation.'"

Eric Foner at The Nation writes that "[h]eated controversy over what history books students and interested adults should encounter has a long history."

"More Prolific Than Even the Hollywood Studios in Their Golden Age Peak"

"The strange paradox of the streaming era is that as the quest to personalise entertainment has continued, entertainment itself is becoming steadily more impersonal. The user, and the fantasy of unlimited choice, is king. The auteur, and singularity of perspective, are now subordinate–and the tsunami of AI threatens to wash them away completely."

Phil Hoad at The Guardian asks, "what has the Netflix algorithm done to our films?"

"The Broader Threat Posed by Right-Wing Authoritarianism"

"With the rise of right-wing populism and neofascism, the crisis has become acute. Neofascism sees the trade union movement as its enemy while at the same time trying to appeal to the working class who make up labor's membership. However, to win over this base, the far right is harkening back to previous pseudo pro-worker appeals by embracing racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic politics that can present as being in the interest of everyday working people."

At In These Times, Bill Fletcher, Jr., concludes that "[t]rade unionism must either be anti-fascist, or it will be nothing at all."

While Carl Davidson at ZNetwork calls for a "Third Reconstruction."

And Dustin Guastella at Damage blames the "MANGO class."

"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."

And Chris DeVille at Stereogum writes after a Chicago concert that, "at long last, Oasis have conquered America."

While Steven Zeitchik at The Hollywood Reporter says that "Oasis Just Glitched the Algorithm."

And Alex Edelman at Rolling Stone describes an Oasis reunion concert as a "religious experience, if the religion was 'football hooligan.'"

"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."