"A Form of Participatory Art"

"The cri­ti­cism that theme parks are fake is a sur­face one, one that fails to prop­erly meet the medium where it’s at. It's easy, of course, to look at the nos­tal­gia of a Main Street, U.S.A, and the castle up ahead and to write off Dis­ney­land as a rosy, ideal­ized take on Amer­ica. This is the undis­cern­ing view; Dis­ney­land is a present­a­tion of an Amer­ica that never exis­ted, one dis­rup­ted by a castle that also doubles as an exten­ded hand."

Todd Martens at the Los Angeles Times praises theme parks.

September 2026 Acquisitions

Books:

Octavia E. Butler, Kindred, 1979.

Clinton Heylin, All the Madmen: Barrett, Bowie, Drake, Pink Floyd, the Kinks, the Who and a Journey to the Dark Side of English Rock, 2012.

Judd Winick et al, Batman: Under the Red Hood, 2026.

Music:

Richard Ashcroft, Live Vol 1, 2026.

David Bowie, The Shel Talmy Recordings, 2026.

Floyd Cramer, RCA Country Legends, 2001.

Descendents, Liveage!, 2026.

Brian Fallon, Not Bad for New Jersey, 2026.

Squeeze, Annie Get Your Gun, 1990.

Strokes, Reality Awaits, 2026.

Porter Wagoner, RCA Country Legends, 2002.

Various, RCA Country Legends: The Bristol Sessions Vol. 1, 2002.

"The Left Should Feel Vindicated"

"Because of pressure from the streets and the ballot box, Labour has shifted its rhetoric. The substance is a bit more complicated. Where Starmerism defined itself against the left, could this new government be pushed in a more progressive direction? That question has not yet been answered. But the left should indeed feel emboldened."

Owen Jones at The Guardian praises Prime Minister Andy Burnham for "listing five villains: 'Deindustrialisation, deregulation, privatisation, austerity, Brexit.'"

"A Document of Our Times"

"In the latest film, we learn that Symon and his wife became foster parents, not just once or twice but, over the decades, to a staggering 130 children. As Symon said of his own children when he was 28, 'They've got everything. They've got a father.' The animating premise of each of the Up films was the old Jesuit saying: 'Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.' There turns out to be great truth in that, a truth far more profound than the political point the film-makers first set out to prove."

Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian marks the debut of 70 Up.

"The Rich Thrive and Everyone Else Struggles"

"The labor share is a symptom of worker anxiety, of course, not the cause. But as a symptom it speaks volumes. It reflects growing wealth inequality, a tax system that comes down hard on wages but gives capital earnings a pass, an explosive growth in corporate profits and a shift of employment from large-scale manufacturing to gig-provided services."

At the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik writes that "labor's share of the economy is at a record low."

"On This Anniversary, We Should Not Forget This"

"And so, on this twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, older people need to be reminded of—and younger readers told for perhaps the first time—how the Republican Party of that era used that tragedy to impose its worldview on a confused and malleable populace and to browbeat the political opposition (and how, tragically, said opposition largely complied in ways that resonate loudly today). Superficial reminiscences published this week will bemoan the 'fact' that we were a country united then, and look how far we've fallen. It sounds soothing. But nothing could be further from the more forensically examined truth."

Michael Tomasky at The New Republic recalls 9/11.

"So Much Fantasizing That Was Meant to Provoke Horror Now Seems to Be Regarded as a Wellspring of Good Ideas"

"This misreading, and the yearning it reveals, would be amusing if it didn't have such potentially dire consequences, fueling the minds of the people with the most resources and power to turn, as Lepore puts it, 'a science-fiction dystopia into a fully functioning infrastructure.' What stayed with the Silicon Valley magnates was the idea of abandoning our bodies and the messiness of other people, leaving behind our finitude for an infinity of stars and self-coding machines. But this is actually a nightmare, a false escape, as the source material hints at without much subtlety. What happens next may depend on whether these boys grow up and finally recognize what they failed to see before."

Gal Beckerman at The Atlantic reviews Jill Lepore's The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.

"He'll End Up Inoculating Them Instead"

"In a larger sense, it's all part of the cognitive dissonance that defines Trump's presidency. The president rose to power on the strength of middle-class white voters - people who feel, justifiably, like they've somehow been denied opportunity and blamed for inequality at the same time. Everything Trump does, he does in their name. And yet Trump never really cares about retooling government in way that works for those voters; the only thing that gets his blood pumping is persecuting otherness and brutalizing intellectuals. As with his erratic tariff regime and his spiraling war in Iran, Trump's harassment of the academy is really just a lashing out, with the consequences disproportionately falling on the people who voted for him. He could have pressed to reform our universities." 

Matt Bai at Rolling Stone argues that "Trump's attacks on elite colleges are doing them a huge favor."

"Good Societies Need Good Social Critics; but They Are Not Made of Critics Alone"

"It also leaves a lot out. In any survey text there are inevitable absences. But, for example, A People's History makes virtually no mention of religion—surely an important part of the national experience. It doesn't discuss conservatism in any serious way. Geopolitics is scarce. Zinn's Nye-inflected explanation for World War I, for example, replaces ideology with interests, and assumes them to be the same. If the goal is to understand Woodrow Wilson's thinking about entry into World War I, for example, A People's History is a very poor guide."

Patrick Iber at The New Republic reviews Dave Zirin's The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn.

As does Heath W. Carter at The Atlantic.

Always on the Run Now

"This also began Steinem's career as a provocative journalist, penning articles including If Men Could Menstruate, which ran in Ms, a magazine co-founded by Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes in 1971. The first issue featured Wonder Woman on the cover; the superhero had recently given up her powers to stay with her male love interest, and the essay argued that DC Comics should restore her powers and return the character to her feminist roots. Steinem also wrote articles such as What It Would Be Like If Women Win in Time, and After Black Power, Women's Liberation, the 1969 New York magazine article that would make her name as a feminist leader."

Sian Cain at The Guardian writes an obituary for Gloria Steinem.

"I Wanted the Subject Matter to Have Scope, Depth, Structure, and Dignity"

"I can't say the same of today's nineteen-year-olds with the same aspirations and bookish bent. English and the humanities generally have lost their grand allure. There's no point in rehearsing the fall for the umpteenth time, only to say that during the '80s canon became a bad word, a dead-white-male artifact. Perhaps the skeptics believed their takedown of the Big Picture was a liberation, and it may have been for some. But not for many. In 1970, English took one in thirteen of all four-year degrees in the United States. Now, it stands at one in sixty."

Mark Bauerlein. at Portico reminisces about being an English major at UCLA.

August 2026 Acquisitions

Books:

Steven Beeber, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, 2008.

Torunn Grønbekk et al, Catwoman Vol. 3: Court of Fools, 2026.

Movies:
One of Them Days, 2025.

Music:

Beatles, Anthology 4, 2025.

Paul Carrack, Twenty-One Good Reasons: The Paul Carrack Collection, 1994.

Charli XCX, Music, Fashion, Film, 2026.

Damned, Not Like Everybody Else, 2026.

Lemon Twigs, Look for Your Mind!, 2026.

Squeeze, Trixies, 2026.

Womack Sisters, The Womack Sisters, 2026.

"There's a Reason 'Democratic' Is There at the Front of the Label"

"One of the ironies of this is that as terms developed over the first half of the 20th century, 'socialism' (in the sense of socialist parties and so forth) generally became self-identified as socialist over and against the anti-democratic elements of communism which, of course, also claimed the socialist label. Old news for people who know this history but a lot of the most intense anti-communists were socialists, though that can seem odd to those outside these sectarian debates. Indeed, the DSA, which Michael Harrington helped found in 1982, was at the forefront of that element of socialist politics."

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo warns against "[t]his vanguard, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party claptrap" in the Democratic Socialists of America.

And Joshua Zeitz at The Bulwark asks, "[d]oes the DSA genuinely admire the social-democratic European model?"  

"What Happens When You Combine Free Trade, Shrinking Unions, Wall Street Bailouts, Growing Corporate Monopoly Power, and the Abandonment of Campaign Finance Reform?"

"You get an economy favoring the wealthy and a political system favoring the powerful, while workers without college degrees suffer declining real wages and dwindling job security."

Robert Reich at The Guardian says that "[w]e are finally witnessing the decline of corporate Democrats."

"Spring From Desperate Human Needs in the Absence of Religion"

"And the good news, I think, is that it's finally happening. Cult leaders, however charismatic, are usually sociopaths when they aren't simply sexual abusers, and so cults tend to implode when the leader's flaws emerge beyond any denial. Fixed dogmas can also collapse when the lies required to sustain them simply become too absurd, too huge to believe, when the avatars of the system are exposed as frauds and liars. And to my eyes, the emperors' clothes on both sides are now unmistakably falling."

Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish writes that "[t]he cult of Trump and the cult of wokeness are taking huge hits from reality."

"And They Must See This as Not Three Fights but One"

"Thus will changing the paradigm be the work of many years. Can the Democrats, and the people in their orbit, do it? I think they can. They have popular policies, but they have to remove those policies from their silos and connect them to values and offer people a vision for themselves as individuals and for society at large, a vision that stirs people's souls as Americans. They have to connect their economic ideas to ideals that Americans cherish—democracy and freedom. You can't get much more American than democracy and freedom. They are core to our national project. And they are not separate from economic justice. They are inseparable. It is up to the Democrats to defend all three."

In 2022, The New Republic ran an excerpt from Michael Tomansky's The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity.

"Marx in the Twenty-First Century"

"This is not to say that Marx thought that industrialization, mechanization, or globalization were bad things. He was no Luddite. His concern was the disconnect between profits and human need: Much like today's industrial regions, the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester that Marx observed were filled with workers who were exhausted, unhealthy, and miserable while the factory owners dined on beef bourguignon and claret in their mansions. The factories these days just happen to be in Shenzhen or Dhaka, not the other side of town. Unlike the British machine wreckers of a generation before, Marx saw no way to stuff the technological genie back into the bottle. New tools must be utilized for the greatest good: Instead of getting rid of the factories, the public should take ownership of them."

Max Holleran at The New Republic reviews David Harvey's The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works.

"The Real Story of Trump's Presidency"

"But the Democrats will almost certainly retake one, if not both, chambers of Congress in the fall. When they do, their biggest task will be to restrain this administration—and a huge part of that will involve investigating this corruption. But to do that effectively, they must weave these scandals into a larger narrative, not just pick one or two that seem particularly odious or emblematic. This should be easy. The Democrats will spend the fall campaigning primarily on what has been the biggest issue of the post-pandemic era: the affordability crisis. Prices are rising, real wages are going down, and Americans are anxious and pissed off. While many voters are struggling to get by, one man is doing better than ever. He made more than $2 billion last year alone. And he did it by selling the highest, most sacred office in the land."

Alex Shephard at The New Republic calls Donald Trump "the most corrupt politician in American history."

July 2026 Acquisitions

Books:

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 2024.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, Five Gears in Reverse: A Criminal Book, 2026.

Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch, The Authority: Relentless, 2025.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 2005.

Reuel Golden, New York: Portrait of a City, 2025.

Chris Robinson (ed.), All-Negro Comics: America's First Black Comic Book, 2025.

Movies:
Michael, 2026.

Music:

Angine de Poitrine, Vol. II, 2026.

Little Barrie, Gravity Freeze, 2026.

Dyke and the Blazers, The Funky Broadway: The Very Best of Dyke & the Blazers, 1999.

Madonna, Confessions II, 2026.

Raye, This Music May Contain Hope, 2026.

Bobby Womack, J.J. Johnson, Across 110th Street, 1972.

Various, The Best of Blaxploitation, 1999.

Various, Digging Your Scene: New Pop and All That Jazz 1982-1987, 2026.

Various, In the Beginning There Was Rhythm, 2001.

Various, Thom Bell: Didn't I Blow Your Mind: The Sound of Philadelphia Soul 1969-1983, 2024.