"If the Study of History Teaches Anything, It Teaches Us the Limitations of Life"

"Professor Wood distilled what he found exceptional in the Revolutionary period in 'The Radicalism of the American Revolution.' 'To base a society on the commonplace behavior of ordinary people,' he wrote, 'may be obvious and understandable to us today, but it was momentously radical in the long sweep of world history up to that time.'"

At The New York Times, David Stout, Alex Traub, and Ash Wu write an obituary for Gordon S. Wood.

"This Was Supposed to Be a Change Revolution, but Voters Clearly Said No to the Revolution"

"'I think the Democrats' prospects are very bright in 2026 given the California Republicans' dysfunctionality and a complete backlash against Donald Trump,' Adams said. 'But I have much bigger concerns about the California Democrats long term, because it seems to me they're setting a record for most consecutive years of failing to fix the state's problems while getting reelected anyway.'"

Jenny Jarvie at the Los Angeles Times reports reactions to the results of California's primary elections.

And Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect explains "How California Politics Became So Blah."

Broken Eggs Cannot Be Mended

"The American people broke something when they gave Trump a second chance in office. And there is no going back to the Union as it was. If Democrats hope to lead the nation to any kind of recovery, much less renewal, they must understand and internalize this fact of the matter."

Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times argues that "Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction—for building something new on the wreckage of what President Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought—not for restoration of what was."

"One Reason the Revolution Disappoints Is Because We Assume It Ended Too Soon"

"Yet Richards's final plea is still worth heeding: 'a narrative of the American Revolution that only criticizes is a poor replacement for a narrative that only celebrates.' It may simply be that history books are not the best place to look for this 'usable past,' as historians call it. In many ways, ordinary Americans are already doing that work themselves. You see one version in MAGA's appropriation of Revolutionary symbols, from the 'Don't Tread On Me' flag to the movement's Tea Party roots. But the impulse appears on the left as well. Bernie Sanders frequently invokes the Founders in his fight against oligarchy, even casting his first presidential campaign as part of an ongoing 'political revolution' that 'never ends.' Mainstream liberals, too, seem to have caught the Revolutionary spirit: What is the protest slogan 'No Kings,' after all, if not a reminder that the founding still resonates, and might not be as distant as it seems?"

Eric Herschthal at The New Republic reviews Nathan Perl-Rosenthal's The Long Revolution: Creating a United States after 1776 and Thomas Richards, Jr.'s The Unfinished Business of 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended.

May 2026 Acquisitions

Books:

Jeph Loeb et al, Superman/Batman, 2025.

Movies:

The Women in Cages Collection, 2011.

Music:

Black Keys, Peaches!, 2026.

Gorillaz, The Mountain, 2026.

Graham Bond Organisation, The Sound Of '65/There's A Bond Between Us, 1999.

Social Distortion, Born to Kill, 2026.

Paul Weller, Weller at the BBC (Vol. 2), 2026.

"Any Billionaires Who Pay the Tax Will Earn It Back in Just a Few Months"

"Billionaires' taxes amount to zero. So long as they don't sell any of the shares that made them rich, they're not actually forced to pay taxes on the skyrocketing value of those shares. A 'wealth tax' worthy of the name would ensure they pay the same as the rest of us, around 40%. That would not prevent them from amassing fortunes. Their $1 million would still grow to $190 million over 20 years—which is colossal, just not as colossal as $3.3 billion."

Stephen Land at the Los Angeles Times explains "[w]hy billionaires shouldn't fuss over the wealth tax."

And Jonathan Last at The Bulwark writes, "As the saying goes: Capitalism is too important to be left to the capitalists."

"PBS-ification"

"But it is noticeable that as the folk memory of punk and of the mid-Sixties and rock'n'roll, has faded,  so too is that distrust of art that Marcus wrote about approvingly, that Drummond enacted, that Bangs took for granted...

Gradually there has been a growing resignation towards the very thing that Nik Cohn found intolerable–the division between industrialised chartpop, brainless if entertaining trash, and a separate zone of 'fine music', which is totally comfortable with seeing itself as art."

Simon Reynolds presents a transcript of a talk he made at Harvard University in 2012.

"Probably Did More Than Any Organization to Expose the Society's Dark Side to the World"

"No smear campaign, this was an exposé. The covert program ginned up negative press and made the society toxic in the eyes of most Americans. The exposure neutered the ability of violent, conspiratorial, white-supremacist elements associated with the society to win elective office or dominate either the Democratic or the Republican party. And the ADL's campaign forced Birchers to spend time, energy, and resources fending off charges of extremism or bigotry. The incessant public conversation about Birchers as a hate-filled group generated the impression that the organization must be tainted and ought to be shunned."

Matthew Dallek at The Bulwark discusses how the Anti-Defamation League challenged the John Birth Society.

"Calls This Period of Economic Growth One of the 'Two Pillars' Supporting That Era's Anomalously High Marriage Rates"

"Free-market conservatives toppled one pillar, and feminism toppled the other, bringing us to our current era of record high inequality and singlehood. The conservatives trying to revive midcentury marriage patterns place the blame squarely on feminists, even though the regressive economic agenda enacted by conservatives themselves made it all but inevitable that marriage would become what Coontz and other social scientists call 'a luxury good.'"

Anna Louie Sussman at The New Republic reviews Stephanie Coontz's For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage.

"Lest We Forget the Horrors" Part II

"Now that Trump has returned to office, amid civil rights, humanitarian, economic, and constitutional crises, we felt it critical to make an inventory of this new round of horrors."

As with Donald Trump's first term, the editors of McSweeney's present "An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes."

Attention Politics

"'Politicians are recruited in lots of different ways, but let's say that now we have reached an era in which part of the recruitment process is based on their ability to engage with new social media platforms,' says Stuart Soroka, a professor in the departments of communication and political science at UCLA." 

While discussing the Los Angeles mayoral race, Lorraine Ali at the Los Angeles Times writes about "reality TV- and social media-made politicians who've moved into politics."

"A Luminous Quality That Can Be Almost Blinding"

"You can hardly blame Monroe for being overwhelmed by her own image. In her lifetime, she was far and away the most photographed woman in the world, which is another way of saying that she was the most desired. Marilyn Monroe became a movie star in the years following World War II and died just before the social movements of the 1960s permanently altered the face of the nation. Her career was almost exactly contemporaneous with the '50s, that decade of unparalleled American prosperity and power."

Moira Donegan at Bookforum reviews Marilyn Monroe 100: The Official Centenary Book.

"What Went Wrong?"

"Some portion of the book's confusion about capitalism, and its author's refusal or inability to stand by its claims about capitalism, is symptomatic and shared. In 2014, Seth Rockman, one of Beckert's colleagues in the new history of capitalism, announced that the field had 'minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of capitalism.' That was a virtue, Rockman claimed, not a vice. If they 'let capitalism float as a placeholder,' scholars would be freed to do 'the empirical work of discovery' and find 'ground-level evidence of a system in operation.' Twelve years—and 1,325 pages—later, free time is over, and judging by the results in hand, scholars of the new history of capitalism have no more sense of a system now than when they began." 

Corey Robin at The Nation reviews Sven Beckert's Capitalism: A Global History.

April 2026 Acquisitions

Books:

Brian Michael Bendis, Goldfish, 2022.

Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, Harley Quinn: Wild at Heart, 2025.

Anthony O'Hear and Judy Groves, Introducing Jesus: A Graphic Guide, 2015.

Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, 1899, 1964.

Movies:

Big Bad Mama/Big Bad Mama II, 1999.

Earth Girls Are Easy, 1988.

Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, 1975.

Lethal Ladies 2, 1999.

M, 1931.

Music:

Bangs and Talbot, Smokin' Aces, 2026.

British Electric Foundation, Music Of Quality And Distinction Volume One, 1982, 1991.

DJ Quik, Platnium & Gold Collection, 2004.

Dr Feelgood, Sneakin' Suspicion, 1977, 2025.

Hot Chocolate, An Introduction to Hot Chocolate, 2017.

Sly and the Family Stone, The First Family: Live at Winchester Cathedral 1967, 2025.

Smothers Brothers, Sibling Revelry: The Best of the Smothers Brothers, 1988.

Steve White Trio, Soul Drums, 2026.

"Trump Has Met His Match in Pope Leo"

"It's surely no exaggeration to say that Trump embodies the very worst of us. He brims over with flaws–we used to call them sins–most people try to tame within themselves. Though the self-regard and vanity is beyond egregious, we've somehow grown used to it. This is the man who took a memorial to a young president gunned down in his prime, and slapped his own name on it: behold, the Trump-Kennedy Center. This is the man who plans to build a gold victory arch, an Arc de Trump, so gargantuan at 250ft tall that it will loom over Washington DC. This is the man who posted an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure"

At The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland writes that "the US president represents the polar opposite of Christianity."

"The Economic Mess We're in Is Entirely of Trump's Own Doing"

"It always sounds a bit earnest to deplore corruption, but one of the practical reasons for eschewing corruption is because at best it acts like an invisible tax on economic growth. At worst, it corrodes the economic engine to the point that it doesn't properly function any longer. Before Trump, the United States was a world leader in combatting corporate and political corruption abroad for the unapologetically realpolitik reason that American companies could win on a level playing field. Under Trump II, the DOJ has explicitly stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and we're now in a grubby race to the bottom.

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo writes that "[n]ot only are Trump's second term attacks on economic growth hard to reverse, let alone quickly, they're deeply wired into who he is and what he’s about."

"Pro-Worker, Pro-Family, Pro-America"

"We have no complaints and feel fortunate to have had a place to regularly publish our political and policy ideas since 2020. Hopefully, TLP's insights and arguments made some difference in the Democratic Party's strategic discourse and in wider political debates—or at least got people to look at matters in a different light and reconsider some of their positions."

John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot winds the site down, alongside articles from various writers:

Henry Olsen,

Michael Baharaeen,

Justin Vassallo,

Juan David Rojas, 

and Ruy Teixeira.

Let's Dance

"That's what birthed punk rock. Not anarchy but ennui. The energy had to go somewhere. It went into a fast, urgent 'One, two, three, four…'"

Jonathan Eig at AudioPhix marks the fiftieth anniversary of Ramones.