To Live Is to Maneuver

"Would Buckley really be so shocked by the growth of populism and illiberal nationalism and a creeping authoritarianism on the right? Surely, those afflictions in the late Obama years were hardly new, or any more daunting than they had been in Buckley's time. The true crisis on the right, I believed, lay in the fact that it no longer had anyone of Buckley’s stature to keep the tablets. It still doesn't."

Brian Stewart at The Bulwark reviews Sam Tanenhaus's Buckley: The Live and the Revolution That Changed America.

"A Funny Thing Happened in the Wake of These Triumphs"

"But this huge increase in funding was no longer primarily about gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights, because almost all had already been won. It was instead about a new and radical gender revolution. Focused on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with 'white supremacy,' they aimed to dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with 'gender identity' in the law and culture, and to redefine homosexuality, in the process, not as a neutral fact of the human condition but as a liberating ideological 'queerness' meant to subvert and 'queer' language, culture and society in myriad different ways."

Ten years after the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, Andrew Sullivan argues in The New York Times that "the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way."

At The Advocate, Marcie Bianco reacts to Sullivan.

"No Problem the World Faces Has an Answer That Can Be Found in America"

"It is clear that we have to start looking for answers to the world's problems elsewhere, in ourselves and in others. There is a celebration of independence this Independence Day and it is real; it's just for countries other than America. The lesson the Americans once taught the British, they are teaching the rest of the world: there are no necessary nations. There are no exceptional countries. There are no permanent global orders. There's just more history, and trying to survive to stay yourself it."

Stephen Marche at The Guardian says that "[t]his Independence Day, the world is declaring its independence from the US."

"To Put Down Roots and Then Oppose New Development"

"Glaeser and Gyourko go one step further. They hypothesize that as Sun Belt cities have become more affluent and highly educated, their residents have become more willing and able to use existing laws and regulations to block new development. They point to two main pieces of evidence. First, for a given city, the slowdown in new housing development strongly correlates with a rising share of college-educated residents. Second, within cities, the neighborhoods where housing production has slowed the most are lower-density, affluent suburbs populated with relatively well-off, highly educated professionals. In other words, anti-growth NIMBYism might be a perverse but natural consequence of growth: As demand to live in a place increases, it attracts the kind of people who are more likely to oppose new development, and who have the time and resources to do so. 'We used to think that people in Miami, Dallas, Phoenix behaved differently than people in Boston and San Francisco,' Gyourko told me. 'That clearly isn't the case.'"

Rogé Karma at The Atlantic writes that "[t]he Sun Belt, in short, is subject to the same antidevelopment forces as the coasts; it just took longer to trigger them.

June 2025 Acquisitions

Books:

Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, 1962.

Golding, Lord of the Flies, 1954.

Arnaud Le Gouëfflec and Nicolas Moog, Underground: Cursed Rockers and High Priestesses of Sound, 2024.

Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951.

The Little Black Songbook: Oasis, 2010.

Music:
Chuck D, , 2025.
Pulp, More, 2025.
Rain Parade, Crashing Dream, .
Rain Parade, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, .
Talking Heads, , .
Brian Wilson, Playback, .

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.

And Anita Chabria wonders at the Los Angeles Times about what the NYC primary means for the Democratic Party.

"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 pawns."

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.