"In the 21st Century, How Often Do You Hear Musicians Talk About Being Inspired by Books or Poetry?"

"Today we are, as the truism goes, more connected than ever–the perfect incubator for the widespread exchange of ideas. It's what the counter-culture thinkers dreamed of (and helped to build in Silicon Valley). Yet it also feels like we've lost our dreams of radicalism, lost our belief in what art can do, or be, to us. There is no turning back the clock, Burroughs' moment has passed. But as we reflect on his centenary and his remarkable influence on the 20th Century, and on the history of avant-garde and pop music, we should keep our own moment in mind and question why no one has emerged to take his place."

Chal Ravens in a 2014 Quietus article explores examines "the rise and fall of the musical legacy of William Burroughs."

She Watch Channel Zero

"It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote that 'each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.' Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television's values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes."

In a 2025 post, Derek Thompson claims that "Everything Is Television."

"We Should Admit That We're No Longer in the Paradigm Bourdieu Wrote About"

"Where the Left wants to stake out a moral position on cultural consumption, it is time to update the priors. To rail against avant-garde classical music as 'elitist' is absurd, when appreciation of complicated music no longer has any relation to economic, social, or cultural capital. Is it truly fighting oppression to ignore Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir to gush over multi-billionaire Taylor Swift and her army of hired-gun songwriters, lawyers, and publicists? (Swift's wedding revealed the practical nexus of power today: one guest was Steven J. Demetriou, the executive chairman of Amentum Holdings, which does work for ICE.) Poptimism has become the perfect example of Gramscian hegemony™—where late-stage capitalism has so commandeered the human value system that well-meaning liberals believe their full-throated defense of art-for-money's-sake is somehow chipping away at the class structure."

At Culture: An Owner's Manual, W. David Marx argues that "Good Taste is Not What's Oppressing Us in 2026."

Against "'Respect Me!' Politics"

"The core of my contention is that we need to move away from airy, philosophical debates about the ontology of sex and gender and instead ground our advocacy in common values and clear moral narratives. After years of slogans like 'trans women are women' functioning as progressive shibboleths—so rarely explained, so rarely justified through persuasion—it's time to sideline them from our mass politics."

Cassie Pritchard at The Argument writes that "because I believe trans people are not generally respected as our transitioned sex that I believe we must shift to an argument for our rights and safety premised on moral narratives and values that sit apart from that question entirely."

"The Cardinal Sin of the Social Researcher Is Squeezing the World into His Worldview"

"But while some sociologists proudly claim that their field is a 'weapon' for progressive causes, others have recognized the problem of adopting a narrow ideological compass to guide what is meant to be a broadly-trusted disciplinary ship. Christian Smith, one of America's most prominent sociologists of religion, observed that wielding sociology as an activist tool 'tends to produce sectarian narrowness, exclusion, uniformity, silencing, self-censorship, lack of debate, the negative sanctioning of non-conformists, and the debilitation of rigorous thought.'
"In other words, the opposite of what an academic field is meant to do."

Eboo Patel at Persuasion writes that "We Must Save Sociology From Itself."

"One of America's Great Critics of Plutocracy"

"Eugene Debs was, as the abolitionist Horace Greeley once referred to Abe Lincoln, a 'growing man.' More than previous biographers, Gude illuminates the ways Debs never stopped learning, sharpening his socialist perspective, or recalibrating and expanding his conception of solidarity. From hard compromises within the ARU to his cofounding of the IWW to pondering the formation of an 'American Labor Party,' Debs pursued a never-ending quest of how best to empower workers and win socialism."

Matthew E. Stanley at Jacobin reviews Shawn Gude's American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs.

"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.