"Intense Politicisation, with Neither Institutional Roots nor Ambitions"

"'On the surface,' Jäger writes, 'the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.' As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s evocative phrase 'bodies without organs'. Modern political movements, he writes, are 'concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism'."

Zoe Williams at The Guardian talks with Anton Jäger, author of Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences.

"A Cesspool of Prissy Repression and Recklessly Moronic Freedom That Now Stands as an Embarrassment to One and All"

"Like every decade, the '90s had its cathartic heights. And like the '60s, it seemed like a period in which the culture was moving forward, albeit fitfully, toward a more progressive, enlightened future, at least in our fuzz-pedal-hazy minds. But it was also a decade of repulsive depths, craven money-grabs, and Pauly Shore's film career."

Charles Aaron in a 2013 Spin article presents "The 50 Worst Moments of the '90s."

Now or Never

"Having staged a remarkably successful coup within Britain’s ruling Labour Party in response to outgoing leader Keir Starmer's chronic irresolution on virtually all issues, Burnham has calculated that he needs to appear decisive and pragmatic straight out of the box. The former Manchester mayor comes off as a gregarious, upbeat fellow with an admittedly nerdy overlay. If he's not exactly John F. Kennedy, he clearly outdoes Starmer on charisma (not a high bar). He begins with a considerable reservoir of goodwill, but whether improved vibes can correct the Labour government's toxic drift remains to be seen."

Andrew O'Hehir at Salon reacts to Andy Burnham becoming the latest UK prime minister.

As does Larry Elliot at The Guardian.

"Optimistic Researchers Say There Still Time to Head Off Climate Change Before It Starts Killing Rich People"

"Despite its overall conclusion, the report stated that the climate crisis had already worsened to the point at which rich people really ought to start thinking about selling their private islands in the Caribbean."

From The Onion.

"These Changes Have Already Begun"

"And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn't mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn't illiterate. It's postliterate."

Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic declares that "The End of Reading Is Here."

"The Reckoning Coming When the MAGA Sleeping Giant Awakens"

"A January New York Times and Siena poll found 65 percent of voters say a middle-class life is simply out of reach, and 77 percent say it’s harder to reach now than it was for their parents. That isn't a 'left' or 'right' number: that's my dad's vanished paycheck and benefits, expressed as despair, across the whole country.

Which is precisely why the morbidly rich oligarchs and their lickspittle politicians, and the billionaire-owned media, work so hard to keep us in these neat little categories and at each others' throats."

Thom Hartmann at Alternet writes that "[t]he instant working people stop asking 'who's the enemy who looks, prays, or loves differently than I do' and start asking 'who took my dad's paycheck,' the whole game is over."

June 2026 Acquisitions

Books:

Charles Ardai et al. Heat Seeker: Exposed--A Gun Honey Series Vol. 3, 2026.

Andy Diggle and Jock, Green Arrow: Year One, 2026.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, We3, 2025.

Ben Rhodes, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity--A History in 15 Speeches, 2026.

Various, Elseworlds: Batman Vol. 3, 2018.

Music:

Don Covay, Mercy Mercy: The Definitive Don Covay, 1994.

Graham Coxon, Castle Park, 2026.

Haircut 100, Boxing the Compass, 2026.

Heavy Stereo, "Sleep Freak," 1995.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Wedding Album, 1969.

Madonna, Finally Enough Love, 2022.

Molotovs, Wasted on Youth, 2026.

Paul Young, From Time to Time: The Singles Collection, 1991.

Various, Super Bad on Celluloid: Music from '70s Black Cinema, 1998.

"A Leftist Wave Is Cresting Across the Country"

"After the last month, Democratic leadership should be seriously taking stock of their position. The energy is on their left. The people are on their left. Democrats want fighters, and they want a politics rooted in the collective struggles of the masses, not decided in smoke-filled rooms. We still need moderate Democrats to win those pesky median voters, for now. But the party's leadership is deeply out of touch with its base."

Ben Davis at The Guardian considers the results of recent primary elections.

As does George Chidi.

"The United States Has Perhaps Done Worse Than Gaining Nothing"

"Iran has suffered significant damage from U.S. and Israeli military action. But as I and others warned at the outset, killing people and bombing things do not by themselves produce victory. The reality is that the war will close with the regime in Tehran intact and in the grip of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; the Strait of Hormuz will remain under the threat of Iranian attacks; Iran will continue to possess significant drone and missile stocks; the regime will maintain the capability to be a state sponsor of terror; and many sanctions will be lifted and billions of dollars in unfrozen assets will flow to Iran. In other words, the Iranians have achieved their key strategic aims—regime survival above all—while the Americans have achieved none of their own."

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic writes that "the United States has been defeated."

"It Didn't Have to Be Like This"

"There is a sense of sadness here, of opportunities missed. America is the most powerful economic and cultural force on Earth, self-appointed global prefect and all-round democracy monitor. This is a place where liberty is cherished, where people throw around the word 'freedom' like it's a threat, an insult, a blood-stained battle-axe. And yet the US is also the only World Cup host to ban Fifa members from attending. So far the landscape it has dished up is barren and divisive, a depressingly angry version of football uniting the world."

At The Guardian, Barney Ronay says, "Welcome to Trump's World Cup."

"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.

And David Waldstreicher at The New Republic writes an appreciation.

"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.