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Books:
Movies:
Music:
Kate Bush, The Kick Inside, 1978.
Chvrches, Every Open Eye, 2015.
John Denver, John Denver's Greatest Hits, 1973.
Nada Surf, The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy, 2012.
Red Hot Chili Peppers, What Hits!?, 1992.
Paul Weller, Jawbone: Music from the Film, 2017.
Various, Beach Classics, 1987.
"The PMC therefore tries hard to make their children 'gifted' and to nourish their talents, an effort that is supposed to culminate in the kind of august institutional validation that BOOTedgedge has enjoyed. Because they have, all their lives, felt a certain panic about the need to be college-application impressive, the PMC has come to see such impressiveness as somehow morally admirable. For people like this, the recent college admissions scandal, exposing corruption at institutions like Yale and USC, occasions not eye-rolling and wisecracks, as it does on dirtbag Twitter (this writer is guilty), but earnest hand-wringing about fairness and social justice. Smartness, to them, makes some people more deserving of the good life than others."
Liza Featherstone at Jacobin criticizes "Smartness culture."
"We are living with a new kind of regime that didn't exist in Orwell's time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984, where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is—the goal of Newspeak is to impoverish language so that politically incorrect thoughts are no longer possible. Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions."
George Packer at The Atlantic reviews Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984.
"What fuels the Republicans' political strength, in other words, is not current white Christian population levels, but the fact that white Christians historically turn out to vote at higher rates than nonwhite and non-Christian Americans. These higher turnout rates are driven by a number of factors. Voting is highly correlated with other forms of civic participation, such as church attendance. Voting is also highly correlated to education levels, and white Christians are more likely than nonwhite Christians to hold a four-year-college degree. Finally, voting is a habit that has been strongly emphasized in white Christian churches, especially among white evangelicals since the rise of the Christian right in the 1980s."
Robert P. Jones at The Atlantic writes that since 1980, "[m]ajorities of white Christian groups—including white evangelical Protestants, white mainline Protestants, and white Catholics—have voted for Republican presidential candidates, while majorities of every other group—including nonwhite Protestant and Catholic Christians, non-Christian religious Americans, and the religiously unaffiliated—have voted for Democratic presidential candidates."
"Neither do we want a foreign policy that is based on the logic that led to those wars and corroded our democracy: a logic that privileges military tools over diplomatic ones, aggressive unilateralism over multilateral engagement, and acquiescence to our undemocratic partners over the pursuit of core interests alongside democratic allies who truly share our values. We have to view the terrorism threat through the proper scope, rather than allowing it to dominate our view of the world. The time has come to envision a new form of American engagement: one in which the United States leads not in war-making but in bringing people together to find shared solutions to our shared concerns. American power should be measured not by our ability to blow things up, but by our ability to build on our common humanity, harnessing our technology and enormous wealth to create a better life for all people."
Bernie Sanders in Foreign Affairs writes that "[t]he American people don't want endless war."
"At press time, the nation's guitar-wielding men had responded to follow-up questions by biting their lips while finger-picking the introduction to 'Blackbird.'"
From The Onion.
"But what's striking about that editorial, published on April 26, 1989, isn't just how mightily it struggles, and fails, to explain the Central Park jogger case in real time, but how earnestly it strains to reconcile the ugly overtones of its headline—'The Jogger and the Wolf Pack'—with some of the less cooperative facts of the case. Later coverage would leave little room for doubt as to the kids' guilt, but this early piece registers some hesitation as it tackles a set of unrelated incidents that took place the week before, on the evening of April 19, 1989—the rape, and a group of young men who variously robbed and assaulted parkgoers elsewhere—that got rolled together in ways it would take decades to untangle."
Lili Loofbourow at Slate writes about the legacy of the Central Park Five.
"She didn't claim that Trump's detention centers are the equivalent of Auschwitz. But she denied that America is a separate moral category, so inherently different from the world's worst regimes that it requires a separate language. On Tuesday night she retweeted the actor George Takei, who wrote, 'I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America.' This was another act of linguistic transgression. When remembering the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, Americans have generally employed the term internment camps—largely, the historian Roger Daniels has argued, to create a clear separation between America’s misdeeds and those of its hated foes.
"Ocasio-Cortez and others on the Millennial-led left are challenging that separation now."
Peter Beinert at The Atlantic writes that "for the first time in decades, the left is mounting a serious challenge to American exceptionalism."
"This is heroic criticism, warrior criticism, live-ammo criticism that boldly intervenes in culture and unapologetically takes on everything: the movie, the movies, the audience, the other critics, history, society, politics, love and death. This isn't simply a demonstration of reviewing in all its habitual simpering passivity–that type of criticism which is, paradoxically, entirely uncritical, because it eats up whatever film is put on its plate every week and then obediently raises a thumb up or down or at some angle.
"This is criticism that doesn't wait to be asked, Kael's criticism isn't happy with the demurely submissive 'handmaiden to the arts' tag; she is more like Joan of Arc at the Battle of Orléans."
Peter Bradshaw and others at The Guardian praise Pauline Kael on what would have been her 100th birthday.
"Liberalism and the forces opposed to it were the themes of much of Brinkley's work. He came of age in the 1950s and '60s, when conservatism seemed so far outside the mainstream that critic Lionel Trilling declared liberalism 'not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.' But by the end of the '60s, with the rise of the so-called New Right and divisions among liberals brought on by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, critics and scholars were reconsidering their 'consensus' that only liberal thought mattered.
"'Nothing has become clearer over the past 30 years—both in historical scholarship and in our experience as a society—than that the consensus agreement, on that point at least, was wrong,' Brinkley wrote in 1998."
Hillel Italie at the PBS Newshour writes an obituary for historian Alan Brinkley.
Eric Foner at The Nation, David Greenberg at Time, and Yanek Mieczkowski at History News Network write appreciations.
"Think of the internet as a vast ocean of written statements. That ocean is not governed by any traditional knowledge structures; users are instead navigated by for-profit companies that seek to maximize engagement, no matter the cost. The social norms of this world are also chaotic, since users can be anonymous and their social contact therefore undaunted by ordinary interpersonal consequences. Interpretations of the ocean's infinite knowledge float like algae blooms on the surface of the internet, totally unrestrained in their growth by law or shame or 'truth,' which we previously relied upon to negotiate on behalf of the greater good. In this universe, 'the Crusades' are a hunk of narrative flotsam, floating toward whichever whirlpool in the culture is moving fastest, thickening and speeding up discursive maelstroms wherever it finds them."
Josephine Livingstone at The New Republic reviews Christopher Tyerman's The World of the Crusades.
"The Laffer curve has done immense damage to the US economy in the 40 years since its inception. It also ignores a fundamental reality: tax cuts for the rich don't work.
"Each and every time state or federal governments have tested Laffer's trickle-down theory, deficits balloon, rich folks hoard their wealth at the top, and average Americans suffer."
Morris Pearl at The Guardian criticizes Donald Trump's feting of Arthur Laffer.
"Yoni Appelbaum argued in an important cover story for The Atlantic in favor of opening an impeachment inquiry into the president. I worried some weeks later on this site about the political and institutional risks of proceeding down that path. But Trump himself gets a vote; Trump himself forces the hands even of those who might wish to restrain the hands. He is such an institution-wrecker—his instincts are so lawless—that he may simply refuse to allow Congress not to impeach him."
David Frum at The Atlantic reacts to Donald Trump's "willingness to collaborate with foreign spies against his domestic political opponents."
"Most of these measures aren't socialist, in the proper sense of the word, and many of his ideas overlap with those of various campaign rivals who do not use that word at all (though you could argue that his rivals are merely paying lip service to some of the more progressive items they've endorsed). The proposals could be described, accurately, as the application of New Deal principles to ease contemporary forms of wealth inequality, or as a turn away from the neoliberal politics that have dominated the Democratic Party since Reagan.
"But they could also be described as a means of using government power to rein in capitalism—thus preserving it. That's what FDR did, and that’s why many actual socialists hated him. Though Sanders is tinkering with one proposal that could resemble collective ownership of the means of production, it's not the main thrust of most of his policy plans, which—like FDR's—piss off capitalists while preserving the core of the capitalist system."
Jim Newell at Slate reacts to Bernie Sanders's "major address on how democratic socialism is the only way to defeat oligarchy and authoritarianism."
John Nichols at The Nation interviews Sanders.
And Yascha Mounk at The Atlantic reacts to the speech.
"Between external sources and his own research and phone and email interviews, Rae creates a complex, rich picture of Burroughs' life, focusing on his meetings with musicians and the way his techniques and ideas infiltrated them and changed the way they looked at the world as well as their own work. While doing this, Rae stays true to history and always presents Burroughs' duality; shaman and madman, writer and hermit, traveling man and depressed genius. The mixture came to embody rock and roll:"
Gabino Iglesias at NPR reviews Casey Rae's William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll.
"It raises two big questions: Why wasn't Johnson thrown out of office for making those choices, and should he have been? She answers the first with erudition and cogency. The second she essentially leaves open, reminding us that even some of the lawmakers who reviled Johnson hesitated to remove him. Their ambivalence helps explain why no president has ever been convicted of 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' or why impeachment, often viewed as a necessity to stop a lawless leader, may prove almost impossible to execute successfully."
Michael Kazin at The New Republic reviews Brenda Wineapple's The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.
"French is basically a very conservative classical liberal, in the sense of someone who believes in pluralism, rule of law, etc. Ahmaris argues that's a dead end for real conservatives, that a pluralist, classical liberal model is one in which conservatives will always be being pushed out of the public square. As the argument goes, they now have to accept gays, abortion, trans-rights. Where does it end? Of course, ultra-orthodox Jews seem to get by all right living in one of the more liberal parts of the country here in New York City. How do they manage? Look a little closer and the key is that the trend of American society seems to be one where their traditionalist Christian vision won't be backed by the state or set the tone for society at large."
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo warns of conservatives who are "increasingly soured on pluralism and democracy itself."
"For all the genuine flaws of the American education system, the nation still has many high-achieving public-school districts. Nearly all of them are united by a thriving community of economically secure middle-class families with sufficient political power to demand great schools, the time and resources to participate in those schools, and the tax money to amply fund them. In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it."
Nick Hanauer at The Atlantic writes that "the most direct way to address rising economic inequality is to simply pay ordinary workers more, by increasing the minimum wage and the salary threshold for overtime exemption; by restoring bargaining power for labor; and by instating higher taxes—much higher taxes—on rich people like me and on our estates."
"Labour will never form a government if its remainer and leaver wings become permanently estranged. While it is certainly true that the majority of Labour voters back remain, a significant minority voted to leave the EU. It is not enough for Labour to pile up votes in the pro-remain big cities: it needs to win marginals in the north, the Midlands and south-east as well–constituencies that voted leave in June 2016 and for the Brexit party last month. Labour's remainers believe departure from the EU will make those who voted to leave worse off. Labour's leavers think the remainers are subverting democracy."
Larry Elliott at The Guardian argues that Jeremy Corbyn "is right to try to move on from the referendum and focus on healing the country."
"By 1984 dozens of off beat independent businesses and forward thinking boutiques dominated the Avenue and over night these old rundown stucco buildings started to house kooky, outlandish and colorful shops covered in Graffiti and the store employees were the main attraction."
Alison Martino in a 2014 Los Angeles article remembers Melrose Avenue in the 1980s.
"Moreover, 1968 was the year that flower-power idealism curdled: it was a year of rioting, violence and upheaval, of Sympathy for the Devil rather than All You Need Is Love. That suited the album's sinister atmosphere perfectly. Its flatly astonishing closer, I Walk on Gilded Splinters, offered up eight minutes of crawling malevolence and threatening braggadocio: if you took the title as a reference to needles, as plenty did, it sounded remarkably like a sneering, screw-you defence of Rebennack's drug use, a distant Louisiana relation of the Velvet Underground's Heroin. The live show Rebennack devised to support the album was a sensation, involving dancers wearing nothing but body paint, the singer disappearing in a puff of smoke and voodoo rituals. In St Louis, they were arrested after a band member bit the head off a chicken on stage."
Alexis Petridis at The Guardian writes an appreciation of Dr. John.
"There are now Labour activists and polemicists who treat politics as if it were a board game, hanging on to the theories of dead Russians, and dealing in abstractions. Their rationale for maligning much of the party's supposed base, I am told by some horrified Labour insiders, is to excise a whole chunk of the post-industrial working class from left politics, leave it to Farage and his friends, and install 'networked youth' as the new vanguard of the revolution. Where any such manoeuvre would leave Labour's supposed mission to double down on inequality and the UK's regional imbalances is anyone's guess."
John Harris at The Guardian worries that anti-Brexiteers "threaten to pump the left full of one of the worst prejudices of all: snobbery."
"At its heart, fascism is an alliance of hardline and moderate conservatives seeking to repress left-wing sentiment. It's a campaign to convert the working classes to nationalism, to make them angry and violent, to convince them that they've been betrayed by their global-elite leaders. It's the resurrection of an illustrious past, an effort to propel the nation forward, to expand with industry, military weapons and technology.
"The danger of fascism lies in its ability to coopt legitimate resentments resulting from inequality and refashion them as hostility towards outsiders. Instead of addressing working-class grievances, fascistic regimes offer their followers a different form of reward by redrawing the lines of inclusion and exclusion, mass-producing myth and arms in equal measure."
At The New Republic, Geoffrey Cain warns that "[u]ntil moderates and leftists can identify these characteristics and talk, clearly, about their costs, fascistic thinking will be hard to challenge."
"In 1965, his group the Spades released a single containing two Erickson songs that became crucial to the Elevators–You're Gonna Miss Me and We Sell Soul. But the leap into innerspace came when he paired up with Tommy Hall to form the Elevators in Austin, Texas, later that year. Hall was the psychedelic visionary–the one who shaped the band’s debut into being The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, the principal lyricist, and the player of the electric jug, the sound that gave the band their unearthly wobbliness–while Erickson was the singer and main composer; and what extraordinary music he composed. On that debut album, Roller Coaster is disorienting and sinister, a combination of rock'n'roll and raga-like intensity; Reverberation (Doubt) a claustrophobic nightmare; Fire Engine is garage rock taken to its logical extreme. As Rob Chapman wrote in his book Psychedelia and Other Colours: 'The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators and its follow-up, Easter Everywhere, contain some of the most primal yelps of discomfort and joy heard anywhere in rock'n'roll.'"
Michael Hann at The Guardian writes an appreciation of Roky Erickson.
"I wasn't aware that there had been a real life model for the welfare queen myth and stereotype. When I learned about it back in 2012 that Linda Taylor had been really the first person to be given this nickname and that the image of the fur coats and the Cadillac came from her I was fascinated both by that fact and the idea that a myth and a stereotype could endure in a person's image but that person herself could be forgotten and erased was just so kind of transfixing to me and I became obsessed with trying to figure out who this person had been and why she had been forgotten."
Hari Sreenivasan on the PBS Newshour interviews Josh Levin, the author of The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth.
