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."

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.'"

"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."

"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."

August 2026 Acquisitions

Books:

Steven Beeber, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, 2008.

Torunn Grønbekk et al, Catwoman Vol. 3: Court of Fools, 2026.

Movies:
One of Them Days, 2025.

Music:

Beatles, Anthology 4, 2025.

Paul Carrack, Twenty-One Good Reasons: The Paul Carrack Collection, 1994.

Charli XCX, Music, Fashion, Film, 2026.

Damned, Not Like Everybody Else, 2026.

Lemon Twigs, Look for Your Mind!, 2026.

Squeeze, Trixies, 2026.

Womack Sisters, The Womack Sisters, 2026.

"There's a Reason 'Democratic' Is There at the Front of the Label"

"One of the ironies of this is that as terms developed over the first half of the 20th century, 'socialism' (in the sense of socialist parties and so forth) generally became self-identified as socialist over and against the anti-democratic elements of communism which, of course, also claimed the socialist label. Old news for people who know this history but a lot of the most intense anti-communists were socialists, though that can seem odd to those outside these sectarian debates. Indeed, the DSA, which Michael Harrington helped found in 1982, was at the forefront of that element of socialist politics."

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo warns against "[t]his vanguard, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party claptrap" in the Democratic Socialists of America.

And Joshua Zeitz at The Bulwark asks, "[d]oes the DSA genuinely admire the social-democratic European model?"  

"What Happens When You Combine Free Trade, Shrinking Unions, Wall Street Bailouts, Growing Corporate Monopoly Power, and the Abandonment of Campaign Finance Reform?"

"You get an economy favoring the wealthy and a political system favoring the powerful, while workers without college degrees suffer declining real wages and dwindling job security."

Robert Reich at The Guardian says that "[w]e are finally witnessing the decline of corporate Democrats."

"Spring From Desperate Human Needs in the Absence of Religion"

"And the good news, I think, is that it's finally happening. Cult leaders, however charismatic, are usually sociopaths when they aren't simply sexual abusers, and so cults tend to implode when the leader's flaws emerge beyond any denial. Fixed dogmas can also collapse when the lies required to sustain them simply become too absurd, too huge to believe, when the avatars of the system are exposed as frauds and liars. And to my eyes, the emperors' clothes on both sides are now unmistakably falling."

Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish writes that "[t]he cult of Trump and the cult of wokeness are taking huge hits from reality."

"And They Must See This as Not Three Fights but One"

"Thus will changing the paradigm be the work of many years. Can the Democrats, and the people in their orbit, do it? I think they can. They have popular policies, but they have to remove those policies from their silos and connect them to values and offer people a vision for themselves as individuals and for society at large, a vision that stirs people's souls as Americans. They have to connect their economic ideas to ideals that Americans cherish—democracy and freedom. You can't get much more American than democracy and freedom. They are core to our national project. And they are not separate from economic justice. They are inseparable. It is up to the Democrats to defend all three."

In 2022, The New Republic ran an excerpt from Michael Tomansky's The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity.

"The Real Story of Trump's Presidency"

"But the Democrats will almost certainly retake one, if not both, chambers of Congress in the fall. When they do, their biggest task will be to restrain this administration—and a huge part of that will involve investigating this corruption. But to do that effectively, they must weave these scandals into a larger narrative, not just pick one or two that seem particularly odious or emblematic. This should be easy. The Democrats will spend the fall campaigning primarily on what has been the biggest issue of the post-pandemic era: the affordability crisis. Prices are rising, real wages are going down, and Americans are anxious and pissed off. While many voters are struggling to get by, one man is doing better than ever. He made more than $2 billion last year alone. And he did it by selling the highest, most sacred office in the land."

Alex Shephard at The New Republic calls Donald Trump "the most corrupt politician in American history."

July 2026 Acquisitions

Books:

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 2024.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, Five Gears in Reverse: A Criminal Book, 2026.

Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch, The Authority: Relentless, 2025.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 2005.

Reuel Golden, New York: Portrait of a City, 2025.

Chris Robinson (ed.), All-Negro Comics: America's First Black Comic Book, 2025.

Movies:
Michael, 2026.

Music:

Angine de Poitrine, Vol. II, 2026.

Little Barrie, Gravity Freeze, 2026.

Dyke and the Blazers, The Funky Broadway: The Very Best of Dyke & the Blazers, 1999.

Madonna, Confessions II, 2026.

Raye, This Music May Contain Hope, 2026.

Bobby Womack, J.J. Johnson, Across 110th Street, 1972.

Various, The Best of Blaxploitation, 1999.

Various, Digging Your Scene: New Pop and All That Jazz 1982-1987, 2026.

Various, In the Beginning There Was Rhythm, 2001.

Various, Thom Bell: Didn't I Blow Your Mind: The Sound of Philadelphia Soul 1969-1983, 2024.

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."

And John Harris at The Guardian argues that "democracy won't survive the death of reading."

"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."