“Four Ways to Enjoy the Culture War.” Robert Wyllie writes about Kirk’s assassination and the state of hyperpolitics with the appropriate self-awareness, despair, and hope: “I refuse to tell myself the lie, This is how one becomes an informed and engaged citizen. The best citizen is not the one who enjoys politics the most. Sometimes I tell my wife that, however, when she complains that I have been on my phone too much. Role-players, trolls, personal brand ambassadors, and pundits: There are four ways to enjoy the culture war. We are both competitors and spectators online in a colosseum without walls. We seek the approval of a hundred million thumbs in a never-ending ludus. Like those antique gladiatorial contests, our game generates financial losses and blood loss. People get fired and fired upon. Then we role-play in solidarity, troll the role-players, state the obvious, and predict the consequences. Our preferred diversions are four different sorts of feedback loop. The whole jumble of them interacting together is the architecture of the massive, chaotic, mostly online multiplayer game.”
“Voters Who Oppose Wars of Choice Have Nowhere to Turn.” Conor Friedersdorf chronicles the grim reality that American presidents keep taking military action after promising to rein in the excesses of their predecessors: “For more than two decades, voters who oppose wars of choice have had nowhere to turn. In post-2004 presidential races, anti-war Americans keep rejecting establishment hawks, only to see the supposed alternatives empower hawkish advisers and deploy force unilaterally. Congress shares the blame: Legislators committed to protecting and defending their enumerated powers could have impeached several post–World War II presidents for usurping Article I and the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was designed to limit the president’s ability to initiate war unilaterally. Instead, presidents face no consequences for doing so. Obama took military action in Libya without congressional authorization. Trump unilaterally ordered strikes against Syria in his first term and Iran in his second. And congressional inaction may enable yet more risky wars started by Trump, public opinion be damned.”
“Redistricting Is Ruining Democracy.” Charles Lane condemns the bipartisan push to gerrymander all districts: “the norms already jettisoned in pursuit of winning the 2026 midterms will not easily be restored in time for the next election in 2028—if ever. At the bottom of this slippery slope lies a country made up of 50 one-party states, represented in the Senate and House by increasingly extreme ideologues, with no incentive to compromise about anything. Most ordinary Americans have no interest in such a future. The people who dominate our political parties, however, seem perfectly happy to risk it.”
“Sam Altman says OpenAI is Not ‘trying to become too big to fail.’” George Hammond and Michael Acton report on comments by OpenAI’s CFO indicating that the federal government should guarantee investment in AI. The “circular financial terms” of this industry—which remains wildly unprofitable—raise the specter of the ‘08 housing market crash: “Some analysts are concerned that if OpenAI’s bet on AI fails to deliver enough revenue to meet these commitments, it could cascade into major losses for the US stock market and economy. A government backstop would also tie the taxpayer into its complex financing. Altman wrote on X that ‘we do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters’ and the company is not ‘trying to become too big to fail.’”
“It’s a Tool, It’s a Medium… It’s a Bomb?” Anna Bonanno corrects those who assume the internet is just a neutral “tool” that can be used for good or evil: “Media make us like themselves. They transform us as we use them, just as any other environment transforms us when we step into it (we become warm when we enter a warm room, we become like the friends we hang out with, etc.). If we really believe this to be true, then we can start to see our role as world-builders, not as tech optimists or Luddites.” (Recommended by Rob Grano.)
“Why We Will Miss the BBC.” Mary Harrington responds to the controversy over bias at the BBC by pointing to the real problem—in today’s digital media ecosystem, the aspiration for viewpoint neutrality simply doesn’t stand a chance: “More than one thing can be true simultaneously. It is surely true that many will be delighted by the opportunity these events have afforded, to put the boot into the BBC. It’s surely also true that the institution’s well-documented middle-class staffing skew exposes its employees to the blind spots and groupthink of that social milieu, and that this is often visible in editorial decisions. But it’s also true that comparatively speaking, the BBC is fighting a heroic last stand for neutrality, against perhaps insuperable odds, and has arguably already held out longer than any of its commercial counterparts. It also held out longer than such utopian digital enterprises as Wikipedia.”
“Inside Trump’s Crypto Cash Machine.” Joe Nocera tries to track down the crypto deals that are making the Trump family billions of dollars: “$TRUMP . . . was the start of something much bigger—the First Family’s staggeringly lucrative crypto business, which has added billions to the president’s net worth in a matter of months and led to accusations of corruption. Forbes has calculated that in the 10 months since the election, Trump’s wealth rose by an astonishing $3 billion—from $4.3 billion to $7.3 billion. . . . Crypto may or may not turn out to be good for America; the jury is still out on whether it is truly a new form of currency or just a sophisticated Ponzi scheme. But it has been spectacularly good for the Trumps.”
“Fiction: ‘Marce Catlett’ by Wendell Berry.” Sam Sacks reviews Berry’s newest novel very favorably in the Wall Street Journal and situates it in the rest of his Port William fiction: “Obligation is a recurring theme in this novel, notable because its connotations are almost entirely positive; Andy’s debts have given his life purpose and meaning. Mr. Berry is also drawn to continuity and coherence: His writing conjures the connectedness and simple moral clarity that the people of Port William imperfectly aspire to. And while ‘Marce Catlett’ is in many ways a lament for an ‘oldfangled’ lifestyle that now persists only in stories, it arrives at another of this author’s favorite words. That is ‘thanks’—‘for life continuing on the earth, and for the earth continuing alive.’”
“Has Los Angeles Killed America’s Imagination?” Bill Kauffman hunts for something good to say about LA: “The magnificent Griffith Park Observatory turned 90 this year and, as fans of nonagenarians, my wife and I hiked up the south slope of Mount Hollywood—well, our rental car did the hard work—to pay our respects. The city of Los Angeles sprawled out before us; the Hollywood sign loomed ominously above us. I suppose I should hate this city, the Typhoid Mary of cultural imperialism, infecting and deadening imaginations from Bangor to Bend. As Morrissey crooned: ‘We look to Los Angeles for the language we use/ London is dead.’ But I dunno: it’s my wife’s hometown, I love her Armenian relatives and I’ve always been a sucker for the movies, at least in their pre-CGI, pre-Marvel, pre-woke, pre-franchise age.”
“I Tried the Robot That’s Coming to Live With You. It’s Still Part Human.” Joanna Stern tries out a new robot maid/butler/disaster: “The goal is for Neo to do all of that autonomously. But a 1X expert teleoperator, wearing a VR headset and wielding videogame-like controllers, was behind all those moves. . . . But for Neo to autonomously tidy up your kitchen in the future, it needs a smarter brain. Its AI neural network learns from real-world experience. That’s part of why 1X is sending early versions into homes: to capture videos of every dishwasher load and laundry fold—and feed them into its world model. While large language models are trained on the text of the internet, the model that underpins Neo is trained on the real world.”
“Tall Tales of Abundance.” Kyle Edward Williams has a very perceptive review of Abundance and identifies the core flaw in this newly popular vision: “Perhaps lurking beneath this reductionistic account of abundance is some kind of category error—a mistake about what it means to be a human being and to flourish. The fact that this vision of 2050 is so antiseptic and boring suggests something spiritually bankrupt about it. But Klein and Thompson are pragmatic policy wonks. What’s more, they are at heart technocratic men, so perhaps they are not overly bothered by such things. Yet even if we accept their materialism and join them in neglecting deeper questions of meaning and belonging, their thesis still struggles for this reason: Their ideal of abundance lacks the very solidarity and higher meaning that are necessary to bring people together for common projects. There is little reason to think that technocratic fixes and materialistic abundance will overcome the nihilism and apathy that so thoroughly dominate our political culture.”
“What a Cranky New Book About Progress Gets Right.” Tyler Austin Harper has an excellent review of Paul Kingsnorth’s new book for the Atlantic: “If Against the Machine is one of the most insightful works on culture, technology, and the environment published in some time—and I believe it is—it is not so much because Kingsnorth is persuasive, or likely to win acolytes to his cause. It is not even because I think the limits he chooses to draw are necessarily the right ones. It is valuable because he sees with uncommon clarity that not only nature, but human nature, is being redefined by an anti-limit culture, economic system, and technology sector that treat minds, bodies, and environments as ripe for plundering and optimization in the name of progress. ‘What progress wants is to replace us,’ Kingsnorth writes. ‘Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.’”
