Songs of a Lost World

Anglo-American society never quite embraced Samuel Johnson’s idea that “nothing odd will do long.” His reference point was Tristram Shandy (1766), Laurence Sterne’s odd autobiographical novel filled with so many asides and digressions that it eventually cops to its own pointlessness. Though right about the trend-setting potential of Tristram Shandy, Dr. Johnson was completely wrong about oddity within culture.

Amid the conformity of British capitalism and especially that of the American version, oddity endures but is constantly displaced by new oddities vying for consumer attention. We are often too busy or too incurious about the previously odd to track its subsequent fate. History being full of curios and oddities is what makes it seem clunky, non-seamless, and non-optimized to devotees of presentism. The internet dutifully organizes the previously avant-garde within a mainstream buffet, enabling consumers to pick and choose the “alt” to suit current tastes and esthetics (tattoos, piercings, Doc Martens) without the bother of historical context.

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The Hard Way

Donald Trump’s signature extortion line of 2025 was delivered right out of the gate last January. Ironically, he said it to the last person in the world he would dare extort: Vladimir Putin. “We can do it the easy way or the hard way,” he told the Russian President in regard to the war with Ukraine. Although Trump’s FCC lackey Brendan Carr used the phrase months later in attempting to pressure the FCC to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air, Trump owns the letter and the spirit of this gangland “proposition.” He said it again on January 9, this time in regard to annexing Greenland, as he regaled the oil executives he called to the White House with scenarios of Venezuelan plunder.

In the mob world, “We can do this easy way or the hard way” is usually delivered to someone in a very bad place. In extreme situations, victims are aware that if they don’t submit they will be tortured to death (the hard way) whereas if they do they will merely be fatally shot (the easy way). With the White House rackets, many have paid to take the easy way: Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia; YouTube, Disney, Meta, ABC, and most notably CBS. Pepper that with a bunch of white-shoe law firms and voilà! . . . a one-pan dictatorship for a crowd. During the Year of Submission, it seemed that this is what you did when your number was called: capitulate to the criminal threatening to remove your organization’s congressionally approved federal funding and/or tax exempt status.

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We Are the Robots

America’s destruction of its own government and economy continues to shock the world outside of bribe-paying oligarchs. Not just Canada and Mexico but our allies across Europe and Asia look on with horror as Donald Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol thugs beat up and kidnap people on American streets and murder Venezuelan fishermen in the Caribbean. While a federal shutdown dragged on for almost two months, the MAGA-aligned Supreme Court gave a thumbs-up to Trump denying children SNAP benefits and Trump’s clown cabinet made the TV news rounds saying that inflation was a hoax and that prices were actually coming down.

Official government websites now function like backed-up sewers, filled with Trump Administration propaganda and lies about political enemies, the state of economy, and the safety of cities and communities. The Homeland Security site, in particular, engages in performative immaturity that would get you fired from any company in America. Its vulgar “messaging” mirrors whatever foreign-bot-generated AI content Trump shares on Truth Social. All of this contributes to the global impression that the word of the United States cannot be trusted.

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Brazil

With the government shut down, with ICE terrorizing American cities, with the National Guard used as strong-arm intimidation cutouts, and with Donald Trump’s Department of Justice indicting his political enemies, America’s proposed $20 billion bailout of Argentina initially flew under the radar.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spun the move as a lifeline to Javier Milei, Argentina’s embattled president and Trump’s authoritarian pal. But the bailout would also help major U.S. hedge funds that made risky bets on the Argentine economy. During Milei’s October 14 visit to the White House, Trump clarified that Argentina would receive the $20 billion only if the ruling party of the chainsaw-wielding Milei won in the country’s elections on October 26. The next day, Bessent sweetened the deal by making it a potential $40 million bailout.

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The Press Corpse

I was struck a couple weeks ago by a fairly banal headline amid the Trump administration’s daily authoritarian grease fires: “The Best Red Carpet Looks at the Venice Film Festival.” With the fracturing of democracy, I’d forgotten that mainstream entertainment media and luxury brands are still doing their thing according to a seasonal calendar. The annual parade of Venice gowns whets the appetite for Fashion Weeks in New York, Paris, London, and Milan.

Fashion Week ought to be a reminder that despite world wars and natural disasters, the cycles of institutional culture and the media that promote them always manage to carry on. Haute couture is the small-batch distraction from social ills just like professional sports is (or is supposed to be) the Big Gulp distraction. But the first thing I saw in the New York Times about the city’s 2025 Fashion Week was an article on Andrew Cuomo and other current and former local politicians walking the runway as part of Style Across the Aisle, a supposedly bipartisan charity event launched by a former journalist who “last year wore an ‘I Heart Cuomo’ T-shirt in the Hamptons.”

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The Law of Subtraction

“God is not found in the soul by adding anything,” wrote the medieval German theologian Meister Eckhart, “but by a process of subtraction.” I assume he meant the letting go of worldly attachments, hence the Christian centrality of alms-giving and rituals of fasting and material abnegation. But humans—loss-averse by nature—and Americans in particular have found subtraction a difficult act.

Before there was athleisure and people still “dressed up” to go out, a sartorial rule held that before leaving the house you should look in the mirror and subtract one thing. But in today’s baroque culture of eternal abundance, even one thing seems too much. Americans’ preferred solution to any problem that involves themselves is to add. During COVID lockdown, our first impulse was to hoard and then to binge-buy superfluous gadgets. Despite the ignorance of anti-vaxxers, reasonable people aggressively wanted to be vaccinated (addition) rather than socially distanced (subtraction).

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Look What You Made Me Do

A couple of years ago, I saw a tweet about an entitled white novelist who’d just published a memoir about being entitled. So I read Jonathan Dee’s New York Times review of Quiet Street: On American Privilege, by the novelist Nick McDonell, an exemplar of the “blue-blooded, white upper class” who “reaped enormous benefits from having grown up in hyper-privileged circumstances.” According to Dee, McDonell “sees . . . [his privilege] more clearly now, and he feels bad about it. And so, having unconsciously monetized these unearned advantages all his life . . . he now monetizes his consciousness of them, courtesy of corporate publishing, at a rate of roughly $1,495.73 per page.”

Dee’s is a competent and composed takedown of McDonell’s grossly ironic social transgression. Yet when I looked up Dee’s bio, I learned that he, too, is a successful novelist who graduated from Yale and went straight to work for George Plimpton at The Paris Review. To a probably lesser degree, he himself is one of the entitled . . . which, according to the worldview of the New York Times, is the only way it could be. Why, you couldn’t rightly have some working-class striver review McDonell’s book now, could you? That would be socialist class warfare. No, it could only be someone “internal” to the club.

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Ancestors

On a bright, breezy Saturday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its redesigned and reconceived Michael C. Rockefeller wing with holdings from Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. At one time or another, I had breezed past the wing’s 1,726 objects before the 2021 renovation began. When friends wanted to check out the architectural bling related to the Oceania rooms—specifically, a reconstructed Ceremonial House Ceiling by Kwoma artists of Papua New Guinea—I went along.

In 1982, the Met had acquired pre-Columbian and African art and artifacts collected by Nelson A. Rockefeller, the politician and oil dynasty scion. Nelson’s son Michael, a young ethnologist, had purchased various artwork from the Pacific islands and Australia before dying in a boat accident in New Guinea in 1961. With the Rockefeller acquisition, the Met built a 40,000-square-foot addition to house it. This renovation changes the floor plan to better integrate the wing with the larger museum, providing a bridge from Greek and Roman galleries that begins with Africa.

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DOGE Day Afternoon

With Elon Musk “pulling back” from field-marshaling the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), I’ve been wondering how long it will take for us to see and feel the disintegration of society that the loss of government programs will cause. Although the perils of Trump’s tariffs are already evident, the odds are still pretty good that he will cave if the whole of Wall Street turns against him. With the agency cuts, however, there will be no backtracking from ripping out the fixtures while ripping off the Constitution and the taxpayers. Even with the retreat of our unelected Property Brother from Another Planet sledgehammering beams and partitions before even seeing a building plan, the destruction is sure to continue if only out of spite.

It’s strange America’s newfound comfort with “strategic uncertainty” and “creative destruction.” As we learned from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and had confirmed by reality shows like Hoarders, people are notoriously loss-averse: we will forfeit opportunities for gain to hold on to what we already have. By nature, we don’t want to let go of something (a taxpayer-funded service, for instance) we may later need.

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Sanctuary City

Sometimes the things you can’t believe have happened are not only not bad, but actually quite good. Like Manhattan’s congestion pricing plan that finally crawled past the finish line on Sunday.

Drivers now have to pay $9 to enter the busiest part of Manhattan during peak commuting hours, which, if all goes as planned, will unclog the city’s gridlocked streets while raising billions for the MTA. This idea has been stalled for years, most recently by Governor Kathy Hochul. An angry chorus of suburban commuters and public officials has done everything in its power to stop implementation. On Friday, a federal judge rejected a last-minute challenge brought by the state of New Jersey.

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