Wednesday, January 14, 2026
Chairman Powell's Statement
[ed. Don't hear public comments from a Fed Chairman too often. Screw around with administrative, social, legal fields and you might notch a few wins. Screw around with the nation's monitary system and expect significant pushback (from both parties). See also: Chairman Powell’s Statement (MR):]
***
Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.
[ed. And it all began with this: Trump Meets With Powell at Federal Reserve... leading to one of the most surreal political moments in recent memory.]
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Stable Strategies For Middle Management
STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT
Our cousin the insect has an external skeleton made of shiny brown chitin, a material that is particularly responsive to the demands of evolution. Just as bioengineering has sculpted our bodies into new forms, so evolution has shaped the early insect's chewing mouthparts into her descendants' chisels, siphons, and stilettos, and has molded from the chitin special tools - pockets to carry pollen, combs to clean her compound eyes, notches on which she can fiddle a song.
- From the popular science program, Insect People!
I awoke this morning to discover that bioengineering had made demands upon me during the night. My tongue had turned into a stiletto, and my left hand now contained a small chitinous comb, as if for cleaning a compound eye. Since I didn't have compound eyes, I thought that perhaps this presaged some change to come.
I dragged myself out of bed, wondering how I was going to drink my coffee through a stiletto. Was I now expected to kill my breakfast, and dispense with coffee entirely? I hoped I was not evolving into a creature whose survival depended on early-morning alertness. My circadian rhythms would no doubt keep pace with any physical changes, but my unevolved soul was repulsed at the thought of my waking cheerfully at dawn, ravenous for some wriggly little creature that had arisen even earlier.
I looked down at Greg, still asleep, the edge of our red and white quilt pulled up under his chin. His mouth had changed during the night too, and seemed to contain some sort of a long probe. Were we growing apart?
I reached down with my unchanged hand and touched his hair. It was still shiny brown, soft and thick, luxurious. But along his cheek, under his beard, I could feel patches of sclerotin, as the flexible chitin in his skin was slowly hardening to an impermeable armor.
He opened his eyes, staring blearily forward without moving his head. I could see him move his mouth cautiously, examining its internal changes. He turned his head and looked up at me, rubbing his hair slightly into my hand.
"Time to get up?" he asked. I nodded. "Oh, God," he said. He said this every morning. It was like a prayer.
"I'll make coffee," I said. "Do you want some?"
He shook his head slowly. "Just a glass of apricot nectar," he said. He unrolled his long, rough tongue and looked at it, slightly cross-eyed. "This is real interesting, but it wasn't in the catalog. I'll be sipping lunch from flowers pretty soon. That ought to draw a second glance at Duke's."
"I thought account execs were expected to sip their lunches,"I said.
"Not from the flower arrangements..." he said, still exploring the odd shape of his mouth. Then he looked up at me and reached up from under the covers. "Come here."
It had been a while, I thought, and I had to get to work. But he did smell terribly attractive. Perhaps he was developing aphrodisiac scent glands. I climbed back under the covers and stretched my body against his.We were both developing chitinous knobs and odd lumps that made this less than comfortable. "How am I supposed to kiss you with a stiletto in my mouth?" I asked.
It had been a while, I thought, and I had to get to work. But he did smell terribly attractive. Perhaps he was developing aphrodisiac scent glands. I climbed back under the covers and stretched my body against his.We were both developing chitinous knobs and odd lumps that made this less than comfortable. "How am I supposed to kiss you with a stiletto in my mouth?" I asked.
"There are other things to do. New equipment presents new possibilities." He pushed the covers back and ran his unchanged hands down my body from shoulder to thigh. "Let me know if my tongue is too rough." It was not.
Fuzzy-minded, I got out of bed for the second time and drifted into the kitchen.
Measuring the coffee into the grinder, I realized that I was no longer interested in drinking it, although it was diverting for a moment to spear the beans with my stiletto. What was the damn thing for, anyhow? I wasn't sure I wanted to find out.
Putting the grinder aside, I poured a can of apricot nectar into a tulip glass. Shallow glasses were going to be a problem for Greg in the future, I thought. Not to mention solid food.
My particular problem, however, if I could figure out what I was supposed to eat for breakfast, was getting to the office in time for my ten A.M. meeting. Maybe I'd just skip breakfast. I dressed quickly and dashed out the door before Greg was even out of bed.
Thirty minutes later, I was more or less awake and sitting in the small conference room with the new marketing manager, listening to him lay out his plan for the Model 2000 launch. In signing up for his bioengineering program, Harry had chosen specialized primate adaptation, B-E Option No. 4. He had evolved into a textbook example: small and long-limbed, with forward-facing eyes for judging distances and long, grasping fingers to keep him from falling out of his tree.
He was dressed for success in a pin-striped three-piece suit that fit his simian proportions perfectly. I wondered what premium he paid for custom-made. Or did he patronize a ready-to-wear shop that catered especially to primates?
I listened as he leaped agilely from one ridiculous marketing premise to the next. Trying to borrow credibility from mathematics and engineering, he used wildly metaphoric bizspeak, "factoring in the need for pipeline throughout," "fine-tuning the media mix," without even cracking a smile.
Harry had been with the company only a few months, straight from business school. He saw himself as a much-needed infusion of talent. I didn't like him, but I envied his ability to root through his subconscious and toss out one half-formed idea after another. I know he felt it reflected badly on me that I didn't join in and spew forth a random selection of promotional suggestions.
I didn't think much of his marketing plan. The advertising section was a textbook application of theory with no practical basis. I had two options: I could force him to accept a solution that would work, or I could yes him to death, making sure everybody understood it was his idea. I knew which path I'd take.
"Yeah, we can do that for you," I told him. "No problem." We'd see which of us would survive and which was hurtling to an evolutionary dead end.
Although Harry had won his point, he continued to belabor it. My attention wandered I'd heard it all before. His voice was the hum of an air conditioner, a familiar, easily ignored background noise. I drowsed and new emotions stirred in me, yearnings to float through moist air currents, to land on bright surfaces, to engorge myself with warm, wet food.
Adrift in insect dreams, I became sharply aware of the bare skin of Harry's arm, between his gold-plated watchband and his rolled-up sleeve, as he manipulated papers on the conference room table. He smelled greasily delicious, like a pepperoni pizza or a charcoal-broiled hamburger. I realized he probably wouldn't taste as good as he smelled but I was hungry. My stiletto-like tongue was there for a purpose, and it wasn't to skewer cubes of tofu. I leaned over his arm and braced myself against the back of his hand, probing with my styles to find a capillary.
Adrift in insect dreams, I became sharply aware of the bare skin of Harry's arm, between his gold-plated watchband and his rolled-up sleeve, as he manipulated papers on the conference room table. He smelled greasily delicious, like a pepperoni pizza or a charcoal-broiled hamburger. I realized he probably wouldn't taste as good as he smelled but I was hungry. My stiletto-like tongue was there for a purpose, and it wasn't to skewer cubes of tofu. I leaned over his arm and braced myself against the back of his hand, probing with my styles to find a capillary.
Harry noticed what I was doing and swatted me sharply on the side of the head. I pulled away before he could hit me again. "We were discussing the Model 200o launch. Or have you forgotten?" he said, rubbing his arm.
"Sorry. I skipped breakfast this morning."
I was embarrassed. "Well, get your hormones adjusted, for chrissake." He was annoyed, and I couldn't really blame him. "Let's get back to the media allocation issue, if you can keep your mind on it. I've got another meeting at eleven in Building Two.
"Inappropriate feeding behavior was not unusual in the company, and corporate etiquette sometimes allowed minor lapses to pass without pursuit. Of course, I could no longer hope that he would support me on moving some money out of the direct-mail budget...
by Eileen Gunn, Norton Book of Science Fiction | Read more (pdf):
[ed. A science fiction pioneer.]
The Inevitable Rise of the Art TV
The Samsung Frame TV, first announced in 2017, doesn’t look all that great as an actual television. But switch it off and it sure is pretty—certainly much better to look at than an empty black void.
This is thanks to its matte-finish, anti-glare screen and the picture-frame-like bezels that together transform whatever fine art you choose to display on the TV when it's in standby mode (Samsung offers a variety of high-resolution digital slides) into something that resembles a framed painting. In the years since its debut and through a few updates, the Frame TV has become one of the more considered options for people who live in smaller spaces without dedicated rooms for watching TV.
[ed. See also: Ambient Intelligence in the Living Room (MDPI).]
This is thanks to its matte-finish, anti-glare screen and the picture-frame-like bezels that together transform whatever fine art you choose to display on the TV when it's in standby mode (Samsung offers a variety of high-resolution digital slides) into something that resembles a framed painting. In the years since its debut and through a few updates, the Frame TV has become one of the more considered options for people who live in smaller spaces without dedicated rooms for watching TV.
It has taken a while for other brands to catch up, but we're now seeing a huge wave of Frame-like TVs hit the market. The trend is largely driven by aesthetes in cities where smaller living rooms are the norm, but it's getting a boost from advances in screen design.
Late last year, Hisense announced its CanvasTV, a frame competitor that also has a matte screen and displays art. (We have a review unit coming shortly.) TCL has the similar NXTvision model that uses a Vincent van Gogh self-portrait in the marketing, and LG has announced the Gallery TV (also repping van Gogh) for later this year. Even Amazon has decided to throw its hat in the ring, with the Ember Artline TV. Announced this week at CES 2026, Amazon's $899 television can display one of 2,000 works of art (available for free to Ember Artline owners) and even has a tool that uses Alexa AI to help you decide which artworks are the best fit for your room.
So what's so great about Art TVs, and why do brands seem to be pivoting so hard into the category?
Part of it has to do with personal space. It's true that many younger buyers just don't have the same taste or sense of style as folks from previous generations. But also, young city-dwelling professionals are less likely to have the room to place a large screen in a dedicated area in their home, a pain point compounded by the fact that TV screen sizes have ballooned over the past decade.
The other reason TV makers are getting artsy has to do with the evolution of TV technology itself. Brands are choosing to step into this space now because they have finally developed the means to create matte screens that can accurately represent a painting or a fine art photograph. Though Samsung is a pioneer in the space, matte LED screens are enjoying something of a renaissance across all television brands.
A typical glossy TV display reflects light like a window, but a matte screen absorbs light like a canvas might. This effect enables any art pieces displayed on the screen to look extra realistic. Another advance in technology is backlighting. Where previous generations of these Art TVs needed to be lit from the edges of the display in order to maintain their painting-like thinness and allow them to be mounted flush against a wall, brands have recently been able to employ more advanced lighting systems while keeping the TVs slim. Local dimming, better backlighting processing, and the ability to adjust the screen brightness to match a room's ambient lighting when in “art mode” make these new displays look better than ever.
Late last year, Hisense announced its CanvasTV, a frame competitor that also has a matte screen and displays art. (We have a review unit coming shortly.) TCL has the similar NXTvision model that uses a Vincent van Gogh self-portrait in the marketing, and LG has announced the Gallery TV (also repping van Gogh) for later this year. Even Amazon has decided to throw its hat in the ring, with the Ember Artline TV. Announced this week at CES 2026, Amazon's $899 television can display one of 2,000 works of art (available for free to Ember Artline owners) and even has a tool that uses Alexa AI to help you decide which artworks are the best fit for your room.
So what's so great about Art TVs, and why do brands seem to be pivoting so hard into the category?
Part of it has to do with personal space. It's true that many younger buyers just don't have the same taste or sense of style as folks from previous generations. But also, young city-dwelling professionals are less likely to have the room to place a large screen in a dedicated area in their home, a pain point compounded by the fact that TV screen sizes have ballooned over the past decade.
The other reason TV makers are getting artsy has to do with the evolution of TV technology itself. Brands are choosing to step into this space now because they have finally developed the means to create matte screens that can accurately represent a painting or a fine art photograph. Though Samsung is a pioneer in the space, matte LED screens are enjoying something of a renaissance across all television brands.
A typical glossy TV display reflects light like a window, but a matte screen absorbs light like a canvas might. This effect enables any art pieces displayed on the screen to look extra realistic. Another advance in technology is backlighting. Where previous generations of these Art TVs needed to be lit from the edges of the display in order to maintain their painting-like thinness and allow them to be mounted flush against a wall, brands have recently been able to employ more advanced lighting systems while keeping the TVs slim. Local dimming, better backlighting processing, and the ability to adjust the screen brightness to match a room's ambient lighting when in “art mode” make these new displays look better than ever.
by Parker Hall, Wired | Read more:
Image: Samsung/PCMag
CES 2026
CES 2026 is now over another year – and after scouring its vast halls for days, we've learned a lot about how tech will evolve over the next twelve months.
Want the bigger picture? Make sure to read our summary of the 11 biggest tech trends of CES 2026. You should also check out our hands-on review of the new Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold, our coverage of Nvidia's CES 2026 keynote and – in what may be the most exciting announcement so far – the news of Lego's new smart bricks!
Here's how the world's biggest tech show played out – and what we learned along the way: [links]
We saw so much that it's hard to know where to start. To get a taste of the biggest announcements, check out our CES 2026 day 1, CES day 2 and CES day 3 roundups – each features the 11 best gadgets we saw on that day. Or you can jump straight to our roundup of the 25 best gadgets we saw at the show.
Here's how the world's biggest tech show played out – and what we learned along the way: [links]
by Philip Berne, TechRadar | Read more:
Image: Birdbuddy
[ed. Lots 'o links. Probably the most interesting products (to me, anyway) were Lego's new Smart Bricks (here and here); and the Birdbuddy 2 Mini bird feeder. See also: CES 2026 live: all the news, announcements, and innovations from the show floor and beyond (Verge).
Monday, January 12, 2026
You're Ugly, Too
You had to get out of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names: Paris, Oblong, Normal. Once, when the Dow Jones dipped two hundred points, a local paper boasted the banner headline “NORMAL MAN MARRIES OBLONG WOMAN.” They knew what was important. They did! But you had to get out once in a while, even if it was just across the border to Terre Haute for a movie.
Outside of Paris, in the middle of a large field, was a scatter of brick buildings, a small liberal-arts college by the improbable name of Hilldale-Versailles. Zoe Hendricks had been teaching American history there for three years. She taught “The Revolution and Beyond” to freshmen and sophomores, and every third semester she had the senior seminar for majors, and although her student evaluations had been slipping in the last year and a half —Professor Hendricks is often late for class and usually arrives with a cup of hot chocolate, which she offers the class sips of—generally the department of nine men was pleased to have her. They felt she added some needed feminine touch to the corridors—that faint trace of Obsession and sweat, the light, fast clicking of heels. Plus they had had a sex-discrimination suit, and the dean had said, well, it was time.
The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing “Getting to Know You”—all of it. At the request of the dean, the chairman had called her into his office, but did not ask her for an explanation, not really. He asked her how she was and then smiled in an avuncular way. She said, “Fine,” and he studied the way she said it, her front teeth catching on the inside of her lower lip. She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite. There was too much effort with the eyeliner, and her earrings, worn, no doubt, for the drama her features lacked, were a little frightening, jutting out the sides of her head like antennae.
“I’m going out of my mind,” said Zoe to her younger sister, Evan, in Manhattan. Professor Hendricks seems to know the entire soundtrack to “The King and I.” Is this history? Zoe phoned her every Tuesday.
“You always say that,” said Evan, “but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you’re quiet for a while and then you say you’re fine, you’re busy, and then after a while you say you’re going crazy again, and you start all over.” Evan was a part-time food designer for photo shoots. She cooked vegetables in green dye. She propped up beef stew with a bed of marbles and shopped for new kinds of silicone sprays and plastic ice cubes. She thought her life was O.K. She was living with her boyfriend of many years, who was independently wealthy and had an amusing little job in book publishing. They were five years out of college, and they lived in a luxury midtown high rise with a balcony and access to a pool. “It’s not the same as having your own pool,” Evan was always sighing, as if to let Zoe know that, as with Zoe, there were still things she, Evan, had to do without.
“Illinois. It makes me sarcastic to be here,” said Zoe on the phone. She used to insist it was irony, something gently layered and sophisticated, something alien to the Midwest, but her students kept calling it sarcasm, something they felt qualified to recognize, and now she had to agree. It wasn’t irony. “What is your perfume?” a student once asked her. “Room freshener,” she said. She smiled, but he looked at her, unnerved.
Her students were by and large good Midwesterners, spacey with estrogen from large quantities of meat and eggs. They shared their parents’ suburban values; their parents had given them things, things, things. They were complacent. They had been purchased. They were armed with a healthy vagueness about anything historical or geographic. They seemed actually to know very little about anything, but they were good-natured about it. “All those states in the East are so tiny and jagged and bunched up,” complained one of her undergraduates the week she was lecturing on “The Turning Point of Independence: The Battle at Saratoga.” “Professor Hendricks, you’re from Delaware originally, right?” the student asked her.
“Maryland,” corrected Zoe.
“Aw,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “New England.”
Her articles—chapters toward a book called “Hearing the One About: Uses of Humor in the American Presidency”—were generally well received, though they came slowly for her. She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them—she didn’t trust things written in the morning only—so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day—its moods, its light—was allowed to dominate. She hung on to a piece for a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the entirety of a day had registered there.
The job she’d had before the one at Hilldale-Versailles had been at a small college in New Geneva, Minnesota, Land of the Dying Shopping Mall. Everyone was so blond there that brunettes were often presumed to be from foreign countries. Just because Professor Hendricks is from Spain doesn’t give her the right to be so negative about our country. There was a general emphasis on cheerfulness. In New Geneva you weren’t supposed to be critical or complain. You weren’t supposed to notice that the town had overextended and that its shopping malls were raggedy and going under. You were never to say you weren’t “fine, thank you—and yourself?” You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new I.B.M. photocopier saying, “If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I’m going to slit my wrists.”
But now in her second job, in her fourth year of teaching in the Midwest, Zoe was discovering something she never suspected she had: a crusty edge, brittle and pointed. Once she had pampered her students, singing them songs, letting them call her at home even, and ask personal questions, but now she was losing sympathy. They were beginning to seem different. They were beginning to seem demanding and spoiled.
“You act,” said one of her senior-seminar students at a scheduled conference, “like your opinion is worth more than everyone else’s in the class.”
Zoe’s eyes widened. “I am the teacher,” she said. “I do get paid to act like that.” She narrowed her gaze at the student, who was wearing a big leather bow in her hair like a cowgirl in a TV ranch show. “I mean, otherwise everybody in the class would have little offices and office hours.” Sometimes Professor Hendricks will take up the class’s time just talking about movies she’s seen. She stared at the student some more, then added, “I bet you’d like that.”
“Maybe I sound whiny to you,” said the girl, “but I simply want my history major to mean something.”
“Well, there’s your problem,” said Zoe, and, with a smile, she showed the student to the door. “I like your bow,” she said. (...)
Zoe had been out with three men since she’d come to Hilldale-Versailles. One of them was a man in the municipal bureaucracy who had fixed a parking ticket she’d brought in to protest and then asked her out for coffee. At first, she thought he was amazing— at last, someone who did not want Heidi! But soon she came to realize that all men, deep down, wanted Heidi. Heidi with cleavage. Heidi with outfits. The parking-ticket bureaucrat soon became tired and intermittent. One cool fall day, in his snazzy, impractical convertible, when she asked him what was wrong he said, “You would not be ill served by new clothes, you know.” She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars. She flicked an ant from her sleeve.
“Did you have to brush that off in the car?” he said, driving. He glanced down at his own pectorals, giving first the left, then the right, a quick survey. He was wearing a tight shirt.
“Excuse me?”
He slowed down at an amber light and frowned. “Couldn’t you have picked it up and thrown it outside?”
“The ant? It might have bitten me. I mean, what difference does it make?”
“It might have bitten you! Ha! How ridiculous! Now it’s going to lay eggs in my car!”
The second guy was sweeter, lunkier, though not insensitive to certain paintings and songs, but too often, too, things he’d do or say would startle her. Once, in a restaurant, he stole the garnishes off her dinner plate and waited for her to notice. When she didn’t, he finally thrust his fist across the table and said, “Look,” and when he opened it, there was her parsley sprig and her orange slice crumpled to a wad. Another time, he described to her his recent trip to the Louvre. “And there I was in front of Delacroix’s ‘The Barque of Dante,’ and everyone else had wandered off, so I had my own private audience with it, all those agonized shades splayed in every direction, and there’s this motion in that painting that starts at the bottom, swirling and building up into the red fabric of Dante’s hood, swirling out into the distance, where you see these orange flames—” He was breathless in the telling. She found this touching, and smiled in encouragement. “A painting like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It just makes you shit.” (...)
She thought about all the papers on “Our Constitution: How It Affects Us” she was going to have to correct. She thought about how she was going in for ultrasound tests on Friday, because, according to her doctor and her doctor’s assistant, she had a large, mysterious growth in her abdomen. Gallbladder, they kept saying. Or ovaries or colon. “You guys practice medicine?” asked Zoe, aloud, after they had left the room. Once, as a girl, she brought her dog to a vet, who had told her, “Well, either your dog has worms or cancer or else it was hit by a car.”
She was looking forward to New York. (...)
“Ultrasound,” Zoe now said jokingly to the technician who put the cold jelly on her bare stomach. “Does that sound like a really great stereo system or what?”
She had not had anyone make this much fuss over her bare stomach since her boyfriend in graduate school, who had hovered over her whenever she felt ill, waved his arms, pressed his hands upon her navel, and drawled evangelically, “Heal! Heal for thy Baby Jesus’ sake!” Zoe would laugh and they would make love, both secretly hoping she would get pregnant. Later they would worry together, and he would sink a cheek to her belly and ask whether she was late, was she late, was she sure, she might be late, and when after two years she had not gotten pregnant they took to quarrelling and drifted apart.
“O.K.,” said the technician absently.
The monitor was in place, and Zoe’s insides came on the screen in all their gray and ribbony hollowness. They were marbled in the finest gradations of black and white, like stone in an old church or a picture of the moon. “Do you suppose,” she babbled at the technician, “that the rise in infertility among so many couples in this country is due to completely different species trying to reproduce?” The technician moved the scanner around and took more pictures. On one view in particular, on Zoe’s right side, the technician became suddenly alert, the machine he was operating clicking away.
Zoe stared at the screen. “That must be the growth you found there,” suggested Zoe.
“I can’t tell you anything,” said the technician rigidly. “Your doctor will get the radiologist’s report this afternoon and will phone you then.”
“I’ll be out of town,” said Zoe.
“I’m sorry,” said the technician.
Driving home, Zoe looked in the rearview mirror and decided she looked —well, how would one describe it? A little wan. She thought of the joke about the guy who visits his doctor and the doctor says, “Well, I’m sorry to say, you’ve got six weeks to live.”
“I want a second opinion,” says the guy. You act like your opinion is worth more than everyone else’s in the class.
“You want a second opinion? O.K.,” says the doctor. “You’re ugly, too.” She liked that joke. She thought it was terribly, terribly funny.
by Lorrie Moore, New Yorker | Read more:
Outside of Paris, in the middle of a large field, was a scatter of brick buildings, a small liberal-arts college by the improbable name of Hilldale-Versailles. Zoe Hendricks had been teaching American history there for three years. She taught “The Revolution and Beyond” to freshmen and sophomores, and every third semester she had the senior seminar for majors, and although her student evaluations had been slipping in the last year and a half —Professor Hendricks is often late for class and usually arrives with a cup of hot chocolate, which she offers the class sips of—generally the department of nine men was pleased to have her. They felt she added some needed feminine touch to the corridors—that faint trace of Obsession and sweat, the light, fast clicking of heels. Plus they had had a sex-discrimination suit, and the dean had said, well, it was time.
“I’m going out of my mind,” said Zoe to her younger sister, Evan, in Manhattan. Professor Hendricks seems to know the entire soundtrack to “The King and I.” Is this history? Zoe phoned her every Tuesday.
“You always say that,” said Evan, “but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you’re quiet for a while and then you say you’re fine, you’re busy, and then after a while you say you’re going crazy again, and you start all over.” Evan was a part-time food designer for photo shoots. She cooked vegetables in green dye. She propped up beef stew with a bed of marbles and shopped for new kinds of silicone sprays and plastic ice cubes. She thought her life was O.K. She was living with her boyfriend of many years, who was independently wealthy and had an amusing little job in book publishing. They were five years out of college, and they lived in a luxury midtown high rise with a balcony and access to a pool. “It’s not the same as having your own pool,” Evan was always sighing, as if to let Zoe know that, as with Zoe, there were still things she, Evan, had to do without.
“Illinois. It makes me sarcastic to be here,” said Zoe on the phone. She used to insist it was irony, something gently layered and sophisticated, something alien to the Midwest, but her students kept calling it sarcasm, something they felt qualified to recognize, and now she had to agree. It wasn’t irony. “What is your perfume?” a student once asked her. “Room freshener,” she said. She smiled, but he looked at her, unnerved.
Her students were by and large good Midwesterners, spacey with estrogen from large quantities of meat and eggs. They shared their parents’ suburban values; their parents had given them things, things, things. They were complacent. They had been purchased. They were armed with a healthy vagueness about anything historical or geographic. They seemed actually to know very little about anything, but they were good-natured about it. “All those states in the East are so tiny and jagged and bunched up,” complained one of her undergraduates the week she was lecturing on “The Turning Point of Independence: The Battle at Saratoga.” “Professor Hendricks, you’re from Delaware originally, right?” the student asked her.
“Maryland,” corrected Zoe.
“Aw,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “New England.”
Her articles—chapters toward a book called “Hearing the One About: Uses of Humor in the American Presidency”—were generally well received, though they came slowly for her. She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them—she didn’t trust things written in the morning only—so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day—its moods, its light—was allowed to dominate. She hung on to a piece for a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the entirety of a day had registered there.
The job she’d had before the one at Hilldale-Versailles had been at a small college in New Geneva, Minnesota, Land of the Dying Shopping Mall. Everyone was so blond there that brunettes were often presumed to be from foreign countries. Just because Professor Hendricks is from Spain doesn’t give her the right to be so negative about our country. There was a general emphasis on cheerfulness. In New Geneva you weren’t supposed to be critical or complain. You weren’t supposed to notice that the town had overextended and that its shopping malls were raggedy and going under. You were never to say you weren’t “fine, thank you—and yourself?” You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new I.B.M. photocopier saying, “If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I’m going to slit my wrists.”
But now in her second job, in her fourth year of teaching in the Midwest, Zoe was discovering something she never suspected she had: a crusty edge, brittle and pointed. Once she had pampered her students, singing them songs, letting them call her at home even, and ask personal questions, but now she was losing sympathy. They were beginning to seem different. They were beginning to seem demanding and spoiled.
“You act,” said one of her senior-seminar students at a scheduled conference, “like your opinion is worth more than everyone else’s in the class.”
Zoe’s eyes widened. “I am the teacher,” she said. “I do get paid to act like that.” She narrowed her gaze at the student, who was wearing a big leather bow in her hair like a cowgirl in a TV ranch show. “I mean, otherwise everybody in the class would have little offices and office hours.” Sometimes Professor Hendricks will take up the class’s time just talking about movies she’s seen. She stared at the student some more, then added, “I bet you’d like that.”
“Maybe I sound whiny to you,” said the girl, “but I simply want my history major to mean something.”
“Well, there’s your problem,” said Zoe, and, with a smile, she showed the student to the door. “I like your bow,” she said. (...)
Zoe had been out with three men since she’d come to Hilldale-Versailles. One of them was a man in the municipal bureaucracy who had fixed a parking ticket she’d brought in to protest and then asked her out for coffee. At first, she thought he was amazing— at last, someone who did not want Heidi! But soon she came to realize that all men, deep down, wanted Heidi. Heidi with cleavage. Heidi with outfits. The parking-ticket bureaucrat soon became tired and intermittent. One cool fall day, in his snazzy, impractical convertible, when she asked him what was wrong he said, “You would not be ill served by new clothes, you know.” She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars. She flicked an ant from her sleeve.
“Did you have to brush that off in the car?” he said, driving. He glanced down at his own pectorals, giving first the left, then the right, a quick survey. He was wearing a tight shirt.
“Excuse me?”
He slowed down at an amber light and frowned. “Couldn’t you have picked it up and thrown it outside?”
“The ant? It might have bitten me. I mean, what difference does it make?”
“It might have bitten you! Ha! How ridiculous! Now it’s going to lay eggs in my car!”
The second guy was sweeter, lunkier, though not insensitive to certain paintings and songs, but too often, too, things he’d do or say would startle her. Once, in a restaurant, he stole the garnishes off her dinner plate and waited for her to notice. When she didn’t, he finally thrust his fist across the table and said, “Look,” and when he opened it, there was her parsley sprig and her orange slice crumpled to a wad. Another time, he described to her his recent trip to the Louvre. “And there I was in front of Delacroix’s ‘The Barque of Dante,’ and everyone else had wandered off, so I had my own private audience with it, all those agonized shades splayed in every direction, and there’s this motion in that painting that starts at the bottom, swirling and building up into the red fabric of Dante’s hood, swirling out into the distance, where you see these orange flames—” He was breathless in the telling. She found this touching, and smiled in encouragement. “A painting like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It just makes you shit.” (...)
She thought about all the papers on “Our Constitution: How It Affects Us” she was going to have to correct. She thought about how she was going in for ultrasound tests on Friday, because, according to her doctor and her doctor’s assistant, she had a large, mysterious growth in her abdomen. Gallbladder, they kept saying. Or ovaries or colon. “You guys practice medicine?” asked Zoe, aloud, after they had left the room. Once, as a girl, she brought her dog to a vet, who had told her, “Well, either your dog has worms or cancer or else it was hit by a car.”
She was looking forward to New York. (...)
“Ultrasound,” Zoe now said jokingly to the technician who put the cold jelly on her bare stomach. “Does that sound like a really great stereo system or what?”
She had not had anyone make this much fuss over her bare stomach since her boyfriend in graduate school, who had hovered over her whenever she felt ill, waved his arms, pressed his hands upon her navel, and drawled evangelically, “Heal! Heal for thy Baby Jesus’ sake!” Zoe would laugh and they would make love, both secretly hoping she would get pregnant. Later they would worry together, and he would sink a cheek to her belly and ask whether she was late, was she late, was she sure, she might be late, and when after two years she had not gotten pregnant they took to quarrelling and drifted apart.
“O.K.,” said the technician absently.
The monitor was in place, and Zoe’s insides came on the screen in all their gray and ribbony hollowness. They were marbled in the finest gradations of black and white, like stone in an old church or a picture of the moon. “Do you suppose,” she babbled at the technician, “that the rise in infertility among so many couples in this country is due to completely different species trying to reproduce?” The technician moved the scanner around and took more pictures. On one view in particular, on Zoe’s right side, the technician became suddenly alert, the machine he was operating clicking away.
Zoe stared at the screen. “That must be the growth you found there,” suggested Zoe.
“I can’t tell you anything,” said the technician rigidly. “Your doctor will get the radiologist’s report this afternoon and will phone you then.”
“I’ll be out of town,” said Zoe.
“I’m sorry,” said the technician.
Driving home, Zoe looked in the rearview mirror and decided she looked —well, how would one describe it? A little wan. She thought of the joke about the guy who visits his doctor and the doctor says, “Well, I’m sorry to say, you’ve got six weeks to live.”
“I want a second opinion,” says the guy. You act like your opinion is worth more than everyone else’s in the class.
“You want a second opinion? O.K.,” says the doctor. “You’re ugly, too.” She liked that joke. She thought it was terribly, terribly funny.
by Lorrie Moore, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Lorrie Moore by Lynda Nylind
Sunday, January 11, 2026
Free Fall: How Sweetgreen Became Millennial Cringe
Last spring, Sweetgreen did something shocking, at least insofar as the menu adjustments of a fast-casual salad chain can be described that way: It added fries. In interviews, the company’s “chief concept officer,” Nicolas Jammet, paid lip service to “reevaluating and redefining fast food,” but I suspect that Sweetgreen was also “reevaluating and redefining” how to make money in a world that appeared poised to move on from buying what the company was trying to sell.
In the first two months of last year, Sweetgreen’s stock price had declined more than 30 percent. The company had already made significant changes, dropping seed oils, adding “protein plates,” and hiring a bunch of robots in an apparent effort to cater to the early 2020s’ three defining dining trends: the MAHA movement, the protein fixation, and the push to cut costs by eliminating human labor. But not even air-fried potatoes could stop Sweetgreen’s free fall. In August, with operational losses reaching $26.4 million, the chain fired workers, and also the fries. As the year ended, Nathaniel Ru, who co-founded the company in 2007, stepped down from his role. Today, a share of Sweetgreen stock costs less than $8. In late 2024, it was more than $43.
This is remarkable because, for a golden decade or so, Sweetgreen was the future of lunch. Americans, especially ones who were youngish and worked on computers, were toting green paper bags around coastal cities (and later, smaller towns and non-coastal cities) en masse. Silicon Valley was injecting capital into a restaurant as though it were a software start-up.
Sweetgreen’s early success was not a fluke. As a restaurant, it truly did do something incredible. The company put high-quality organic produce in interesting combinations, incorporating fresh herbs and global ingredients, and going heavy on crunch and citrus. It sourced from small farms that it listed proudly on chalkboards inside each store, appealing squarely to a cohort who knew they really should be shopping at the farmers’ market, even if they usually got their groceries from Instacart, guiltily. And Sweetgreen was an early adopter of online ordering, allowing its customers to waste less time waiting in line. When a Sweetgreen opened in my city, in 2016, replacing a restaurant that had been serving hamburgers for 65 years, I was excited about it the same way I was excited when fiber internet came to my neighborhood: Finally, a better way to live.
In all this, the chain was achingly of its era, when high functioning in the office (productivity) and on the cellular level (health) became irretrievably intertwined. The widespread adoption of smartphones invented new categories of aspiration, new ways to sell things, new expectations that workers be available and productive, including during lunch hour. The wellness influencer—a figure whose job title did not exist just a few years earlier—suddenly started to seem like one of the more powerful figures in American life. Millennials graduated, grew up, got jobs, and emerged as not just a chronological category but a marketing segment.
Around this time, a number of venture-backed start-ups appeared to sell them new versions of stuff they already used. The stuff was legitimately nicer, but only a little; the real innovation was in how it was sold. Largely, this meant minimalist packaging that was purpose-built to look good on a small screen, and marketing copy that made canny nods to responsibility but also fun, using a corporate voice that sounded like a real person’s, even if that person was sort of embarrassing and obsessed with the grind (“you’re going to guac this week. #monday 👊,” read the caption on an Instagram post from Sweetgreen in 2015). In short order, many Americans swapped out their YMCA stationary-bike classes for SoulCycle; their yellow cabs for rideshares; their generic workout gear for color-blocked, cellphone-pocketed leggings made out of, like, recycled water bottles.
And these same Americans abandoned the salad bar—for decades, a depressing fixture of the workday lunch—in favor of Sweetgreen. It was a healthy, efficient meal for healthy, efficient people (at least aspirationally), a power lunch for those who didn’t have assistants or expense accounts but who were nonetheless determined to feel in control, possibly formidable. Especially after 2018—when the company began installing shelves in office lobbies and WeWork cafeterias, from which workers could retrieve a preordered salad without leaving the building—it just became a default, a nearly frictionless calorie-delivery vehicle for people whose bosses were definitely paying attention to whether their little Slack bubble was green or not...
In the first two months of last year, Sweetgreen’s stock price had declined more than 30 percent. The company had already made significant changes, dropping seed oils, adding “protein plates,” and hiring a bunch of robots in an apparent effort to cater to the early 2020s’ three defining dining trends: the MAHA movement, the protein fixation, and the push to cut costs by eliminating human labor. But not even air-fried potatoes could stop Sweetgreen’s free fall. In August, with operational losses reaching $26.4 million, the chain fired workers, and also the fries. As the year ended, Nathaniel Ru, who co-founded the company in 2007, stepped down from his role. Today, a share of Sweetgreen stock costs less than $8. In late 2024, it was more than $43.
Sweetgreen’s early success was not a fluke. As a restaurant, it truly did do something incredible. The company put high-quality organic produce in interesting combinations, incorporating fresh herbs and global ingredients, and going heavy on crunch and citrus. It sourced from small farms that it listed proudly on chalkboards inside each store, appealing squarely to a cohort who knew they really should be shopping at the farmers’ market, even if they usually got their groceries from Instacart, guiltily. And Sweetgreen was an early adopter of online ordering, allowing its customers to waste less time waiting in line. When a Sweetgreen opened in my city, in 2016, replacing a restaurant that had been serving hamburgers for 65 years, I was excited about it the same way I was excited when fiber internet came to my neighborhood: Finally, a better way to live.
In all this, the chain was achingly of its era, when high functioning in the office (productivity) and on the cellular level (health) became irretrievably intertwined. The widespread adoption of smartphones invented new categories of aspiration, new ways to sell things, new expectations that workers be available and productive, including during lunch hour. The wellness influencer—a figure whose job title did not exist just a few years earlier—suddenly started to seem like one of the more powerful figures in American life. Millennials graduated, grew up, got jobs, and emerged as not just a chronological category but a marketing segment.
Around this time, a number of venture-backed start-ups appeared to sell them new versions of stuff they already used. The stuff was legitimately nicer, but only a little; the real innovation was in how it was sold. Largely, this meant minimalist packaging that was purpose-built to look good on a small screen, and marketing copy that made canny nods to responsibility but also fun, using a corporate voice that sounded like a real person’s, even if that person was sort of embarrassing and obsessed with the grind (“you’re going to guac this week. #monday 👊,” read the caption on an Instagram post from Sweetgreen in 2015). In short order, many Americans swapped out their YMCA stationary-bike classes for SoulCycle; their yellow cabs for rideshares; their generic workout gear for color-blocked, cellphone-pocketed leggings made out of, like, recycled water bottles.
And these same Americans abandoned the salad bar—for decades, a depressing fixture of the workday lunch—in favor of Sweetgreen. It was a healthy, efficient meal for healthy, efficient people (at least aspirationally), a power lunch for those who didn’t have assistants or expense accounts but who were nonetheless determined to feel in control, possibly formidable. Especially after 2018—when the company began installing shelves in office lobbies and WeWork cafeterias, from which workers could retrieve a preordered salad without leaving the building—it just became a default, a nearly frictionless calorie-delivery vehicle for people whose bosses were definitely paying attention to whether their little Slack bubble was green or not...
Sweetgreen sold salad, which you eat, but it also sold moral superiority, which you build an identity around. (By 2016, BuzzFeed was posting lists about “21 Truths for Everyone Obsessed With Sweetgreen.”) The company capitalized on this to sell not just lunch but a lifestyle brand. It staged an annual music festival; collaborated with cool fashion people on limited-edition housewares and accessories; sold branded Nalgenes and expensive, earth-toned sweatshirts in its capacious webstore; posted its playlists to Spotify. Imagine anyone willingly re-creating the sonic ambience inside their local McDonald’s at home and you will realize how unique Sweetgreen is, or was, among casual-restaurant chains.
Although McDonald’s and its ilk got big by serving as broad an audience as possible, Sweetgreen derived much of its cachet from projecting a level of elitism. This, as it turns out, is not the secret to market dominance. Sweetgreen has always been relatively expensive, and it has gotten more so: In 2014, a kale Caesar with chicken was $8.85; this week, in some locations, it’s more than $14.75, which is almost $2 higher than can be explained by inflation alone. Maybe more important is the impression that it’s expensive. Today’s consumers are highly price-sensitive, Jonathan Maze, the editor in chief of the trade publication Restaurant Business, told me, and “Sweetgreen has had a reputation as an expensive place to eat for what you’re getting.”
There’s also the issue that many Americans don’t like salad quite enough to actually want it regularly. In a 2024 YouGov poll, 40 percent of respondents said they ate salad more than once a week, which might seem like a lot until you remember that some of them were surely lying, and you consider how many more people prefer food that isn’t chopped-up raw vegetables: Last year, the nation’s top five quick-service restaurants were, in order, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s. “It’s really difficult to convince a large number of people that salad is something they’re going to eat on a frequent enough basis to support a chain like that,” Maze said. Many years ago, he was driving his then-10-year-old son and a friend home from baseball practice, and the friend was excitedly talking about eating Chipotle for dinner. The memory has, clearly, stuck with him: “Can I realistically imagine my son’s 10-year-old friend bragging about going to Sweetgreen?” He cannot. I can’t either.
Although McDonald’s and its ilk got big by serving as broad an audience as possible, Sweetgreen derived much of its cachet from projecting a level of elitism. This, as it turns out, is not the secret to market dominance. Sweetgreen has always been relatively expensive, and it has gotten more so: In 2014, a kale Caesar with chicken was $8.85; this week, in some locations, it’s more than $14.75, which is almost $2 higher than can be explained by inflation alone. Maybe more important is the impression that it’s expensive. Today’s consumers are highly price-sensitive, Jonathan Maze, the editor in chief of the trade publication Restaurant Business, told me, and “Sweetgreen has had a reputation as an expensive place to eat for what you’re getting.”
There’s also the issue that many Americans don’t like salad quite enough to actually want it regularly. In a 2024 YouGov poll, 40 percent of respondents said they ate salad more than once a week, which might seem like a lot until you remember that some of them were surely lying, and you consider how many more people prefer food that isn’t chopped-up raw vegetables: Last year, the nation’s top five quick-service restaurants were, in order, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s. “It’s really difficult to convince a large number of people that salad is something they’re going to eat on a frequent enough basis to support a chain like that,” Maze said. Many years ago, he was driving his then-10-year-old son and a friend home from baseball practice, and the friend was excitedly talking about eating Chipotle for dinner. The memory has, clearly, stuck with him: “Can I realistically imagine my son’s 10-year-old friend bragging about going to Sweetgreen?” He cannot. I can’t either.
by Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Akshita Chandra/The Atlantic. Source: Dixie D. Vereen/The Washington Post/Getty.
Bob Weir, Grateful Dead Founding Member Dies at 78
The Soul of the Grateful Dead (Atlantic)
In the summer of 1968, three years into the Grateful Dead’s existence, the band fired singer and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir. Jerry Garcia, the band’s other guitarist and its reluctant leader, and bassist Phil Lesh had decided that Weir and keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan were dragging the band down musically. Weir was just 20 years old, the youngest member of the group and the least technically accomplished. But Garcia didn’t have the heart to pull the trigger himself, and he made the band’s manager do the deed. Or at least he tried to. “It didn’t take. We fired them, all right, but they just kept coming back,” Garcia remembered later.
The failure was auspicious. A few months later, the band performed the shows that would be released as Live/Dead, one of the greatest psychedelic albums ever. The first sound heard on the record is Weir’s guitar, which methodically builds “Dark Star” up, sewing together Garcia and Lesh’s riffing. Weir’s place in the Dead was never again in doubt. When the group disbanded after Garcia’s death in 1995, Weir continued to lead or co-lead iterations of the band for another 30 years, culminating in a three-night 60th-anniversary celebration in San Francisco this past August. He died Saturday at 78, from complications of cancer.
Weir lived his entire adult life in the shadow of Garcia, a formidable genius who died too young, but he was more than just a backing musician. Garcia gave the band virtuosity; Lesh, with his avant-garde training, gave it ambition. Weir gave it soul and fun, and his underappreciated guitar playing was the glue that held the whole Dead sound together.
In the summer of 1968, three years into the Grateful Dead’s existence, the band fired singer and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir. Jerry Garcia, the band’s other guitarist and its reluctant leader, and bassist Phil Lesh had decided that Weir and keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan were dragging the band down musically. Weir was just 20 years old, the youngest member of the group and the least technically accomplished. But Garcia didn’t have the heart to pull the trigger himself, and he made the band’s manager do the deed. Or at least he tried to. “It didn’t take. We fired them, all right, but they just kept coming back,” Garcia remembered later.
The failure was auspicious. A few months later, the band performed the shows that would be released as Live/Dead, one of the greatest psychedelic albums ever. The first sound heard on the record is Weir’s guitar, which methodically builds “Dark Star” up, sewing together Garcia and Lesh’s riffing. Weir’s place in the Dead was never again in doubt. When the group disbanded after Garcia’s death in 1995, Weir continued to lead or co-lead iterations of the band for another 30 years, culminating in a three-night 60th-anniversary celebration in San Francisco this past August. He died Saturday at 78, from complications of cancer.
Weir lived his entire adult life in the shadow of Garcia, a formidable genius who died too young, but he was more than just a backing musician. Garcia gave the band virtuosity; Lesh, with his avant-garde training, gave it ambition. Weir gave it soul and fun, and his underappreciated guitar playing was the glue that held the whole Dead sound together.
by David A. Graham, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Mark Sullivan/Getty
[ed. Not only was Bobby an excellent rhythm guitarist with a unique phrasing style, he had to sing and remember all the words to most of the Dead's songs (no small feat given all the drugs involved). The above is a great example. Here's another one. See also: Bob Weir Dies at 78 (NBC); and this famous New Yorker profile of the entire band and its cultural influence: Deadhead.]
Fascism in America
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”
What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration’s insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.
As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!”
In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking b*tch” after he killed her. (...) [ed. Probably the same way they reacted to the storming of Capitol Building...]
Although ICE currently employs more than 20,000 people, it is looking to hire over 10,000 more with the help of the money Republicans put in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July. That law tripled ICE’s budget for enforcement and deportation to about $30 billion.
On December 31, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported that ICE was investing $100 million on what it called a “wartime recruitment” strategy to hire thousands of new officers. It planned to target gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts as well as those who listen to right-wing radi0 shows, directing ads to people who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear. It planned to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of people near military bases, NASCAR races, gun and trade shows, or college campuses, apparently not considering them the hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination right-wing politicians claim. (...)
When Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump yesterday if he thought the FBI should be sharing information about the shooting of Renee Good with state officials, as is normally the case, Trump responded: “Well, normally, I would, but they’re crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor fool. I mean, he’s a stupid person, and, uh, it looks like the number could be $19 billion stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote, they vote in a group, they buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost—can you imagine? You come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. They’re very corrupt people. It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody’s won it for since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state, and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand, maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have to safe election. But I won Minnesota three times that I didn’t get credit for. I did so well in that state, every time. The people were, they were crying. Every time after. That’s a crooked state. California’s a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”
Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”
by US Army/War Department/Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American | Read more:
Image: US Army
[ed. Dictators are gonna dictate, it's what they do. The real blame lies with supporters who give them their power, willingly. The people who think their personal fortunes or the country's will be enhanced by standing in the shadow of a strongman. And others: tuned out and oblivious, who "just aren't into politics" or rely on "talking points" to tell them what to think. It's all here. Now. See also: January 10, 2026:]
***
Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to regain control of the national narrative surrounding the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President J.D. Vance led the administration in pushing a video of the shooting captured by the shooter himself, Jonathan Ross, on his cell phone. (...)What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration’s insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.
As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!”
In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking b*tch” after he killed her. (...) [ed. Probably the same way they reacted to the storming of Capitol Building...]
Although ICE currently employs more than 20,000 people, it is looking to hire over 10,000 more with the help of the money Republicans put in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July. That law tripled ICE’s budget for enforcement and deportation to about $30 billion.
On December 31, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported that ICE was investing $100 million on what it called a “wartime recruitment” strategy to hire thousands of new officers. It planned to target gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts as well as those who listen to right-wing radi0 shows, directing ads to people who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear. It planned to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of people near military bases, NASCAR races, gun and trade shows, or college campuses, apparently not considering them the hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination right-wing politicians claim. (...)
When Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump yesterday if he thought the FBI should be sharing information about the shooting of Renee Good with state officials, as is normally the case, Trump responded: “Well, normally, I would, but they’re crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor fool. I mean, he’s a stupid person, and, uh, it looks like the number could be $19 billion stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote, they vote in a group, they buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost—can you imagine? You come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. They’re very corrupt people. It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody’s won it for since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state, and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand, maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have to safe election. But I won Minnesota three times that I didn’t get credit for. I did so well in that state, every time. The people were, they were crying. Every time after. That’s a crooked state. California’s a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”
Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
Saturday, January 10, 2026
How Consent Can—and Cannot—Help Us Have Better Sex
The idea is legally vital, but ultimately unsatisfying. Is there another way forward?
In 1978, Greta Hibbard was twenty-two and living in rural Oregon. She had a two-year-old daughter, a minimum-wage job, and an unemployed husband. She was, she would later say, “living on peanut butter sandwiches.” She and her husband, John Rideout, often fought; sometimes he hit her or demanded sex. On the afternoon of October 10th, when he did just that, Hibbard fled to a neighbor’s house. Rideout followed her, cornered her in a park, and took her home. Once inside, she said, he punched her several times in the face and pulled down her pants. Their toddler, who was watching, went into her bedroom and wailed as her father penetrated her mother.
That this might be rape, legally speaking, was a brand-new idea. Until the mid-seventies, much of the sex in the United States was regulated not by the theory of consent but by that of property: a husband could no more be arrested for raping his wife than for breaking into his own house. In 1977, Oregon became one of the first states to make spousal rape illegal, and even then some politicians thought the law should apply only to couples living apart or in the process of divorcing. A California state senator summed up the prevailing attitude: “If you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?”
Hibbard herself had only just learned that she had a right to decline sex with her husband. (At a woman’s crisis center, she had noticed a sign on the wall that read “If she says no, it’s rape.”) The night before the incident, she and Rideout were chatting with a neighbor when she brought up the new law. “I don’t believe it,” Rideout said. When he was arrested a few days later, he still didn’t. What followed was Oregon v. Rideout, the first time in the United States that a man stood trial for the rape of a wife with whom he lived, and a formative test of the notion that consent should determine the legality of sex.
Sarah Weinman retells this story in “Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime” (Ecco). Weinman is known for taking a true-crime approach to intellectual history: her previous books center on the murderer who befriended William F. Buckley, Jr.—the founder of the National Review—and on the kidnapping that is believed to have inspired Vladimir Nabokov to write “Lolita.” Her writing is breezy even when the subject matter is not exactly beachy. Rideout’s trial, for example, teemed with outrages. His defense lawyer smeared Hibbard for her sexual past: two abortions, a supposed lesbian experience, and a previous assault allegation against Rideout’s half brother, which, according to Weinman, Hibbard retracted after threats from the accused. Meanwhile, even the prosecutor thought Rideout seemed like a good guy. “I don’t think he belongs in prison or jail,” he told the press. When Rideout was acquitted, the courtroom burst into applause.
Hibbard, who reconciled with Rideout almost immediately after the trial, would divorce him within months. But Weinman follows Rideout all the way through 2017, when he was once again tried for rape. This time, the victims were Sheila Moxley, an acquaintance who had grudgingly allowed a drunk Rideout to sleep on her sofa after he came over to help her fix some furniture, and Teresa Hern, a long-term, on-and-off girlfriend. Both women had been held down and penetrated by Rideout in the middle of the night. Once again, a defense lawyer attempted to paint the women as lying, scheming seductresses. But this time Rideout was convicted on all counts and eventually sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. “You are a bad man,” Moxley read in a statement. “You are an evil man. You are a monster.”
Weinman’s choice to begin and end with Rideout’s trials allows her to tell a story of comeuppance, in which, during the span of one man’s life, society decided to take rape seriously and punish the monsters who commit it. This is a happy thought. But the real arc of history is not so short, nor does it bend with anything like certainty toward justice. Today, about one in ten American women have been raped by their intimate partners—roughly the same rate reported in the eighties. This year, the Trump Administration removed the Center for Disease Control’s online statistics on intimate-partner and sexual violence; the page was restored by a court order, and now contains a disclaimer: “This page does not reflect reality.” Donald Trump himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least twenty-four women. He has denied these accusations, including one from his first wife, Ivana, who testified under oath that he threw her on the bed, ripped out a handful of her hair, and then forced himself on her. She later clarified that she didn’t mean the word “rape” in the “literal or criminal sense.”
In Weinman’s epilogue, she briefly points to the unfinished business of ending rape, spousal or otherwise. But her book assumes that society has at least sorted out the philosophical underpinnings of how to regulate sex. “Younger generations were far clearer about these issues,” Weinman writes, “understanding that consent must be given ‘freely and intelligently’ by those who were capable, and anything shy of full consent was considered rape.” There is, I think, no such clarity. It is not just people like Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Pete Hegseth, Brock Turner, Bill Cosby, Sean Combs, Dominique Pelicot, and their many, many friends who seem to have a bone to pick with consent. Feminists have their own quibbles. What does “freely and intelligently” mean, they ask, and what entails “full consent”? Who exactly is capable of consenting? And what are we to do with rapists?
For some second-wave feminists, the very idea that a woman living under patriarchy could “consent” to sex with a man was absurd. After all, we don’t think of a serf consenting to work for her feudal overlord: the serf might well enjoy tilling the fields, she might even love her master, but she didn’t choose farm labor so much as she was kept, by rigid and often violent social limits, from pursuing anything else. And even if the choice were free—even if decades of hard-fought feminist struggle had occasioned the sort of emancipation that meant women were no longer analogous to serfs—could such a choice ever be “intelligent”? Some women find knitting pleasurable, comforting, and affirming of their femininity, but how many would recommend it to a friend if it carried a ten-per-cent chance of rape?
These were lively arguments in the seventies and eighties, advanced by feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who had herself been battered by her husband. Today, the basic idea—often glossed as “all heterosexual sex is rape,” though neither MacKinnon nor Dworkin wrote exactly those words—seems almost farcical. Radical feminists no longer blame heterosexual women for “sleeping with the enemy.” It’s widely accepted that a woman really can consent to sex with a husband on whom she is financially dependent. The immediate though rather less accepted corollary is that she can also consent to sex with a paying stranger. To say anything else, many feminists now argue, would be to infantilize her, to subordinate her—to the state, to moralism—rather than acknowledge her mastery of her own body.
But the root of the second-wave critique, that there are power differentials across which professed consent is insufficient, lives on in other debates. Children, a class whom the poet Mary Karr once described as “three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate,” are an obvious example. It is easy to be horrified by situations where children are subjected to sex that is forced or coerced. But what about sex that they claim to want? Can children consent to sex with other children? With adults? Can a nineteen-year-old girl legally have what she believes to be loving, consensual sex with her stepfather? What about with her stepmother? Can students choose to have sex with their professors, or employees with their bosses? How we answer these questions depends on whom we consider to be so gullible, vulnerable, or exploited that they must be protected from their own expressed desires. (...)
One critique of consent, then, is that it is too permissive—that it ignores how coercion or delusion may result in the illusion of agreement. But another critique is that it’s too restrictive and punitive. Decades of reform laws have expanded the number of situations legally considered to be rape: it’s no longer a charge that can be brought only against an armed stranger who attacks a struggling victim, ideally a white virgin. On university campuses, the idea that “no means no” has given way—because of the well-documented fact that many people freeze and are unable to speak in moments of fear—to “yes means yes.”
Critics of this shift worry about encounters where both parties are blackout drunk, or where one appears to retroactively withdraw consent. They argue that a lower bar for rape leads to the criminalization—or at least the litigation—of misunderstandings, and so discourages the sort of carefree sexual experimentation that some feminists very much hope to champion. “I can think of no better way to subjugate women than to convince us that assault is around every corner,” the self-identified feminist Laura Kipnis writes in “Unwanted Advances,” a 2017 book about “sexual paranoia on campus.” Kipnis describes her own mother laughingly recalling a college professor chasing her around a desk and trying to kiss her. That young women today are encouraged to think of this kind of “idiocy” as an “incapacitating trauma,” Kipnis argues, codifies sexist ideas about their innocence, purity, and helplessness. Another interpretation is that young women have decided, with a rather masculine sense of their own entitlement, that they need not smile indulgently upon their transgressors. But Kipnis is right in her broader point: the bureaucratization of our erotic lives is no path to liberation.
by S.C. Cornell, New Yorker | Read more:
In 1978, Greta Hibbard was twenty-two and living in rural Oregon. She had a two-year-old daughter, a minimum-wage job, and an unemployed husband. She was, she would later say, “living on peanut butter sandwiches.” She and her husband, John Rideout, often fought; sometimes he hit her or demanded sex. On the afternoon of October 10th, when he did just that, Hibbard fled to a neighbor’s house. Rideout followed her, cornered her in a park, and took her home. Once inside, she said, he punched her several times in the face and pulled down her pants. Their toddler, who was watching, went into her bedroom and wailed as her father penetrated her mother.
That this might be rape, legally speaking, was a brand-new idea. Until the mid-seventies, much of the sex in the United States was regulated not by the theory of consent but by that of property: a husband could no more be arrested for raping his wife than for breaking into his own house. In 1977, Oregon became one of the first states to make spousal rape illegal, and even then some politicians thought the law should apply only to couples living apart or in the process of divorcing. A California state senator summed up the prevailing attitude: “If you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?”
Sarah Weinman retells this story in “Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime” (Ecco). Weinman is known for taking a true-crime approach to intellectual history: her previous books center on the murderer who befriended William F. Buckley, Jr.—the founder of the National Review—and on the kidnapping that is believed to have inspired Vladimir Nabokov to write “Lolita.” Her writing is breezy even when the subject matter is not exactly beachy. Rideout’s trial, for example, teemed with outrages. His defense lawyer smeared Hibbard for her sexual past: two abortions, a supposed lesbian experience, and a previous assault allegation against Rideout’s half brother, which, according to Weinman, Hibbard retracted after threats from the accused. Meanwhile, even the prosecutor thought Rideout seemed like a good guy. “I don’t think he belongs in prison or jail,” he told the press. When Rideout was acquitted, the courtroom burst into applause.
Hibbard, who reconciled with Rideout almost immediately after the trial, would divorce him within months. But Weinman follows Rideout all the way through 2017, when he was once again tried for rape. This time, the victims were Sheila Moxley, an acquaintance who had grudgingly allowed a drunk Rideout to sleep on her sofa after he came over to help her fix some furniture, and Teresa Hern, a long-term, on-and-off girlfriend. Both women had been held down and penetrated by Rideout in the middle of the night. Once again, a defense lawyer attempted to paint the women as lying, scheming seductresses. But this time Rideout was convicted on all counts and eventually sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. “You are a bad man,” Moxley read in a statement. “You are an evil man. You are a monster.”
Weinman’s choice to begin and end with Rideout’s trials allows her to tell a story of comeuppance, in which, during the span of one man’s life, society decided to take rape seriously and punish the monsters who commit it. This is a happy thought. But the real arc of history is not so short, nor does it bend with anything like certainty toward justice. Today, about one in ten American women have been raped by their intimate partners—roughly the same rate reported in the eighties. This year, the Trump Administration removed the Center for Disease Control’s online statistics on intimate-partner and sexual violence; the page was restored by a court order, and now contains a disclaimer: “This page does not reflect reality.” Donald Trump himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least twenty-four women. He has denied these accusations, including one from his first wife, Ivana, who testified under oath that he threw her on the bed, ripped out a handful of her hair, and then forced himself on her. She later clarified that she didn’t mean the word “rape” in the “literal or criminal sense.”
In Weinman’s epilogue, she briefly points to the unfinished business of ending rape, spousal or otherwise. But her book assumes that society has at least sorted out the philosophical underpinnings of how to regulate sex. “Younger generations were far clearer about these issues,” Weinman writes, “understanding that consent must be given ‘freely and intelligently’ by those who were capable, and anything shy of full consent was considered rape.” There is, I think, no such clarity. It is not just people like Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Pete Hegseth, Brock Turner, Bill Cosby, Sean Combs, Dominique Pelicot, and their many, many friends who seem to have a bone to pick with consent. Feminists have their own quibbles. What does “freely and intelligently” mean, they ask, and what entails “full consent”? Who exactly is capable of consenting? And what are we to do with rapists?
For some second-wave feminists, the very idea that a woman living under patriarchy could “consent” to sex with a man was absurd. After all, we don’t think of a serf consenting to work for her feudal overlord: the serf might well enjoy tilling the fields, she might even love her master, but she didn’t choose farm labor so much as she was kept, by rigid and often violent social limits, from pursuing anything else. And even if the choice were free—even if decades of hard-fought feminist struggle had occasioned the sort of emancipation that meant women were no longer analogous to serfs—could such a choice ever be “intelligent”? Some women find knitting pleasurable, comforting, and affirming of their femininity, but how many would recommend it to a friend if it carried a ten-per-cent chance of rape?
These were lively arguments in the seventies and eighties, advanced by feminists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who had herself been battered by her husband. Today, the basic idea—often glossed as “all heterosexual sex is rape,” though neither MacKinnon nor Dworkin wrote exactly those words—seems almost farcical. Radical feminists no longer blame heterosexual women for “sleeping with the enemy.” It’s widely accepted that a woman really can consent to sex with a husband on whom she is financially dependent. The immediate though rather less accepted corollary is that she can also consent to sex with a paying stranger. To say anything else, many feminists now argue, would be to infantilize her, to subordinate her—to the state, to moralism—rather than acknowledge her mastery of her own body.
But the root of the second-wave critique, that there are power differentials across which professed consent is insufficient, lives on in other debates. Children, a class whom the poet Mary Karr once described as “three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate,” are an obvious example. It is easy to be horrified by situations where children are subjected to sex that is forced or coerced. But what about sex that they claim to want? Can children consent to sex with other children? With adults? Can a nineteen-year-old girl legally have what she believes to be loving, consensual sex with her stepfather? What about with her stepmother? Can students choose to have sex with their professors, or employees with their bosses? How we answer these questions depends on whom we consider to be so gullible, vulnerable, or exploited that they must be protected from their own expressed desires. (...)
One critique of consent, then, is that it is too permissive—that it ignores how coercion or delusion may result in the illusion of agreement. But another critique is that it’s too restrictive and punitive. Decades of reform laws have expanded the number of situations legally considered to be rape: it’s no longer a charge that can be brought only against an armed stranger who attacks a struggling victim, ideally a white virgin. On university campuses, the idea that “no means no” has given way—because of the well-documented fact that many people freeze and are unable to speak in moments of fear—to “yes means yes.”
Critics of this shift worry about encounters where both parties are blackout drunk, or where one appears to retroactively withdraw consent. They argue that a lower bar for rape leads to the criminalization—or at least the litigation—of misunderstandings, and so discourages the sort of carefree sexual experimentation that some feminists very much hope to champion. “I can think of no better way to subjugate women than to convince us that assault is around every corner,” the self-identified feminist Laura Kipnis writes in “Unwanted Advances,” a 2017 book about “sexual paranoia on campus.” Kipnis describes her own mother laughingly recalling a college professor chasing her around a desk and trying to kiss her. That young women today are encouraged to think of this kind of “idiocy” as an “incapacitating trauma,” Kipnis argues, codifies sexist ideas about their innocence, purity, and helplessness. Another interpretation is that young women have decided, with a rather masculine sense of their own entitlement, that they need not smile indulgently upon their transgressors. But Kipnis is right in her broader point: the bureaucratization of our erotic lives is no path to liberation.
by S.C. Cornell, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Michelle Mildenberg Lara
Friday, January 9, 2026
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