via:
Tuesday, July 7, 2026
[ed. Not as inspiring perhaps as President John F. Kennedy's We choose to go to the Moon speech, but probably more common:]
***
"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours. There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too. - Wikipedia
Monday, July 6, 2026
“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Beating the Heat
Long before air-conditioning, people around the world came up with ingenious ways to beat the heat. But, really — wear dark, billowing robes? And drink tea?
The science can be surprising. As big chunks of the United States and Canada roast through the weekend, some of these ideas might be worth a closer look.
Water That Sidewalk
In Japan’s sweltering summer months, you might see storekeepers with a bucket of cold water, dousing hot pavement outside their stores.
The practice, called uchimizu, grew out of Japan’s tea ceremony tradition. It was originally a purifying ritual and an act of welcome for guests. But uchimizu also has an effect on temperature thanks to what’s known as evaporative cooling — when water evaporates, it pulls heat out of the hot ground.
A 2018 study in the journal Water found that uchimizu caused air temperatures to drop by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit near the ground, even with small amounts of water.
According to Shigenori Asai, director of the Japan Water Forum, the more neighbors join in and douse the pavement, the more effective it is. “You might even feel a cooling breeze,” he said. His group is sponsoring a global Uchimizu Day on Aug. 1.
Hang Screens of Fragrant Grass
Before air-conditioning, people in some of the hottest parts of India survived intense heat waves by weaving screens made from the spongy roots of a sorghumlike grass called vetiver.
The screens are kept wet and hung over doors and windows facing the wind for another version of evaporative cooling. Hot air blowing through is stripped of some of its heat. The grasses also smell good.
The process works so well, especially in dry environments, that some modern data centers are turning to a variation of this idea called indirect evaporative cooling.
If old-fashioned technologies like this can make a dent in the expected surge in air-conditioning use in India and other countries, that would bring great benefits, said Liza Raju Subhadra, an architect in Kerala, India, who works with alternative materials.
“It’s not just energy-intensive — when a neighbor uses an air-conditioner, the hot air gets passed onto me,” she said. “It makes a big difference if we can passively cool our homes.”
Wear Dark, Flowing Robes (or Seersucker)
It may seem counterintuitive to wear heavy, dark clothing in the desert, but communities in the Middle East and North Africa have done so for centuries.
A study published in Nature in 1980 found that dark robes can indeed create a cooling effect when worn in loosefitting ways. The robe absorbs heat and warms the air inside the garment, but as that hot air expands and rises rapidly, it escapes through the top. The upward flow acts like a pump, drawing cooler air from the bottom of the robe.
“The additional heat absorbed by the black robe was lost before it reached the skin,” the authors concluded.
For a different look, try seersucker. In the hot, humid summers of the American South, linen and seersucker, the thin, puckered cotton fabric, are staples.
Seersucker is woven in a way that causes some threads to bunch together, giving the fabric its distinct wrinkled texture. That prevents it from flattening and sticking to sweaty skin. It also creates tiny pockets that aid air circulation and cooling.
by Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times | Read more:
Image: The Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press
[ed. And there are other options too, from architectural to personal/practical. My buddy Jerry was telling me about folks in Texas who used to, maybe still do, dig small pit caverns (like root cellars) a few feet below ground with an attached conduit routed upward into their house. The cool air from just a few feet below ground is enough. Another option would be architectural design, see also: How Old Dubai's historic streets beat extreme heat (BBC).]
The science can be surprising. As big chunks of the United States and Canada roast through the weekend, some of these ideas might be worth a closer look.
Water That Sidewalk
In Japan’s sweltering summer months, you might see storekeepers with a bucket of cold water, dousing hot pavement outside their stores.
A 2018 study in the journal Water found that uchimizu caused air temperatures to drop by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit near the ground, even with small amounts of water.
According to Shigenori Asai, director of the Japan Water Forum, the more neighbors join in and douse the pavement, the more effective it is. “You might even feel a cooling breeze,” he said. His group is sponsoring a global Uchimizu Day on Aug. 1.
Hang Screens of Fragrant Grass
Before air-conditioning, people in some of the hottest parts of India survived intense heat waves by weaving screens made from the spongy roots of a sorghumlike grass called vetiver.
The screens are kept wet and hung over doors and windows facing the wind for another version of evaporative cooling. Hot air blowing through is stripped of some of its heat. The grasses also smell good.
The process works so well, especially in dry environments, that some modern data centers are turning to a variation of this idea called indirect evaporative cooling.
If old-fashioned technologies like this can make a dent in the expected surge in air-conditioning use in India and other countries, that would bring great benefits, said Liza Raju Subhadra, an architect in Kerala, India, who works with alternative materials.
“It’s not just energy-intensive — when a neighbor uses an air-conditioner, the hot air gets passed onto me,” she said. “It makes a big difference if we can passively cool our homes.”
Wear Dark, Flowing Robes (or Seersucker)
It may seem counterintuitive to wear heavy, dark clothing in the desert, but communities in the Middle East and North Africa have done so for centuries.
A study published in Nature in 1980 found that dark robes can indeed create a cooling effect when worn in loosefitting ways. The robe absorbs heat and warms the air inside the garment, but as that hot air expands and rises rapidly, it escapes through the top. The upward flow acts like a pump, drawing cooler air from the bottom of the robe.
“The additional heat absorbed by the black robe was lost before it reached the skin,” the authors concluded.
For a different look, try seersucker. In the hot, humid summers of the American South, linen and seersucker, the thin, puckered cotton fabric, are staples.
Seersucker is woven in a way that causes some threads to bunch together, giving the fabric its distinct wrinkled texture. That prevents it from flattening and sticking to sweaty skin. It also creates tiny pockets that aid air circulation and cooling.
by Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times | Read more:
Image: The Yomiuri Shimbun, via Associated Press
[ed. And there are other options too, from architectural to personal/practical. My buddy Jerry was telling me about folks in Texas who used to, maybe still do, dig small pit caverns (like root cellars) a few feet below ground with an attached conduit routed upward into their house. The cool air from just a few feet below ground is enough. Another option would be architectural design, see also: How Old Dubai's historic streets beat extreme heat (BBC).]
What Does Dressing Up Mean Today?
I understand that we’re all dressing more casually these days, especially so since the pandemic. But there is something special about going to a play or a nice restaurant, and increasingly I’m seeing folks at such places dressed in what they’d wear to the supermarket or to do chores around the house — which kind of makes me sad. Are we losing something? — Janet, New York City
That’s not me speculating or playing up the importance of clothes because I’m a fashion critic. It’s an actual thing, known as enclothed cognition — and that’s what you’re sensing has been lost.
A term coined in 2012 in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky, enclothed cognition refers to “the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes.” Essentially, the paper posited that the physical experience of wearing clothes, when combined with their symbolic meaning, affects how we think about ourselves and about other people.
That hypothesis was proved through an experiment involving white lab coats. When people, like doctors, wore them, they tended to pay more attention to what they were doing. The act of wearing the coat changed their behavior.
That is why fairy tales almost always invoke the literal magic of getting dressed. Why people used to dress for the theater, for dinner, for travel, for job interviews, for church, for cocktails, for parties. Why, when I am working at home, I put on my shoes to tell myself it’s time to focus.
But as you say, while we still dress for the big rituals of life, it seems increasingly that more everyday events are considered … well, not worth the trouble.
Somewhere between Silicon Valley’s declaration of independence from the suit and the rise of athleisure, dressing up became conflated with dressing expensively, uncomfortably and (even worse) according to outdated social conventions. Doing so was seen as something you were supposed to do, rather than something you might choose to do, and rejecting those conventions was seen as progress.
What is actually happening, though, is that we are scrambling our signals.
That doesn’t mean we should rush back to the safety of old-fashioned dress codes. At this point, those have definitively gone the way of the dodo. But it does mean we have to reconsider what getting “dressed up” really means, and that has less to do with any mass social definition than with a simple state of mind. Or so I found when I started asking around.
“To me, dressing up is about intention,” the designer Joseph Altuzarra said. “It has to do with the act of getting dressed with purpose and thoughtfulness, with a conscious decision to step into a particular version of yourself.”
Ikram Goldman, the owner of the Chicago retail emporium Ikram, had much the same response. Dressing up, she said, is about “looking polished” — though that term is largely in the brain, and eye, of the individual.
Goldman’s definition of polish: “Never wear jeans; no flip-flops; hair, nails and makeup done.” For Altuzarra, you can dress up in “perfectly fitting jeans and a crisp white T-shirt” as long as there is emphasis on the “perfectly fitting” and the “crisp.”
For his part, Law Roach, the “Project Runway” executive producer and Zendaya’s image architect, said he feels dressed up when he’s wearing “jeans held up with an Hermès scarf for a belt” or one of the “vintage Armani suits from the ’80s I get from a little store in Brooklyn.” [ed. image architect. that is a new one.]
The point, he said, “is putting something on that makes you feel special.” Something that implies a certain amount of care and consideration. Something that signals to your brain, as Adam and Galinsky might say, that what is about to happen is worth anticipating — and triggers the dopamine hit that comes when you realize, as Roach said, that “having somewhere to go is more of a luxury than ever before.”
by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images
***
Dressing up can be one of the great joys of life. It is a shared human ritual, a mode of self-expression and a sign of respect. It helps mark time and set moments apart. It is an external expression of inner psychological and emotional states. It is a message to those around you.That’s not me speculating or playing up the importance of clothes because I’m a fashion critic. It’s an actual thing, known as enclothed cognition — and that’s what you’re sensing has been lost.
That hypothesis was proved through an experiment involving white lab coats. When people, like doctors, wore them, they tended to pay more attention to what they were doing. The act of wearing the coat changed their behavior.
That is why fairy tales almost always invoke the literal magic of getting dressed. Why people used to dress for the theater, for dinner, for travel, for job interviews, for church, for cocktails, for parties. Why, when I am working at home, I put on my shoes to tell myself it’s time to focus.
But as you say, while we still dress for the big rituals of life, it seems increasingly that more everyday events are considered … well, not worth the trouble.
Somewhere between Silicon Valley’s declaration of independence from the suit and the rise of athleisure, dressing up became conflated with dressing expensively, uncomfortably and (even worse) according to outdated social conventions. Doing so was seen as something you were supposed to do, rather than something you might choose to do, and rejecting those conventions was seen as progress.
What is actually happening, though, is that we are scrambling our signals.
That doesn’t mean we should rush back to the safety of old-fashioned dress codes. At this point, those have definitively gone the way of the dodo. But it does mean we have to reconsider what getting “dressed up” really means, and that has less to do with any mass social definition than with a simple state of mind. Or so I found when I started asking around.
“To me, dressing up is about intention,” the designer Joseph Altuzarra said. “It has to do with the act of getting dressed with purpose and thoughtfulness, with a conscious decision to step into a particular version of yourself.”
Ikram Goldman, the owner of the Chicago retail emporium Ikram, had much the same response. Dressing up, she said, is about “looking polished” — though that term is largely in the brain, and eye, of the individual.
Goldman’s definition of polish: “Never wear jeans; no flip-flops; hair, nails and makeup done.” For Altuzarra, you can dress up in “perfectly fitting jeans and a crisp white T-shirt” as long as there is emphasis on the “perfectly fitting” and the “crisp.”
For his part, Law Roach, the “Project Runway” executive producer and Zendaya’s image architect, said he feels dressed up when he’s wearing “jeans held up with an Hermès scarf for a belt” or one of the “vintage Armani suits from the ’80s I get from a little store in Brooklyn.” [ed. image architect. that is a new one.]
The point, he said, “is putting something on that makes you feel special.” Something that implies a certain amount of care and consideration. Something that signals to your brain, as Adam and Galinsky might say, that what is about to happen is worth anticipating — and triggers the dopamine hit that comes when you realize, as Roach said, that “having somewhere to go is more of a luxury than ever before.”
by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images
Thoughts on a Funeral
I've just visited the largest funeral in history, where millions mourned Sayyed Ali Khamenei, the Iranian leader who was assassinated by the US-Israeli coalition along with members of his family. It is practically impossible to understand what this scene is like, or what it means, unless you're here. I've met people from around the world who've come to pay respects, including many from across the West. The crowds pouring in are endless, and grow larger and more intense into the night.
From Tehran's Mosala, there are indignant calls for vengeance, displays of sorrow and defiance, protest, songs and marathons of poetry. These days of mourning will amount to one of the most resonant moments in the history of anti-imperialist movements.
Everyone I've spoken to believes war will return to Iran before long, and none trust the MOU with the US. But they are confident their country can deter another assault. They see their own citizens' mobilization as an integral component of Iran's survival.
If the assassination of Khamenei was designed to spur regime change, his funeral demonstrates how badly it has backfired. And the crime may blow back in ways its historically illiterate authors could have never imagined.
What we're witnessing in the Mosala consolidates the Islamic Republic and its revolutionary society as a political reality that can not be erased through regime change war or sanctions. This is a turning point in the region that will echo for a generation.
by Max Blumenthal, X | Read more:
Image: X
'We Are Screwed'
Data Center Alley is facing a climate test.
Searing temperatures this week could push energy demand to record levels on the mid-Atlantic’s electric grid, which fuels the country’s data center boom in Virginia.
To relieve some of the pressure, the Department of Energy granted permission Tuesday to the region’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to potentially force data centers to use backup diesel generators.
The move highlights the growing challenge of meeting rising electricity demand from data centers as the grid strains to keep the region cool during a period of extreme heat.
Many data centers rely on backup diesel generators, which release planet-warming emissions and lack air pollution controls designed to safeguard public health. The challenge is particularly acute in Virginia, the epicenter of the nation’s data center boom. State regulators have permitted more than 8,000 diesel generators at data centers in recent years, according to data from the state Department of Environmental Quality.
DOE’s order would allow data centers to run generators beyond limits for emissions that EPA has categorized as a “possible human carcinogen.”
Meeting higher electricity demand from air conditioning use during heat waves was already a challenge, said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University. Adding data centers to the equation makes it harder.
“This is exactly what we expect in a warming world,” she said. “Even a modest increase in baseline temperature causes an exponential increase in heat extremes. You find yourself crossing these heat extremes much more frequently.” [...]
PJM has sufficient generating reserves to withstand intense summer heat waves, according to a recent assessment by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. But it is anticipating electricity demand far in excess of what it was expecting when it issued its summer reliability assessment in May.
Demand is projected to peak around 166 gigawatts on Thursday afternoon, exceeding the all-time record of 165 GW set in 2006. PJM predicted that summer demand would hit 156 GW this year, though it also included an “unlikely but plausible” scenario where electricity demand crests around 169 GW.
“It’s scary. It worries everyone when you see those kind of numbers,” said Abe Silverman, a former New Jersey utility regulator.
The grid should have enough generation to satisfy that power consumption, but the combination of higher temperatures, increased demand from data centers and a regulatory system straining to keep pace with skyrocketing electricity use is a worrisome dynamic, Silverman said.
The future looks even scarier. “The projections for data center loads dwarf the amount of data center load we have now,” he said. [...]
A DOE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. But Energy Secretary Chris Wright blamed the tight grid conditions on the Biden administration. [ed. Of course.]
“We are reversing those failures and using every available tool ensuring Americans in the Mid-Atlantic have continued access to affordable, reliable, and secure energy to power and cool their homes,” Wright said in a statement accompanying the order on diesel generators.
Communities are caught in the middle. In Virginia, one-third of data centers are located within 500 feet of residential areas or schools, according to state auditors.
Some neighbors are bracing to see if their Fourth of July celebrations will be affected by unhealthy air.
“Nothing says life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness like breathing in diesel fumes,” said Elena Schlossberg, who runs a grassroots organization opposing data centers in Prince William County, which has 33 completed data centers and 31 more on the way.
No one wants the grid to collapse, she said, but she argued it’s not fair when neighborhoods pay for Virginia’s data center boom with their health.
“Either way, we are screwed,” Schlossberg said. “Either our lights go out or we get to breathe in this pollution.” [...]
“Last summer it was like, is everyone seeing what we are seeing?” said Ann Bennett, who oversees data center issues at the Sierra Club of Virginia. “This time around people are already emailing us asking if they should expect more diesel and how to protect themselves from the fumes during this heat wave.”
The number of diesel generators in the state has grown since then. Bennett, who has tracked DEQ permits for the machines, found that the agency allowed 3,790 additional diesel generators in 2025.
“This time, we are all anxiously anticipating what is going to happen, and we have thousands more generators to worry about,” she said.
by Ariel Wittenberg and Benjamin Storrow, Politico | Read more:
Searing temperatures this week could push energy demand to record levels on the mid-Atlantic’s electric grid, which fuels the country’s data center boom in Virginia.
To relieve some of the pressure, the Department of Energy granted permission Tuesday to the region’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to potentially force data centers to use backup diesel generators.
Many data centers rely on backup diesel generators, which release planet-warming emissions and lack air pollution controls designed to safeguard public health. The challenge is particularly acute in Virginia, the epicenter of the nation’s data center boom. State regulators have permitted more than 8,000 diesel generators at data centers in recent years, according to data from the state Department of Environmental Quality.
DOE’s order would allow data centers to run generators beyond limits for emissions that EPA has categorized as a “possible human carcinogen.”
Meeting higher electricity demand from air conditioning use during heat waves was already a challenge, said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University. Adding data centers to the equation makes it harder.
“This is exactly what we expect in a warming world,” she said. “Even a modest increase in baseline temperature causes an exponential increase in heat extremes. You find yourself crossing these heat extremes much more frequently.” [...]
PJM has sufficient generating reserves to withstand intense summer heat waves, according to a recent assessment by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. But it is anticipating electricity demand far in excess of what it was expecting when it issued its summer reliability assessment in May.
Demand is projected to peak around 166 gigawatts on Thursday afternoon, exceeding the all-time record of 165 GW set in 2006. PJM predicted that summer demand would hit 156 GW this year, though it also included an “unlikely but plausible” scenario where electricity demand crests around 169 GW.
“It’s scary. It worries everyone when you see those kind of numbers,” said Abe Silverman, a former New Jersey utility regulator.
The grid should have enough generation to satisfy that power consumption, but the combination of higher temperatures, increased demand from data centers and a regulatory system straining to keep pace with skyrocketing electricity use is a worrisome dynamic, Silverman said.
The future looks even scarier. “The projections for data center loads dwarf the amount of data center load we have now,” he said. [...]
A DOE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. But Energy Secretary Chris Wright blamed the tight grid conditions on the Biden administration. [ed. Of course.]
“We are reversing those failures and using every available tool ensuring Americans in the Mid-Atlantic have continued access to affordable, reliable, and secure energy to power and cool their homes,” Wright said in a statement accompanying the order on diesel generators.
Communities are caught in the middle. In Virginia, one-third of data centers are located within 500 feet of residential areas or schools, according to state auditors.
Some neighbors are bracing to see if their Fourth of July celebrations will be affected by unhealthy air.
“Nothing says life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness like breathing in diesel fumes,” said Elena Schlossberg, who runs a grassroots organization opposing data centers in Prince William County, which has 33 completed data centers and 31 more on the way.
No one wants the grid to collapse, she said, but she argued it’s not fair when neighborhoods pay for Virginia’s data center boom with their health.
“Either way, we are screwed,” Schlossberg said. “Either our lights go out or we get to breathe in this pollution.” [...]
“Last summer it was like, is everyone seeing what we are seeing?” said Ann Bennett, who oversees data center issues at the Sierra Club of Virginia. “This time around people are already emailing us asking if they should expect more diesel and how to protect themselves from the fumes during this heat wave.”
The number of diesel generators in the state has grown since then. Bennett, who has tracked DEQ permits for the machines, found that the agency allowed 3,790 additional diesel generators in 2025.
“This time, we are all anxiously anticipating what is going to happen, and we have thousands more generators to worry about,” she said.
by Ariel Wittenberg and Benjamin Storrow, Politico | Read more:
Image: Francis Chung/Politico
[ed. Water issues, too. Number of data centers in Virginia: 749. Providers: 109.]
Life at the End of the Metaverse
It is almost midnight at the close of 15th June 2026, and I am standing in the middle of a world that is supposed to be ending, not that anyone nearby seems all that concerned by the prospect.
In mundane reality, I am standing in my living room, trying not to bash my shins on the coffee table, with a £320 lump of plastic strapped to my head. Conceptually, though, I am in the metaverse—a virtual reality (VR) concept that, for much of the past decade, big tech promised us was the future.
Mark Zuckerberg was so convinced the metaverse was the next big thing that he renamed his company after it. Meta, as Facebook is now known, bet the farm on virtual reality, investing more than $80bn into metaverse-related ventures over the past five years alone—only to abruptly decide it wasn’t the future after all.
In March this year it was announced that Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship metaverse venture, would shut down its VR operations in June, continuing only as a mobile app. The announcement was quickly reversed, after a fashion, as Meta promised not to pull the plug on a service users had bought expensive headsets to access. Instead of a quick end, Horizon Worlds would die slowly—no longer maintained or updated, but still accessible to those who had already signed up.
That’s why I’m standing with a Meta Quest headset strapped to my head on 15th June. Are people going to mark the moment they staved off a virtual reality apocalypse? Is this the celebration scene at the end of the movie, when disaster is averted? Will the metaverse be full of cheering crowds?
The short answer was no: Meta has built a whole network of virtual reality worlds, almost all of them empty. The concept was glitzy: Meta itself would build a hub, which let you design and build your own VR avatar—initially, to much derision, without legs, although these were later added.
Users could then build their own themed worlds which anyone could explore, playing games, buying and selling virtual merchandise and chatting with other visitors. Meta promised it would host gigs, comedy clubs and more. Big brands—including Wendy’s, Mini, Cheetos, Fender and the NBA—were lured to build sponsored worlds. It would be a whole new way to experience the internet.
The busiest venue I can find in Horizon Worlds is Metdonald’s, a VR “parody” of the fast-food chain, with 29 people inside. I am teleported to a crude carpark with a decent facsimile of a McDonald’s restaurant inside it. The design encourages me to go through a drive thru.
When I get to the front, I hear the disembodied voices of American children trying to get a non-functional ordering screen to do something. “Five thousand hamburgers please,” one kid says repeatedly, before getting frustrated at another player standing on top of their car.
Another child tries to challenge me to play one of the games nearby, and is quickly annoyed when I can’t work out the controls well enough to do so. Meta spent tens of billions of dollars on building the future of the internet, and all it has to show for it is a handful of bored children in the parking lot of an offbrand drive-thru restaurant. Something clearly went very wrong here, but it’s not immediately clear what—or what that means for big tech’s ability to shape the future when it’s not what the rest of us want.
In mundane reality, I am standing in my living room, trying not to bash my shins on the coffee table, with a £320 lump of plastic strapped to my head. Conceptually, though, I am in the metaverse—a virtual reality (VR) concept that, for much of the past decade, big tech promised us was the future.
In March this year it was announced that Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship metaverse venture, would shut down its VR operations in June, continuing only as a mobile app. The announcement was quickly reversed, after a fashion, as Meta promised not to pull the plug on a service users had bought expensive headsets to access. Instead of a quick end, Horizon Worlds would die slowly—no longer maintained or updated, but still accessible to those who had already signed up.
That’s why I’m standing with a Meta Quest headset strapped to my head on 15th June. Are people going to mark the moment they staved off a virtual reality apocalypse? Is this the celebration scene at the end of the movie, when disaster is averted? Will the metaverse be full of cheering crowds?
The short answer was no: Meta has built a whole network of virtual reality worlds, almost all of them empty. The concept was glitzy: Meta itself would build a hub, which let you design and build your own VR avatar—initially, to much derision, without legs, although these were later added.
Users could then build their own themed worlds which anyone could explore, playing games, buying and selling virtual merchandise and chatting with other visitors. Meta promised it would host gigs, comedy clubs and more. Big brands—including Wendy’s, Mini, Cheetos, Fender and the NBA—were lured to build sponsored worlds. It would be a whole new way to experience the internet.
The busiest venue I can find in Horizon Worlds is Metdonald’s, a VR “parody” of the fast-food chain, with 29 people inside. I am teleported to a crude carpark with a decent facsimile of a McDonald’s restaurant inside it. The design encourages me to go through a drive thru.
When I get to the front, I hear the disembodied voices of American children trying to get a non-functional ordering screen to do something. “Five thousand hamburgers please,” one kid says repeatedly, before getting frustrated at another player standing on top of their car.
Another child tries to challenge me to play one of the games nearby, and is quickly annoyed when I can’t work out the controls well enough to do so. Meta spent tens of billions of dollars on building the future of the internet, and all it has to show for it is a handful of bored children in the parking lot of an offbrand drive-thru restaurant. Something clearly went very wrong here, but it’s not immediately clear what—or what that means for big tech’s ability to shape the future when it’s not what the rest of us want.
by James Ball, Prospect | Read more:
Image: Benny Douet
Sunday, July 5, 2026
Good Vibrations
Remember the vibe shift? In 2024, first as the election approached and then after Donald Trump’s victory, pundits and political strategists lined up to declare its cultural meaning quite expansive — a shift not just in electoral politics but also in the partisan alignment and cultural life of the whole country. This was the beginning of an era, we were told; his election was perhaps as significant as the one that once heralded the Reagan revolution or what was called the emerging Democratic majority in Barack Obama’s multicultural America.
A new course had been plotted, and the country would be moving MAGA-ward — both in politics and beyond it. The heavy-handed safetyism of the pandemic era was over, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion. The border would be closed and perhaps tens of millions of people deported. Domineering masculinity and throwback gender norms would reign again in Washington and beyond. And unchecked capitalism would be so fully unleashed that bankers were already feeling empowered to throw around slurs again.
It’s been a while since anyone talked in such triumphalist terms about MAGA’s cultural victory — maybe since the time that the people of Minneapolis essentially repelled the Immigration and Customs Enforcement units that had descended on their city. The cruel kids’ table is not nearly as crowded anymore, and those lingering at it look to the rest of the country more like monstrous radicals or opportunistic grifters than anything that might be called a political vanguard for the entire country.
The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another, and even if Mr. Trump’s evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections. Tech accelerationism is still minting unimaginable fortunes but has also generated populist rage against artificial intelligence and data centers that probably counts as the biggest grass-roots backlash since at least Occupy and the Tea Party. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — which seemed at first to produce a MAGA martyr, initiating a generation of young conservatives almost as a frat house would a new class of pledges — has given way instead to crises and infighting in conservative media. Surveys show that Gen Z remains our most progressive generation.
But between the July 2024 assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., and the ignominious end of Elon Musk’s run at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in May 2025, it certainly looked as if there had been a significant shift. It seemed Mr. Trump had managed a generational political realignment, pulling the country’s plutocratic elite in Silicon Valley into a new ideological alliance with his legacy base of the left behind in postindustrial states and drawing an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters into the fold, as well.
Liberals, it appeared, had been ejected from the cultural driver’s seat. To almost everyone contemplating Project 2025 and TrumpCoin and the inauguration stacked with Silicon Valley’s richest, it seemed intuitive that the election told us something profound not just about the politics to come but also about the nature of the country — the vibe shift so clear and obvious that elite liberal institutions, from law firms to top universities and media and entertainment companies, raced to accommodate it.
Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals. We haven’t even hit the midterms yet, and the prospect of an enduring MAGA majority doesn’t look like the natural path of the American future. It looks like a projection from the recent past, already fading.
There are any number of ways to mark the shift back: the president’s abysmal approval ratings, including a –50 net approval rating among independents; the fact that Democrats, hated as they may seem, now have a pretty good chance of winning control of the Senate; the hugely unpopular Iran war coming to such a humiliating end.
But the most vivid might be the planned celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday. A year or so ago, we were told that MAGA had won the culture wars, but barely a year later, when organizers with close ties to the White House tried to put together the Great American State Fair, the biggest stars they could attract were Flo Rida, Vanilla Ice and the living half of Milli Vanilli. Most of the performers who were announced quickly pulled out, then got called “libtards” by a cabinet secretary for doing so, and the lineup was repopulated by fillers like the girlfriend of the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel. Motocross bikers did flying tricks on the White House lawn — which called to mind Evel Knievel rather than any less ironic embodiment of American greatness — and the White House staged a high-profile Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the South Lawn that Americans judged inappropriate by a 3-to-1 ratio. And that was before the fighter Josh Hokit celebrated his victory by declaring that Michelle Obama was a man, as Joe Rogan giggled beside him.
A year ago, the U.F.C. spectacle might have seemed like a mark of right-wing cultural ascendancy, even though fewer Americans watch combat sports or motocross than they do tennis, hockey, soccer or golf; even though Americans have, by and large, hated Mr. Trump’s rash remodeling of the White House property; and even though Mr. Rogan has spent 2026 criticizing the president on deportations, corruption, wars and foreign policy. But by the summer of 2026, it looked like the kind of imperial indulgence that tends to mark the end, not the apogee, of a given reign.
What happened? One explanation is that Mr. Trump simply squandered his advantage. His tariff crusade produced a burst of inflation. DOGE was a dud. His invasion of American cities in the name of immigration enforcement was so violent and aggressive, it seems to have alienated even those voters who wanted more serious action at the border. And his attacks on foreign countries exposed American military vulnerability, drove a big spike in the price of oil and other products and lost him any claim he might have had to being an antiwar president (always a dubious claim but a relatively widely held one nevertheless).
But look at Mr. Trump’s declining approval ratings, and you see a pretty steady line, from about plus-12 net approval on Inauguration Day to almost negative 19 this month. On particular issues, the decline has gone even further. On inflation, for instance, his net approval has fallen by almost 40 points. Same with demographic subgroups, perhaps most conspicuously those said to be central to MAGA’s claim on the country’s future.
His net approval with young voters has fallen by as much as 50 points, depending on the poll. His net approval among Black Americans was –9 on Inauguration Day and has fallen to –50 today, according to Decision Desk. Among Hispanic voters, said to be a new MAGA bulwark, the president is about 20 points underwater. In his first term, he grew steadily more unpopular but held on to the white working-class voters serving as his base. This time, their patience wore thin quickly, and their support for the president collapsed like everybody else’s.
This may seem like normal postinauguration decline, but the fact that Mr. Trump would be following a normal path toward unpopularity is itself a kind of narrative violation.
During his first term, pundits often marveled at the durability of his base: How could it be that someone so noxious and erratic, peddling such punitive and destructive politics, retained the unswerving backing of so many Americans? To some, he looked like such a transformative figure that the old rules no longer applied; others called him Teflon Don.
But in his second term, there isn’t much of a mystery or obvious superpower. Mr. Trump is in the same neighborhood as George W. Bush was at this point in his second term and no more popular than Joe Biden was at the end of his presidency, and the longer Americans live with Mr. Trump, the more they dislike him. Part of this is the result of voters seeing promise in his 2024 campaign that he was never likely to fulfill, rather than the more predictable path — toward punitive and incompetent governance laced through with corruption and self-dealing. But if Trumpism in office has done so much damage to MAGA’s popularity, it means, among other things, that the support wasn’t that robust in the first place.
As it turned out, according to YouGov, the only sustained period in which Mr. Trump’s personal favorability ratings were positive, since they started measuring them in early 2016, was in the one or two months around Election Day 2024. He was elected again by just 1.5 percentage points and did not even win a majority of votes in the midst of a global anti-incumbency wave.
We heard a lot about the red shifts along the Rio Grande and among New York’s working class, but those populations have swung so far back that they helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor in New York City and have helped revive the perennial Democratic dream of a blue Texas. Project 2025 looked on Inauguration Day like a policy Death Star, but Mr. Trump’s flurry of executive actions has been stymied in the courts, and these days it doesn’t seem that he spent the Biden years building a willing army of ideological loyalists. Instead, he can’t manage to find people to hire for very important jobs. Is that supposed to be a mark of populist integrity, that actual staffing proves to be an unsolvable problem?
On the surface, the rightward lurch of tech oligarchs appears perhaps the stickiest shift of the last cycle, with many leading figures in Silicon Valley still talking about tech accelerationism and how much liberals hate progress — and one of them, the most outspoken Trumper, becoming the world’s first trillionaire along the way. Yet even this phenomenon looks, on closer scrutiny, more like the drift of a few tech leaders than the arrival of an entirely new partisan landscape across the industry or region.
In 2024, tech titans donated much more to Republicans than they did in other recent years, then funded and attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration, celebrating it as a return of sanity or perhaps masculinity. But in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where almost 1.5 million votes were cast in 2024, he won only 3,500 more votes than he did in 2020. Does that look like a culture-spanning vibe shift? Or like the strategic alliance of a relatively small number of wealthy executives and the candidate they believed would happily let them write their own ticket, policywise? Mark Zuckerberg isn’t even wearing his chain anymore.
MAGA was never just a political movement. It pulled anti-establishment sentiment into a bundle with hard-line evangelicals and a new breed of gender traditionalists, unapologetic and rapacious entrepreneurs and those who spent the last decade bristling against the cultural reign of what the progressive wonk Matt Stoller recently called — pretty rudely — “HR lady” liberalism.
In the cultural sphere, those shifts are both a bit harder to measure and perhaps more enduring than the ballot-box version of MAGA. Affirmative action looks genuinely dead, and the SAT is once again a requirement for admission at even those elite universities that briefly made it optional in the name of social justice. Big business still stands cocky and empowered.
Artificial intelligence still mostly holds sway in policy, and the immense wealth of its biggest cheerleaders may mean that hands-off consensus will endure, though the backlash against A.I. and data centers has been astonishingly swift, too, with four times as many Americans saying they were concerned about the A.I. future as were unconcerned about it. Presumably the culture of self-dealing and corruption won’t endure unchanged if a Democrat takes the White House. But it’s also hard to believe — given the ambient presence of gambling apps, for instance — that on questions of self-interest and acquisitiveness the country will return to the standards and propriety of the Obama years. [...]
Hollywood has taken a few steps away from peak woke, but we haven’t seen anything like the pivot from 1970s New Hollywood cynicism to 1980s American flag blockbusters. Corporate America has gotten a bit less gung-ho about D.E.I. but still looks to conservatives to be impossibly woke. The temperature of climate alarm has cooled, but American concern about global warming is just a couple of points off its peak. And while the internet has grown a bit more right wing overall, it’s hard to know if any of that is natural drift, given how much more money has been spent on purchasing platforms and recalibrating algorithms.
The most worrying pattern may be around gender and sexuality, which seems significant enough it can make the whole MAGA phenomenon look like an expression of gender backlash. As recently as 2022, fewer than 30 percent of Republican men surveyed said they believed that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” but two years later, that number was 48 percent. Among Republican women, the number jumped 14 points.
Support for same-sex marriage among all Americans has dropped six points since 2023, but the drop is powered by Republicans. In 2022, 56 percent of them told pollsters that same-sex relations were morally acceptable; in 2026, that figure was just 35 percent — lower than when the Supreme Court decided Obergefell in 2015 and lower even than when Mr. Obama belatedly came out in favor of gay marriage in 2012. In 2016 many liberal Americans believed that Mr. Trump was the reactionary product of the country’s ongoing race conflicts. A decade later, gender looks like a much more illuminating skeleton key. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Erika Kirk is a favorite punching bag of the country now.
But nationally, even these declines can be measured in just a few percentage points, and outside MAGA, it’s not clear how much, if any, ground has been lost since the peak woke years. Democratic men have grown perhaps one or two percentage points more reactionary in their views of gender since 2019, and Democratic women haven’t moved much at all. The share of Democrats saying gay sex is morally acceptable is higher than it was in 2019, as is true for independents, though each is down a bit from a Biden-era peak.
Shifts of just a few points matter, of course, for culture as well as for politics. For obvious reasons, the past 10 years can’t really be called anything other than the Trump era, and Americans will be dealing with the fallout for a very long time — in culture and in politics. But in retrospect it seems we might have gotten ahead of ourselves in tabulating all the things, beyond who was in power, that had really changed about the country as a whole.
Perhaps this sounds like liberal cope; probably at least some of it is. But it is also a reminder that partisan outcomes do not offer precise and comprehensive X-rays of the country, that politicians are rarely the avatars of national meaning we want them to be, that even in a time of hyperpolitics most Americans are pretty disengaged from partisan squabbles and that whenever we try to erect a simple new story about the country on the basis of a couple of percentage-points shifts, we should probably expect the foundation to give way pretty quickly beneath our feet.
A new course had been plotted, and the country would be moving MAGA-ward — both in politics and beyond it. The heavy-handed safetyism of the pandemic era was over, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion. The border would be closed and perhaps tens of millions of people deported. Domineering masculinity and throwback gender norms would reign again in Washington and beyond. And unchecked capitalism would be so fully unleashed that bankers were already feeling empowered to throw around slurs again.
The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another, and even if Mr. Trump’s evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections. Tech accelerationism is still minting unimaginable fortunes but has also generated populist rage against artificial intelligence and data centers that probably counts as the biggest grass-roots backlash since at least Occupy and the Tea Party. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — which seemed at first to produce a MAGA martyr, initiating a generation of young conservatives almost as a frat house would a new class of pledges — has given way instead to crises and infighting in conservative media. Surveys show that Gen Z remains our most progressive generation.
But between the July 2024 assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., and the ignominious end of Elon Musk’s run at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in May 2025, it certainly looked as if there had been a significant shift. It seemed Mr. Trump had managed a generational political realignment, pulling the country’s plutocratic elite in Silicon Valley into a new ideological alliance with his legacy base of the left behind in postindustrial states and drawing an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters into the fold, as well.
Liberals, it appeared, had been ejected from the cultural driver’s seat. To almost everyone contemplating Project 2025 and TrumpCoin and the inauguration stacked with Silicon Valley’s richest, it seemed intuitive that the election told us something profound not just about the politics to come but also about the nature of the country — the vibe shift so clear and obvious that elite liberal institutions, from law firms to top universities and media and entertainment companies, raced to accommodate it.
Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals. We haven’t even hit the midterms yet, and the prospect of an enduring MAGA majority doesn’t look like the natural path of the American future. It looks like a projection from the recent past, already fading.
There are any number of ways to mark the shift back: the president’s abysmal approval ratings, including a –50 net approval rating among independents; the fact that Democrats, hated as they may seem, now have a pretty good chance of winning control of the Senate; the hugely unpopular Iran war coming to such a humiliating end.
But the most vivid might be the planned celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday. A year or so ago, we were told that MAGA had won the culture wars, but barely a year later, when organizers with close ties to the White House tried to put together the Great American State Fair, the biggest stars they could attract were Flo Rida, Vanilla Ice and the living half of Milli Vanilli. Most of the performers who were announced quickly pulled out, then got called “libtards” by a cabinet secretary for doing so, and the lineup was repopulated by fillers like the girlfriend of the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel. Motocross bikers did flying tricks on the White House lawn — which called to mind Evel Knievel rather than any less ironic embodiment of American greatness — and the White House staged a high-profile Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the South Lawn that Americans judged inappropriate by a 3-to-1 ratio. And that was before the fighter Josh Hokit celebrated his victory by declaring that Michelle Obama was a man, as Joe Rogan giggled beside him.
A year ago, the U.F.C. spectacle might have seemed like a mark of right-wing cultural ascendancy, even though fewer Americans watch combat sports or motocross than they do tennis, hockey, soccer or golf; even though Americans have, by and large, hated Mr. Trump’s rash remodeling of the White House property; and even though Mr. Rogan has spent 2026 criticizing the president on deportations, corruption, wars and foreign policy. But by the summer of 2026, it looked like the kind of imperial indulgence that tends to mark the end, not the apogee, of a given reign.
What happened? One explanation is that Mr. Trump simply squandered his advantage. His tariff crusade produced a burst of inflation. DOGE was a dud. His invasion of American cities in the name of immigration enforcement was so violent and aggressive, it seems to have alienated even those voters who wanted more serious action at the border. And his attacks on foreign countries exposed American military vulnerability, drove a big spike in the price of oil and other products and lost him any claim he might have had to being an antiwar president (always a dubious claim but a relatively widely held one nevertheless).
But look at Mr. Trump’s declining approval ratings, and you see a pretty steady line, from about plus-12 net approval on Inauguration Day to almost negative 19 this month. On particular issues, the decline has gone even further. On inflation, for instance, his net approval has fallen by almost 40 points. Same with demographic subgroups, perhaps most conspicuously those said to be central to MAGA’s claim on the country’s future.
His net approval with young voters has fallen by as much as 50 points, depending on the poll. His net approval among Black Americans was –9 on Inauguration Day and has fallen to –50 today, according to Decision Desk. Among Hispanic voters, said to be a new MAGA bulwark, the president is about 20 points underwater. In his first term, he grew steadily more unpopular but held on to the white working-class voters serving as his base. This time, their patience wore thin quickly, and their support for the president collapsed like everybody else’s.
This may seem like normal postinauguration decline, but the fact that Mr. Trump would be following a normal path toward unpopularity is itself a kind of narrative violation.
During his first term, pundits often marveled at the durability of his base: How could it be that someone so noxious and erratic, peddling such punitive and destructive politics, retained the unswerving backing of so many Americans? To some, he looked like such a transformative figure that the old rules no longer applied; others called him Teflon Don.
But in his second term, there isn’t much of a mystery or obvious superpower. Mr. Trump is in the same neighborhood as George W. Bush was at this point in his second term and no more popular than Joe Biden was at the end of his presidency, and the longer Americans live with Mr. Trump, the more they dislike him. Part of this is the result of voters seeing promise in his 2024 campaign that he was never likely to fulfill, rather than the more predictable path — toward punitive and incompetent governance laced through with corruption and self-dealing. But if Trumpism in office has done so much damage to MAGA’s popularity, it means, among other things, that the support wasn’t that robust in the first place.
As it turned out, according to YouGov, the only sustained period in which Mr. Trump’s personal favorability ratings were positive, since they started measuring them in early 2016, was in the one or two months around Election Day 2024. He was elected again by just 1.5 percentage points and did not even win a majority of votes in the midst of a global anti-incumbency wave.
We heard a lot about the red shifts along the Rio Grande and among New York’s working class, but those populations have swung so far back that they helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor in New York City and have helped revive the perennial Democratic dream of a blue Texas. Project 2025 looked on Inauguration Day like a policy Death Star, but Mr. Trump’s flurry of executive actions has been stymied in the courts, and these days it doesn’t seem that he spent the Biden years building a willing army of ideological loyalists. Instead, he can’t manage to find people to hire for very important jobs. Is that supposed to be a mark of populist integrity, that actual staffing proves to be an unsolvable problem?
On the surface, the rightward lurch of tech oligarchs appears perhaps the stickiest shift of the last cycle, with many leading figures in Silicon Valley still talking about tech accelerationism and how much liberals hate progress — and one of them, the most outspoken Trumper, becoming the world’s first trillionaire along the way. Yet even this phenomenon looks, on closer scrutiny, more like the drift of a few tech leaders than the arrival of an entirely new partisan landscape across the industry or region.
In 2024, tech titans donated much more to Republicans than they did in other recent years, then funded and attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration, celebrating it as a return of sanity or perhaps masculinity. But in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where almost 1.5 million votes were cast in 2024, he won only 3,500 more votes than he did in 2020. Does that look like a culture-spanning vibe shift? Or like the strategic alliance of a relatively small number of wealthy executives and the candidate they believed would happily let them write their own ticket, policywise? Mark Zuckerberg isn’t even wearing his chain anymore.
MAGA was never just a political movement. It pulled anti-establishment sentiment into a bundle with hard-line evangelicals and a new breed of gender traditionalists, unapologetic and rapacious entrepreneurs and those who spent the last decade bristling against the cultural reign of what the progressive wonk Matt Stoller recently called — pretty rudely — “HR lady” liberalism.
In the cultural sphere, those shifts are both a bit harder to measure and perhaps more enduring than the ballot-box version of MAGA. Affirmative action looks genuinely dead, and the SAT is once again a requirement for admission at even those elite universities that briefly made it optional in the name of social justice. Big business still stands cocky and empowered.
Artificial intelligence still mostly holds sway in policy, and the immense wealth of its biggest cheerleaders may mean that hands-off consensus will endure, though the backlash against A.I. and data centers has been astonishingly swift, too, with four times as many Americans saying they were concerned about the A.I. future as were unconcerned about it. Presumably the culture of self-dealing and corruption won’t endure unchanged if a Democrat takes the White House. But it’s also hard to believe — given the ambient presence of gambling apps, for instance — that on questions of self-interest and acquisitiveness the country will return to the standards and propriety of the Obama years. [...]
Hollywood has taken a few steps away from peak woke, but we haven’t seen anything like the pivot from 1970s New Hollywood cynicism to 1980s American flag blockbusters. Corporate America has gotten a bit less gung-ho about D.E.I. but still looks to conservatives to be impossibly woke. The temperature of climate alarm has cooled, but American concern about global warming is just a couple of points off its peak. And while the internet has grown a bit more right wing overall, it’s hard to know if any of that is natural drift, given how much more money has been spent on purchasing platforms and recalibrating algorithms.
The most worrying pattern may be around gender and sexuality, which seems significant enough it can make the whole MAGA phenomenon look like an expression of gender backlash. As recently as 2022, fewer than 30 percent of Republican men surveyed said they believed that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” but two years later, that number was 48 percent. Among Republican women, the number jumped 14 points.
Support for same-sex marriage among all Americans has dropped six points since 2023, but the drop is powered by Republicans. In 2022, 56 percent of them told pollsters that same-sex relations were morally acceptable; in 2026, that figure was just 35 percent — lower than when the Supreme Court decided Obergefell in 2015 and lower even than when Mr. Obama belatedly came out in favor of gay marriage in 2012. In 2016 many liberal Americans believed that Mr. Trump was the reactionary product of the country’s ongoing race conflicts. A decade later, gender looks like a much more illuminating skeleton key. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Erika Kirk is a favorite punching bag of the country now.
But nationally, even these declines can be measured in just a few percentage points, and outside MAGA, it’s not clear how much, if any, ground has been lost since the peak woke years. Democratic men have grown perhaps one or two percentage points more reactionary in their views of gender since 2019, and Democratic women haven’t moved much at all. The share of Democrats saying gay sex is morally acceptable is higher than it was in 2019, as is true for independents, though each is down a bit from a Biden-era peak.
Shifts of just a few points matter, of course, for culture as well as for politics. For obvious reasons, the past 10 years can’t really be called anything other than the Trump era, and Americans will be dealing with the fallout for a very long time — in culture and in politics. But in retrospect it seems we might have gotten ahead of ourselves in tabulating all the things, beyond who was in power, that had really changed about the country as a whole.
Perhaps this sounds like liberal cope; probably at least some of it is. But it is also a reminder that partisan outcomes do not offer precise and comprehensive X-rays of the country, that politicians are rarely the avatars of national meaning we want them to be, that even in a time of hyperpolitics most Americans are pretty disengaged from partisan squabbles and that whenever we try to erect a simple new story about the country on the basis of a couple of percentage-points shifts, we should probably expect the foundation to give way pretty quickly beneath our feet.
by David Wallace Wells, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Pretty thorough and thoughtful essay. See also: Trumpland and Inverted Totalitarianism (SheerPost).]
Addicted to War
Whether it’s an addiction or an illness I’m not sure, but all too many of us and our leaders, it seems, have war fever (and a distinctly high temperature). And here’s the strangest thing: when you consider our history since World War II or look around this planet any day of the week, it seems as if all too many of our leaders simply can’t help themselves. They just (or do I mean unjust?) have to go to war. And it evidently matters not at all that the major powers on this planet can no longer seem to win any war they start. Not one in recent memory. And yet, explain it as you will -- an addiction, a fever, a grim desire -- at least two crucial leaders at this very moment, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, seem incapable of stopping themselves.
And here’s the OMG news story that shocked me the other day. At the New York Times, a piece by reporter Constant Méheut had this headline: “The War in Ukraine Has Now Gone On Longer Than World War I.” And here’s how his report began: “The war in Ukraine has often been compared to World War I for its brutal infantry assaults and heavy casualties. Yet the idea that it could, by any measure, surpass a conflict so long and bloody that French soldiers hoped it would be ‘the last of the last’ once seemed unthinkable.”
No longer, unfortunately.
And Russia is anything but alone. After all, my country spent three years in bloody strife in Korea, nearly 9 years in Iraq, almost 20 in Vietnam, and almost 20 more in Afghanistan (and, mind you, that’s hardly the full list of its various conflicts) without a victory in sight. Of course, only recently, “my” president launched the latest all-American conflict, this time with Iran and with an utterly predictable lack of success given our history over the last 80 years. That war is now in a strange, distinctly unsettling holding pattern, and who knows what will come next?
In fact, given the history of this country and war since, in September 1945, it emerged victorious from World War II (having dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities to end it), it should be considered beyond remarkable that Americans would still be so willing to let staggering amounts of our tax dollars be eternally “invested” in the U.S. military. That’s year after year after year without the slightest bit of protest. The latest figure offered by Donald Trump: a Pentagon budget that’s no longer the usual almost a trillion dollars (itself nothing short of shocking) but an even more eye-opening (or do I mean eye-watering?) $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion!) dollars.
And how strange, don’t you think, that, in a world where we humans already seem to go to war endlessly with other human beings, we’ve also evidently decided to go to war with this very planet itself? Of course, I’m thinking about what’s come to be known as “climate change,” but should undoubtedly have been labeled something more like “our war on the climate” (or “climate war”). And worse yet, war among us humans has proven to be perhaps the most devastating way of all to also make war on this planet itself, since nothing releases fossil fuels into the atmosphere quite the way war does. In fact, according to the Costs of War Project, the U.S. military is now believed to be “the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases in the world”!
After all, whatever it doesn’t accomplish, the one thing that war actually does do remarkably successfully (along with killing so many of us and destroying villages, towns, cities, and sometimes whole countries) is pour ever more fossil fuels into our atmosphere and so add immeasurably to the overheating of this planet. Honestly, could we humans be more dystopian? [...]
It is truly strange, don’t you think? I’m referring to “my” president’s never-ending urge, the second time around, to commit mayhem on this planet. (And yes, I keep putting “my” in quotation marks because I didn’t vote for him and I never wanted him to be president of the United States.) And yes again, every day there’s something, whether it’s the killing of a supposed Latin American gangster-in-chief, the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela and his wife, the blasting of Iran, the increasing threats against Cuba, or... well, I can’t even imagine what truly lies in our future (and, count on it, neither can Donald Trump), but nothing good, that’s for damn sure.
And hey, Pete Hegseth, our secretary of war (which, as a label, is historically one hell of a lot more accurate than secretary of defense), couldn’t have been blunter about our situation back in 2025: “Everything starts and ends with warriors in training and on the battlefield. We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. And refocusing on lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards and readiness.”
Yes, there is, it seems, nothing worth the bother but war and more war. That, sadly, is indeed our world and it seems like we just can’t help ourselves. War is and always has been a human addiction -- or should we think of it as an illness? War fever, perhaps?
And here’s the OMG news story that shocked me the other day. At the New York Times, a piece by reporter Constant Méheut had this headline: “The War in Ukraine Has Now Gone On Longer Than World War I.” And here’s how his report began: “The war in Ukraine has often been compared to World War I for its brutal infantry assaults and heavy casualties. Yet the idea that it could, by any measure, surpass a conflict so long and bloody that French soldiers hoped it would be ‘the last of the last’ once seemed unthinkable.”
No longer, unfortunately.
And Russia is anything but alone. After all, my country spent three years in bloody strife in Korea, nearly 9 years in Iraq, almost 20 in Vietnam, and almost 20 more in Afghanistan (and, mind you, that’s hardly the full list of its various conflicts) without a victory in sight. Of course, only recently, “my” president launched the latest all-American conflict, this time with Iran and with an utterly predictable lack of success given our history over the last 80 years. That war is now in a strange, distinctly unsettling holding pattern, and who knows what will come next?
In fact, given the history of this country and war since, in September 1945, it emerged victorious from World War II (having dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities to end it), it should be considered beyond remarkable that Americans would still be so willing to let staggering amounts of our tax dollars be eternally “invested” in the U.S. military. That’s year after year after year without the slightest bit of protest. The latest figure offered by Donald Trump: a Pentagon budget that’s no longer the usual almost a trillion dollars (itself nothing short of shocking) but an even more eye-opening (or do I mean eye-watering?) $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion!) dollars.
And how strange, don’t you think, that, in a world where we humans already seem to go to war endlessly with other human beings, we’ve also evidently decided to go to war with this very planet itself? Of course, I’m thinking about what’s come to be known as “climate change,” but should undoubtedly have been labeled something more like “our war on the climate” (or “climate war”). And worse yet, war among us humans has proven to be perhaps the most devastating way of all to also make war on this planet itself, since nothing releases fossil fuels into the atmosphere quite the way war does. In fact, according to the Costs of War Project, the U.S. military is now believed to be “the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases in the world”!
After all, whatever it doesn’t accomplish, the one thing that war actually does do remarkably successfully (along with killing so many of us and destroying villages, towns, cities, and sometimes whole countries) is pour ever more fossil fuels into our atmosphere and so add immeasurably to the overheating of this planet. Honestly, could we humans be more dystopian? [...]
It is truly strange, don’t you think? I’m referring to “my” president’s never-ending urge, the second time around, to commit mayhem on this planet. (And yes, I keep putting “my” in quotation marks because I didn’t vote for him and I never wanted him to be president of the United States.) And yes again, every day there’s something, whether it’s the killing of a supposed Latin American gangster-in-chief, the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela and his wife, the blasting of Iran, the increasing threats against Cuba, or... well, I can’t even imagine what truly lies in our future (and, count on it, neither can Donald Trump), but nothing good, that’s for damn sure.
And hey, Pete Hegseth, our secretary of war (which, as a label, is historically one hell of a lot more accurate than secretary of defense), couldn’t have been blunter about our situation back in 2025: “Everything starts and ends with warriors in training and on the battlefield. We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. And refocusing on lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards and readiness.”
Yes, there is, it seems, nothing worth the bother but war and more war. That, sadly, is indeed our world and it seems like we just can’t help ourselves. War is and always has been a human addiction -- or should we think of it as an illness? War fever, perhaps?
by Tom Englehardt, Substack | Read more:
Image: A long wall of acceptance. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, Washington. (David J. Jackson, cc by SA 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons)
Saturday, July 4, 2026
Rhiannon Giddens
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing marked a turning point in the United States during the civil rights movement and also contributed to support for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by Congress.
In the years leading up to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Birmingham had earned a national reputation as a tense, violent and racially segregated city, in which even tentative racial integration in any form was met with violent resistance. Martin Luther King Jr. described Birmingham as "probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States."...
Black and white residents of Birmingham were segregated between different public amenities, such as water fountains, and places of public gathering such as movie theaters. The city had no black police officers or firefighters and most black residents could expect to find only menial employment in professions such as cooks and cleaners. Black residents did not just experience segregation in the context of leisure and employment, but also in the context of their freedom and well-being. Given the state's disenfranchisement of most black people since the turn of the century, by making voter registration essentially impossible, few of the city's black residents were registered to vote. Bombings at black homes and institutions were a regular occurrence, with at least 21 separate explosions recorded at black properties and churches in the eight years before 1963. However, none of these explosions had resulted in fatalities. These attacks earned the city the nickname "Bombingham" - Wikipedia
In the years leading up to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Birmingham had earned a national reputation as a tense, violent and racially segregated city, in which even tentative racial integration in any form was met with violent resistance. Martin Luther King Jr. described Birmingham as "probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States."...
Black and white residents of Birmingham were segregated between different public amenities, such as water fountains, and places of public gathering such as movie theaters. The city had no black police officers or firefighters and most black residents could expect to find only menial employment in professions such as cooks and cleaners. Black residents did not just experience segregation in the context of leisure and employment, but also in the context of their freedom and well-being. Given the state's disenfranchisement of most black people since the turn of the century, by making voter registration essentially impossible, few of the city's black residents were registered to vote. Bombings at black homes and institutions were a regular occurrence, with at least 21 separate explosions recorded at black properties and churches in the eight years before 1963. However, none of these explosions had resulted in fatalities. These attacks earned the city the nickname "Bombingham" - Wikipedia
How the Himalayan Blackberry Took Over the Pacific Northwest
The tangled history of an invasive plant and a scientist’s troubling quest to engineer a more efficient natural world.
There is no summer in the Pacific Northwest without the blackberry. Across Washington and Oregon, jagged walls of blackberry brambles choke out nearly every hiking trail, highway shoulder, and vacant lot in the region. Come August, dense thickets beckon berry-pickers to stain their fingers with the juice of the sweet purple fruits, promising the potential of a fresh-baked blackberry pie after a long day’s harvest. But despite the strong association between the region and the fruit, the species of blackberry that most locals have come to enjoy is anything but native.
The story of how the Himalayan blackberry came to swallow the West Coast is a monument to late nineteenth-century industrial ambition. In the late 1800s, transcontinental rail travel revolutionized the United States’ approach to agriculture. A rapidly growing, urbanizing populace demanded a constant supply of fresh fruits and vegetables. To meet this demand, the market required crops engineered for this new era, encouraging innovation that produced plants sturdy enough for cross-country travel and aggressive enough to thrive in any backyard soil.
At the core of this innovation was the enterprising horticulturist Luther Burbank. Operating out of his experimental farm in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank functioned more like a “plant wizard” than a traditional farmer. His mail-order catalogs allowed amateur gardeners across the country to purchase from a selection of hybrids suited for the shifting needs of the nation. Among these plants were the Shasta daisy, plumcot, spineless cactus, and Russet Burbank potato, known today as the most widely grown potato in the United States. As historian Phillip Thurtle states, Burbank’s explicit goal in crafting his hybrids was “to take the rough spots out of nature,” domesticating the wild to promote utility and commercial efficiency.
In 1885, Burbank received a packet of seeds that he had imported from India. Upon opening it, he discovered that the seeds bore a hardy blackberry plant that thrived in temperate areas and produced large, succulent fruits. Pleased by its capacity for growth, yet ill-informed of its true regional roots, Burbank named the plant the “Himalayan Giant” to signal its believed origins and great size. The name was a misnomer, as the species, known scientifically as Rubus armeniacus, is actually native to Armenia and northern Iran.
Impressed by the size and strength of the Himalayan Giant, Luther Burbank marketed the plant to growers in the damp, temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest in a targeted flyer in 1894, promising a plant of extreme utility. The marketing push was met with a large wave of orders from the region, and according to Burbank, “the plants could not be multiplied fast enough to meet the demand.” Over a century later, the Himalayan blackberry has spread far beyond the modest backyard bounds its importers envisioned, opting instead to take over indiscriminately and displace the native trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus) in the process.
Like all blackberries, the Himalayan blackberry is not a berry but rather an aggregate fruit of multiple drupelets, with each drupelet containing an individual seed. These sweet fruits attract birds and other animals in the summer, which encourages seed dispersal and the rapid spread of the plants through their feces. In addition to reproducing through seeds, Rubus armeniacus may also clone itself through vegetative propagation, which occurs when the stem tips root as they come in contact with the ground, contributing to its aggressive growth strategy.
The plant is impressively sprawling and hardy. An individual bush can grow up to 15 feet high and 40 feet long, with thick stems, also known as canes, marked by sharp, hooked thorns. The density and hardiness of Himalayan blackberry thickets allow the plant to “choke out other foliage and prevent the establishment of trees.” Furthermore, Himalayan blackberry bushes thrive in poor and disturbed soils, allowing them to flourish in abandoned lots and fields.
Combined, these traits have led the plant to be known as the unofficial state weed of Washington. Frustratingly, Rubus armeniacus is notoriously difficult to get rid of, as traditional approaches to invasive management such as fire, herbicide, and mowing are insufficient at eradicating the plant. Thus, this weed, whether northwesterners like it or not, is here to stay.
The industrial impulse that welcomed this hardy blackberry also manifested in Burbank’s vision for the future of American society. In 1907, he released The Training of the Human Plant, in which he directly applied his plant breeding techniques to the development of a “superior” race of people. Burbank argued that just as plants could be improved through careful crossbreeding to optimize their positive characteristics, the same opportunity existed for the improvement of mankind. Deeply informed by his American context, Burbank alleged that the “vast mingling of races” brought to the United States via immigration presented an opportunity for “developing the finest race the world has ever known,” as the ethnic variety allowed for a wide array of traits to select from. In light of this potential, Burbank called for a long-term overhaul of American childrearing in order to immerse generations of children in favorable environments that would lend themselves to the development of a “healthy [human] animal.”
While it is tempting to categorize Burbank’s ideas as typical of the rigid, genetically determinist eugenicists at the turn of the twentieth century, his eugenic theories possessed a uniquely American appeal, emphasizing productivity, efficiency, and one’s ability to reshape their reality. Central to Burbank’s thesis was his belief that environment mattered as much, if not more, than heredity. For Burbank, heredity was “simply the sum of all the effects of all the environments of all past generations on the responsive, ever-moving life forces.” Under this view, human and plant species were entirely malleable, shaped profoundly by the pressures of the natural and artificial world around them. Thus, through enough hard work and careful attention to environment, one could bend the will of evolution to create more productive organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms. [...]
Ironically, Burbank’s obsession with eliminating the weak and nurturing stronger organisms ultimately unleashed a botanical “master race” that defied his ideals of human control and smothered the Pacific Northwest. Once introduced to the region, the Himalayan blackberry found an environment perfectly suited to its needs and adapted so completely that it has become an inseparable fixture of local cultural identity. In regional lore and literature, the blackberry is depicted as a terrifyingly untamable force, with vines that “[push] up through solid concrete” and “[force] their way into polite society.” Yet each summer, the region suspends its hatred for the stubborn weed, celebrating the plant’s sweet abundance through blackberry festivals and preparing enough jars of blackberry jam to hold them over until the next year’s harvest.
Today, the Himalayan blackberry stands as a humorous rejection of Burbank’s attempt at complete human control. Amidst his efforts to “take the rough spots out of nature” and promote plants that worked toward a vision of human utility, he introduced a vegetal force that fundamentally refused to be disciplined. In doing so, the story of Burbank’s Himalayan blackberry reveals the limits of human intervention and demonstrates plants’ agency in shaping their own environments. The Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks seeks to highlight histories like this one, unearthing the mutual influences of humans and the plant world on one another.
[ed. When I went to school in Oregon, I couldn't believe the berry bushes everywhere, and subsisted on many of them.]
At the core of this innovation was the enterprising horticulturist Luther Burbank. Operating out of his experimental farm in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank functioned more like a “plant wizard” than a traditional farmer. His mail-order catalogs allowed amateur gardeners across the country to purchase from a selection of hybrids suited for the shifting needs of the nation. Among these plants were the Shasta daisy, plumcot, spineless cactus, and Russet Burbank potato, known today as the most widely grown potato in the United States. As historian Phillip Thurtle states, Burbank’s explicit goal in crafting his hybrids was “to take the rough spots out of nature,” domesticating the wild to promote utility and commercial efficiency.
In 1885, Burbank received a packet of seeds that he had imported from India. Upon opening it, he discovered that the seeds bore a hardy blackberry plant that thrived in temperate areas and produced large, succulent fruits. Pleased by its capacity for growth, yet ill-informed of its true regional roots, Burbank named the plant the “Himalayan Giant” to signal its believed origins and great size. The name was a misnomer, as the species, known scientifically as Rubus armeniacus, is actually native to Armenia and northern Iran.
Like all blackberries, the Himalayan blackberry is not a berry but rather an aggregate fruit of multiple drupelets, with each drupelet containing an individual seed. These sweet fruits attract birds and other animals in the summer, which encourages seed dispersal and the rapid spread of the plants through their feces. In addition to reproducing through seeds, Rubus armeniacus may also clone itself through vegetative propagation, which occurs when the stem tips root as they come in contact with the ground, contributing to its aggressive growth strategy.
The plant is impressively sprawling and hardy. An individual bush can grow up to 15 feet high and 40 feet long, with thick stems, also known as canes, marked by sharp, hooked thorns. The density and hardiness of Himalayan blackberry thickets allow the plant to “choke out other foliage and prevent the establishment of trees.” Furthermore, Himalayan blackberry bushes thrive in poor and disturbed soils, allowing them to flourish in abandoned lots and fields.
Combined, these traits have led the plant to be known as the unofficial state weed of Washington. Frustratingly, Rubus armeniacus is notoriously difficult to get rid of, as traditional approaches to invasive management such as fire, herbicide, and mowing are insufficient at eradicating the plant. Thus, this weed, whether northwesterners like it or not, is here to stay.
The industrial impulse that welcomed this hardy blackberry also manifested in Burbank’s vision for the future of American society. In 1907, he released The Training of the Human Plant, in which he directly applied his plant breeding techniques to the development of a “superior” race of people. Burbank argued that just as plants could be improved through careful crossbreeding to optimize their positive characteristics, the same opportunity existed for the improvement of mankind. Deeply informed by his American context, Burbank alleged that the “vast mingling of races” brought to the United States via immigration presented an opportunity for “developing the finest race the world has ever known,” as the ethnic variety allowed for a wide array of traits to select from. In light of this potential, Burbank called for a long-term overhaul of American childrearing in order to immerse generations of children in favorable environments that would lend themselves to the development of a “healthy [human] animal.”
While it is tempting to categorize Burbank’s ideas as typical of the rigid, genetically determinist eugenicists at the turn of the twentieth century, his eugenic theories possessed a uniquely American appeal, emphasizing productivity, efficiency, and one’s ability to reshape their reality. Central to Burbank’s thesis was his belief that environment mattered as much, if not more, than heredity. For Burbank, heredity was “simply the sum of all the effects of all the environments of all past generations on the responsive, ever-moving life forces.” Under this view, human and plant species were entirely malleable, shaped profoundly by the pressures of the natural and artificial world around them. Thus, through enough hard work and careful attention to environment, one could bend the will of evolution to create more productive organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms. [...]
Ironically, Burbank’s obsession with eliminating the weak and nurturing stronger organisms ultimately unleashed a botanical “master race” that defied his ideals of human control and smothered the Pacific Northwest. Once introduced to the region, the Himalayan blackberry found an environment perfectly suited to its needs and adapted so completely that it has become an inseparable fixture of local cultural identity. In regional lore and literature, the blackberry is depicted as a terrifyingly untamable force, with vines that “[push] up through solid concrete” and “[force] their way into polite society.” Yet each summer, the region suspends its hatred for the stubborn weed, celebrating the plant’s sweet abundance through blackberry festivals and preparing enough jars of blackberry jam to hold them over until the next year’s harvest.
Today, the Himalayan blackberry stands as a humorous rejection of Burbank’s attempt at complete human control. Amidst his efforts to “take the rough spots out of nature” and promote plants that worked toward a vision of human utility, he introduced a vegetal force that fundamentally refused to be disciplined. In doing so, the story of Burbank’s Himalayan blackberry reveals the limits of human intervention and demonstrates plants’ agency in shaping their own environments. The Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks seeks to highlight histories like this one, unearthing the mutual influences of humans and the plant world on one another.
by Kari Traylor, JSTOR | Read more:
Images: Getty/Wikimedia Commons
What is the United States of America Now?
The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is ... so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.
It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good while standing up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.
The US is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP, right-to-life terrorists and Planned Parenthood security guards. It is Chevron and Exxon and one of the world’s first environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892, and the thousands of environmental, environmental justice, and climate groups right now. It is its contradictions, its conflicts.
It is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners, a population larger than 12 US states (which has long made me think that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation).
It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr, who was shot on a balcony of a motel in Memphis.
King is said to have come out to the balcony of the motel to greet jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of the song Precious Lord King loved. It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.
At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.
Currently, one third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, leaving an open wound visible in aerial photographs, its rose garden built up by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over, its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome gladiatorial arena in which toxic masculinity would fight itself.
But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote, and it’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners and former prisoners who are not part of that voting population.
It is the land itself from the maple and birch forests of the north-east to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with a lot of prairie, swamp and desert in between. That land was here in various configuration not for millions but billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US has ceased to exist, because cease it must at some point, and so must the human race.
The US is the desert tortoises who have been ambling through versions of the Mojave deserts of what is now California, Nevada and Arizona for 60m years and the people who strove to create the protected lands in which they may survive a little longer.
But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and there is nothing that Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.
Earlier this year, I was struck by the valiant, idealistic, dedicated young people who one after the other came into the spotlight. We only came to know Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, through their willingness to face death for what they believed in and who they believed matters.
But another young person came into power on New Year’s Day of 2026, while they were still alive, Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds and the status quo and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who’s been accused of sexual assault), to become mayor – the city’s first Muslim mayor – of this country’s biggest city as he spoke up for the all the marginalized and minority populations that make New York City what it is.
On 8 February, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage and put on a halftime show that was a celebration – in Spanish – of his beloved Puerto Rico, of the musical traditions that converge in his songs, and the huge spectacle he staged was striking for the range of its performers, and for his insistence on his version of America, a generous joyous multilingualone, an America in which anyone can dance with anyone else.
Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, daughter of a refugee from China, won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance whose freedom and joy cast a shadow over virtually all other figure skating before her victory on 19 February. [...]
These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on 28 March, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in sheer size as well as in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and these performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.
I do not believe that Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it, and what comes after has to include consequences for the criminals and a massive clean-up operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must go ahead by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.
[ed. For a more optimistic view: America Should Love Itself Again (Common Reader).]
It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good while standing up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.
It is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners, a population larger than 12 US states (which has long made me think that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation).
It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr, who was shot on a balcony of a motel in Memphis.
King is said to have come out to the balcony of the motel to greet jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of the song Precious Lord King loved. It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.
At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.
Currently, one third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, leaving an open wound visible in aerial photographs, its rose garden built up by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over, its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome gladiatorial arena in which toxic masculinity would fight itself.
But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote, and it’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners and former prisoners who are not part of that voting population.
It is the land itself from the maple and birch forests of the north-east to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with a lot of prairie, swamp and desert in between. That land was here in various configuration not for millions but billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US has ceased to exist, because cease it must at some point, and so must the human race.
The US is the desert tortoises who have been ambling through versions of the Mojave deserts of what is now California, Nevada and Arizona for 60m years and the people who strove to create the protected lands in which they may survive a little longer.
But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and there is nothing that Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.
Earlier this year, I was struck by the valiant, idealistic, dedicated young people who one after the other came into the spotlight. We only came to know Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, through their willingness to face death for what they believed in and who they believed matters.
But another young person came into power on New Year’s Day of 2026, while they were still alive, Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds and the status quo and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who’s been accused of sexual assault), to become mayor – the city’s first Muslim mayor – of this country’s biggest city as he spoke up for the all the marginalized and minority populations that make New York City what it is.
On 8 February, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage and put on a halftime show that was a celebration – in Spanish – of his beloved Puerto Rico, of the musical traditions that converge in his songs, and the huge spectacle he staged was striking for the range of its performers, and for his insistence on his version of America, a generous joyous multilingualone, an America in which anyone can dance with anyone else.
Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, daughter of a refugee from China, won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance whose freedom and joy cast a shadow over virtually all other figure skating before her victory on 19 February. [...]
These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on 28 March, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in sheer size as well as in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and these performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.
I do not believe that Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it, and what comes after has to include consequences for the criminals and a massive clean-up operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must go ahead by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.
by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Mario Tama/Getty
Todd Snider
[ed. See also: Ottoman Turks, American Male. Have a safe and happy 4th everyone.]
Conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
Gay bashin', black fearin'
Poor fightin', tree killin'
Regional leaders of sales
Frat housin', keg tappin'
Shirt tuckin', back slappin'
Haters of hippies like me
Tree huggin', peace lovin'
Pot smokin', porn watchin'
Lazy-ass hippies like me
Tree huggin', love makin'
Pro choicin', gay weddin'
Widespread diggin' hippies like me
Skin color-blinded
Conspiracy-minded
Protestors of corporate greed
We who have nothing and most likely will 'til
We all wind up locked up in jails
By conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
Conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
Gay bashin', black fearin'
Poor fightin', tree killin'
Regional leaders of sales
Frat housin', keg tappin'
Shirt tuckin', back slappin'
Haters of hippies like me
Tree huggin', peace lovin'
Pot smokin', porn watchin'
Lazy-ass hippies like me
Tree huggin', love makin'
Pro choicin', gay weddin'
Widespread diggin' hippies like me
Skin color-blinded
Conspiracy-minded
Protestors of corporate greed
We who have nothing and most likely will 'til
We all wind up locked up in jails
By conservative Christian, right wing Republican
Straight, white, American males
[...more]
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