Consider the Sister

Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.

Early on Saturday mornings, Amy Wallace would be yanked out of bed by her big brother, David. He was determined not to miss the start of the cartoons. At their home in Urbana, Illinois, the siblings situated themselves in front of the television and waited for the color bars to turn to The Road Runner Show, David eager, impatient, full of energy. Eventually, he would splay out on the carpet and Amy would sit behind him on the couch. More than 50 years later, Amy is still haunted by the sensory experience of that couch. It was pea-green and scratchy, yet she dutifully—and gladly—sat there as part of their sibling ritual.

 

Their mother, Sally Foster, described the scene this way: Amy spent her mornings watching David watch TV. But that’s not quite right.

“Watching television with David was an interactive experience,” Amy says. The two children weren’t content with what was on offer. Often, they would invent new dialogue for the characters extemporaneously.

“That was one of our hobbies,” Amy says. “We just thought, whoever’s writing this, it could be so much more interesting.”

David identified as the Road Runner and told Amy she was his Wile E. Coyote. He had the speed, the tools—and the upper hand. She was left with only her wits to try to keep up with him, but of course she never could. The lot of Wile E. Coyote was to follow the Road Runner hopelessly, never to catch up.

It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her. It’s been nearly 20 years since his death by suicide, and while the legend of DFW the writer has grown, the story of the human has been flattened to the stereotype of a tortured artist who came to a tragic end.

Amy, who lives in Arizona, is now the only living member of the nuclear Foster Wallace family. James (a philosophy professor) and Sally (an English professor) moved from Urbana to Arizona in 2012. James died in July 2019, and Sally died just over a year later in July 2020.

The grief over the deaths of her brother and then her parents is a constant companion.

“Nearly every morning of my life, as a fully grown adult woman living a full adult life, I wake up and I’m back in my childhood bed,” she says. “My mom is making breakfast and David’s in his bedroom and it’s so vivid. Then I open my eyes and it’s like nope, that’s all gone.”

Amy’s own children are adults now. She says her eldest is now a writer as well. (Amy asked me not to describe them, to preserve their privacy.) They were old enough to have strong memories of their uncle, and they bear a strong physical resemblance to him. David’s death was a very public wound for a mostly private family.

In 2001, David published a piece of fiction about a man grappling with suicidal ideation. He wrote, in part: “I apologized for whatever pain my suicide and the fraudulence and/or inability to love that had precipitated it might cause” his family. To some extent, he foresaw the shadow he would cast.

Years after David’s death, their father asked Amy to write a book about him from her perspective. He asked her to make sure the people who raised him got a say in his memory, too.

Amy decided a book would be too invasive—but she came to understand that she had a responsibility to talk about her brother beyond the legend that was partly of his own fashioning. She has given radio interviews, appeared at a conference dedicated to David’s work, and has spoken to me at length about the person who teased her, protected her, alienated and embraced her, and eventually broke her heart.

“I do feel that it's kind of incumbent on me to let the world know what a very normal person he was,” Amy says. “And that he was mostly happy, generous—and extremely funny.”

*****

Amy has a knack for making you feel, very quickly, like you too knew this brotherly version of David, knew the sincerity of his often oddly shaped affection.

My own connection with Amy came as the result of my insecurity around David’s work, not the sort of deep, life-defining fanaticism that one often encounters in the cult of DFW. Generally, I have viewed his work the way I have at times felt about Salvador Dalí—we’re all humans with the same general set of blood, guts, and brains. How could these people pull so much more out of themselves than the rest of us?

In many ways, this envy has stood in the way of my own appreciation of David’s writing. It’s great, profound, and will never be repeated. But how did he know so many words? What’s the deal with that syntax? Why do I write in plain, gray English while his work hits my eyes like Technicolor?

In April 2025, I emailed Amy out of the blue. Here is what I said:

“I'm hoping that you might be willing to be interviewed about your mother and let me learn more about her life and work. I have always had a hard time getting past my envy of your brother's vocabulary, and I felt a little bit better about it when I read a bit about Sally.

“So, naturally, my curiosity turned to her and her life. I'd love to write a real feature piece about Sally.”

Amy and I spoke at length over the following weeks. She suggested I buy a copy of her mother’s textbook Practically Painless English. I read it on the subway and felt immediate clarity upon reading just the first few pages.

In a section about verbs, Sally laid out an exercise:

1. Please circle each verb you find in these sentences.
2. The fox moaned and groaned when the chicken escaped.
3. I baked a cake for Mongo, but he turned bright green after he ate some.
4.George is upset because his father thinks he lied about the cherry tree.
5. Florence sneaked out of her room, tiptoed down the stairs, and dynamited the refrigerator.
6. The big fish kept out of trouble because he shut his mouth and stayed in school.

Practically Painless English isn’t just a textbook for people who want to learn to speak proper English. It’s a guide to using language with personality. If Strunk and White offer a guide to frictionless diction, Practically Painless English demonstrates how to stand out within a traditional framework. I probably would have been a much more interesting writer if I’d been raised by a parent who felt so strongly that storytelling should contain detail, whimsy, and flair. Then I realized that Amy was raised by just such a parent, too.

Eventually, months after our first conversation, I reached out to Amy again. This time my curiosity turned to her and her life. I asked her if I could write a real feature piece about her.

In the course of subjecting Amy to many, many hours of conversations about herself, her brother, and my own writing life and hangups about it, I found someone who is as entertaining as she is earnest. Scrutiny around David’s upbringing is inevitably scrutiny of her own upbringing, though hardly any of those critics care to understand her experience—or even know she exists.

She carries that family trait of delighting in absurdity. She hasn’t deified or demonized her brother despite the persistent desire in the literary community to do one or the other. One afternoon, as she was detailing how David watched television, she described just how long she had to sit with him on Saturday mornings before the start of their cartoons.

“Well, no one ever accused your brother of brevity,” I responded, anxiously. I wondered where the line was between respecting the memory of someone and treating them like they were a real person whose peculiarities were worthy of note.

“Or patience,” she said, upping the ante and putting me at ease. “He bounced off the walls in those days.”

One of the ways that Amy protects her brother’s humanity is by showing how his anxieties seemed to travel through a prism and shoot out at unexpected angles. The gloomier results are well known, but there could be humor, too, in the fears provoked not just by his anxiety but by his own ethic of deep care.

She recalls David had an obsession with sharks—which she believes stems from a book called Shark Attack that lived in the bathroom they shared for a portion of their childhood.

Many years later, Amy went to study abroad in Australia. The water was warm there, and she was enjoying herself at the beach regularly after spending her childhood in the landlocked Midwest. Back in the United States, though, David kept thinking about the sharks. He sent letters reminding his sister how to spot them in open water. There was money, too, because he was distraught at the idea that she might wind up short on resources while out on her own. Amy was fine, but David was determined to protect her, in his own way.

“He’d sign off his letters to me with a picture of a shark fin,” Amy says. “Then there’d be a little stick figure. Oh my god, it was great.”

Amy says the last time she and her family spent significant time with David was on a vacation to Stinson Beach.

“When any of us were in the water, he'd be standing on the deck with binoculars scanning for fins,” she recalls. “He was so terrified of sharks and he didn't stick a toe in the water.”

Before he was the most revered and studied contemporary American author, DFW was just someone’s older brother. Amy didn’t see him as DFW, the public character. But she can talk at length about the person she grew up with.

by Lindsey Adler, The Small Bow | Read more:
Image: Road Runner Show/dreamstime

Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth

Previous generations inherited relatively stable systems for determining what was real: newspapers, universities, scientific institutions, courts, and professional journalism. Those systems were imperfect and often exclusionary, but they provided shared reference points. Gen Z has inherited something fundamentally different: an information ecosystem where truth is increasingly shaped socially, emotionally, algorithmically, and now synthetically through AI.

As journalist Maria Ressa warned in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy."

But Gen Z may already be building something to replace what's been lost. Not institutions. Not gatekeepers. A distributed, socially negotiated sense of who earns the right to be believed. They're not abandoning truth. They're auditing who gets to deliver it.

That verdict, built by millions of young people navigating this system together, is already in.

by Steven Rosenbaum, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Darrell Jackson; Getty Images

Something Big Is Happening on Campus

I get to visit about two dozen campuses every year, and I meet at least a few teachers like Montás at each of them. I can generally spot the ones with the pure disease, the ones with that raw teacher-fire. Usually, they had some experience early in life when they fell in love with learning. This love then became a ruling passion, and now they fervently seek to share it with their students in the classroom. You can find them at Ivies and at community colleges, at big state schools and small liberal-arts colleges. They are a part of what’s going right in American higher education, the part that critics (like me) don’t write about enough.

These teachers talk of their vocation in lofty terms. They are not there merely to download information into students’ brains, or to steer them toward that job at McKinsey. True humanistic study, they believe, has the power to change lives. They want to walk with students through the biggest questions: Who am I? What might I become? What is this world I find myself in? If you don’t ask yourself these questions, these teachers say, you risk wasting your life on trivial pursuits, following the conventional path, doing what others want you to do instead of what is truly in your nature. If society doesn’t offer this kind of deep humanistic education, where people learn to seek truth and cultivate a capacity for citizenship, then democracy begins to crumble. “What I’m giving the students is tools for a life of freedom,” Montás says.

These great teachers are the latest inheritors of the humanist tradition. Humanism is a worldview based on an accurate conception of human nature—that we are both deeply broken and wonderfully made. At our worst, humans are capable of cruelty, fascism, and barbarism that no other mammal can match. On the other hand, deep inside of us we possess fundamental longings for beauty, justice, love, and truth, which, when cultivated, can produce spiritual values and human accomplishments breathtaking in their scope.

Life is essentially a battle between our noblest aspirations and our natural egotism. Humanistic education prepares people for this struggle. Yes, schooling also has a practical purpose—to help students make a living and contribute to the economy. But that practical training works best when it is enmeshed within the larger process of forming a fully functioning grown-up—a person armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, force of character, and a thorough familiarity with the spiritual heritage of our civilization. Preprofessional education treats people solely as economic animals; humanistic education also treats them as social and moral animals.

Humanistic teachers do this by ushering students into the Great Conversation—the debate, stretching back centuries, that constitutes the best of what wise people have thought and expressed. These teachers help students encounter real human beings facing the vital challenges of life: Socrates confronting death, Sun Tzu on how to manage conflict, Dante in love, Zadie Smith on living in the boundary between different identities. The Great Conversation represents each generation’s attempt to navigate the dialectics of life, the tension between autonomy and belonging, freedom and order, intimacy and solitude, diversity and cohesion, achievement and equality. The Great Conversation never ends, because there are no final answers to these tensions, just a temporary balance that works for a particular person or culture in a particular context.

By introducing students to rival traditions of thought—Stoicism, Catholic social teaching, conservatism, critical race theory—colleges help students cultivate the beliefs, worldviews, and philosophies that will help them answer the elemental question of adulthood: What should I do next? By introducing them to history and literature, colleges arm students with wisdom about how humans operate, which is handy knowledge to have. They offer them not only life options but also, more importantly, the ability to choose among them. “Any serious human problem is a hard problem,” Andrew Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia, told me. “The fundamental obligation of a humanities teacher is to try to develop in students an allergy to ideology and certainty. To acknowledge self-doubt.”

But humanistic education is no mere intellectual enterprise. Its primary purpose is not to produce learned people but good people. When teachers do their job, they arouse in their students not only a passion for learning but also a passion to lead a life of generosity and purpose. “The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting—no more—and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth,” Plutarch observed many centuries ago.

Teachers do this by making excellence attractive to the young—excellent lives, excellent ideas, excellent works of art, commerce, and science, and, above all, excellent ideals. The students who are captivated by these ideals find some cause to advance, some social problem to address, some business to start. When confronted by inspiring ideals, many students say: I care intensely about this, I want to orient my life around this. It’s not only their minds that have been refined but also their desires and ambitions. In a true humanistic education, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote, “the shaping of the will is thoroughly more important to man than the shaping of the intellect.”

Preprofessional education is individualistic and selfish. Such students learn to ask: How can I outcompete my peers and beat them up the ladder to success? In a humanistic program, by contrast, groups of people gather to form communities of truth, to reason together, to explore life together, to pool their desires and seek the common good.

I find that students flock to humanistic teachers who radiate a sense of urgency. They tell students: We are doing something important here. College is not just frat parties and internships; it’s potentially the most important four years of your life. You can emerge either an anesthetized drone or a person fully curious, fully committed, and fully alive.

I know this kind of education can have this effect because it is the education I got decades ago at the University of Chicago. I knew I could never be as learned as the professors I encountered, but their passion for large topics and great books seemed so impressive to me. I yearned with all my soul to understand the world as best I could, to embark on a lifelong journey of growth. Whatever my ample failings, that yearning, kindled in those classrooms with those books and those teachers, has never gone away. I stumbled unknowingly into a humanistic education, because it was the only college I got into, but I can tell you, it totally worked on me.

Today, the teachers I’m talking about tend to feel like dissidents within the academy, like they are doing something countercultural. That’s because at most schools, humanistic education has been pushed into the remote corners of academic life. It’s not that people woke up one morning and decided to renounce the humanistic ideal, it’s just that other goals popped up. It was easier to fundraise for them, easier to sell them to tuition-paying parents. The idea of forming students into the best version of themselves sort of got left behind. [...]

Mark Edmundson also grew up in a working-class family, in Medford, Massachusetts. He got into college, something no one else in his family had done, and told his father that he might study prelaw, because you could make a decent living as a lawyer. His father, who had barely graduated high school, “detonated,” Edmundson later recalled. You only go to college once, his father roared, you better study what genuinely interests you. The rich kids get to study what they want, and you are just as good as any rich kids.

Edmundson soon encountered Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself,” he wrote in his book, Why Teach? “They shone a light onto the world, and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too.” Edmundson now teaches poetry and literature at the University of Virginia.

“To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it might be,” Edmundson once told an audience of students. “In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.”

The forces arrayed against humanistic learning are many:

by David Brooks, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic: Source: Laurie Michaels/Bridgeman Images
[ed. Contrast this with someone (below), who believes that colleges should be modeled after OnlyFans, and that hyper-specialization ("edge" degrees where AI will supposedly be less adept) are the future. I know which curriculum I'd choose.]

V.I.P. Snorkel

When Kash Patel visited Hawa‘ii last summer, the FBI took pains to note the director was not on vacation, highlighting his walking tour of the bureau’s Honolulu field office and meetings with local law enforcement.

Left out of the FBI’s news releases was an exclusive excursion that Patel took days later when he participated in what government officials described as a “VIP snorkel” around the USS Arizona in an outing coordinated by the military. The sunken battleship entombs more than 900 sailors and Marines at Pearl Harbor.

The swim, revealed in government emails obtained by The Associated Press, comes to light amid criticism of Patel’s use of the FBI plane and his global travel, which have blurred professional responsibilities with leisure activities. The FBI did not disclose the snorkeling session or that Patel had returned to Hawai‘i for two days after his initial stopover on the island.

“It fits a pattern of Director Patel getting tangled up in unseemly distractions — this time at a site commemorating the second deadliest attack in U.S. history — instead of staying laser-focused on keeping Americans safe,” said Stacey Young, who founded Justice Connection, a network of former federal prosecutors and agents who advocate for the Department of Justice’s independence.

With few exceptions, snorkeling and diving are off-limits around the USS Arizona. The battleship, now a military cemetery reachable only by boat, has stood as one of the nation’s most hallowed sites since Japan bombed and sank it in 1941. Marine archaeologists and crews from the National Park Service make occasional dives at the memorial to survey the condition of the wreck. Other dives have been conducted to inter the remains of Arizona survivors who wanted to rest eternally with their former shipmates. [...]

Patel’s excursion was in August as he spent two days in Hawai‘i on his return to the United States from official visits to Australia and New Zealand. On his way to those countries, he stopped in Hawai‘i to visit the Honolulu field office. An FBI spokesman did not answer questions about the snorkeling session.

The FBI said in a statement that top regional commanders hosted Patel at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam “as they commonly do with US government officials on official travel.” The Pearl Harbor visit, the spokesman said, “was part of the Director’s public national security engagements last August with counterparts in New Zealand, Australia, our Honolulu Field Office, and the Department of War.” [...]

Beyond the snorkeling excursion, it is not clear what else Patel did during his second stop in Hawai‘i.

Flight tracking data for the Gulfstream G550 typically used by the FBI director show the jet remained on the island two nights during that stay before flying on to Las Vegas, Patel’s adopted hometown. The jet has a published range of about 7,700 miles (12,391 kilometers), meaning the plane would have needed to refuel somewhere between New Zealand and Washington.

The snorkeling session happened one day after Patel stopped in Wellington to open the FBI’s first standalone office in New Zealand. The visit sparked controversy after the AP revealed that Patel had gifted that country’s police and spy bosses inoperable 3D-printed replica pistols that were illegal to possess under local gun laws.

by Jim Mustian, Eric Tucker and Michael Biesecker, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Mengshin Lin/2024
[ed. Another Ka$h sighting, which seem to occur just about everywhere except at FBI headquarters. More bad tourist behavior (see below). He's lucky someone didn't throw a rock at his head.]

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m sitting here chatting with the great Bob Spitz, the biographer. He has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much, The Rolling Stones: The Biography. He has other very well-known books on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child, and more. Bob, welcome.

BOB SPITZ: My pleasure, Tyler. Nice to be with you.

COWEN: Did the Rolling Stones have a long apprenticeship period the way the Beatles did? It seems they didn’t. How did they become so great so quickly?

SPITZ: Actually, they did. They worked in a little club called the Crawdaddy Club, which was in Richmond, a suburb of London. They worked long and hard there. In fact, the first time, and I document this in the book, the first time they show up, only six kids show up. They’re despondent. They go and talk to the head of the club. He said, “Look, play as if there are 100 people there and next week, there will be 100 people.”

Next week, there was 100 people. They played as if there were 100. The next week, 200 came. They worked in that club for about six months. Then they went on the road. They played a lot of really crappy little places, the same way that the Beatles did. Perhaps not as long an apprenticeship, but they served their time pretty well.

COWEN: That seems quite short, those six months. You read about Paul McCartney. He writes songs when he’s age 14, age 16. Is there anything comparable in the Rolling Stones?

SPITZ: No, not really. The Stones never dreamed that they would write music. It was beyond them. They were blues singers. Their primary goal in life was to bring that rich catalog of Delta and Mississippi, and Chicago blues to the world. They did not care about writing songs at all. They saw themselves as authentic blues masters. It was only their young manager, Andrew Oldham, who insisted if they were going to go anywhere, if they were going to compete in the music world, the pop music world, they would have to write music. They gave it a try. This came maybe two years after they were already on the road.

On the sound of the Rolling Stones

COWEN: There’s something they added to the blues. If you were to put your finger on what that was, the secret to their sound, the blues plus X, what’s the X there?

SPITZ: Rock ‘n’ roll. The X is rock ‘n’ roll. They jacked it up. They hotwired the blues. They turned it into a sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley started that sound. Then the Stones really gave it extra power and ferocious guitar and gave us the sound that we now know as rock ‘n’ roll today.

COWEN: They also have some songs that are very good. You could say almost Country and Western music, say, circa 1968. There’s some other element musically other than just rocking that they’re adding all along.

SPITZ: Absolutely. They took the records that the American servicemen had left behind after World War II. They left thousands of records behind. The majority of them were Country and Western records. The Stones grew up, like the Beatles did too, loving Country and Western music, courtesy of the American servicemen.

COWEN: Viewed objectively, how good are their melodies, just as melodies? If you ask about the Beatles, here, there, and everywhere, that’s an A-double-plus melody. How do you rate the Stones?

SPITZ: I would rate them maybe a B minus. Their rock and roll melodies are spectacular. “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” these are melodies that I would put up against some of the Beatles’ better songs, but perhaps not as lush, not as romantic as the Beatles. Melodies in a different mode. [...]

On art colleges and rock ‘n’ roll

COWEN: Here’s a sentence from you: “The nascent British rock ‘n’ roll movement was born in art colleges.” Please explain.

SPITZ: Oh, well, art colleges, we don’t have them here, but they are a foundation of UK education. There is an 11-plus test that is given to every student when they’re 11 years old, and it really determines whether or not they’re going to go on to university or they’re going to go to a vocational school. In those early days, a vocational school meant that you’d wind up working in a factory. You’d wind up working as a clerk for the railroad. You’d take on one of those jobs.

Art schools came into being, and this was a repository for people who had talent but didn’t know what to do with it and weren’t that academic. Art schools sprang up in almost every community in the UK. We have people like Jimmy Page coming out of art school, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, all the great rock ‘n’ roll—

COWEN: John Lennon, also, right?

SPITZ: John Lennon, absolutely, went to Liverpool College of Art. It was an incubator for the arts, but also for rock ‘n’ roll because people brought their instruments to school, and they would play in the cloak rooms. That’s where they really formed bands and learned how to play with other musicians. The art school movement really gave us that whole British rock ‘n’ roll thing to this very day. Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine came out of it. Jarvis Cocker came out of art schools. They’re still thriving in the UK, and they’re still giving us new, innovative music. [...]

COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?

SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.

He has served as the Rolling Stones’ manager, bringing all of his experience from the London School of Economics since 1967. He’s negotiated all of the recording contracts, their publishing contracts. Every tour that comes along, he negotiates with the promoters. Every date he oversees, he designs the stage, and he invests the Stones’ money. So remarkable that this guy, a London School of Economics dropout, let’s call him that, has done so well for the rest of the band. [...]

COWEN: Let’s say we put you in charge of social welfare. Was it good that the Beatles split up when they did? I mean for the world, not for them.

SPITZ: Perhaps it was. I always felt that a lot of people run out of steam after three or four albums. If you look at Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Van Morrison and The Who and maybe even The Rolling Stones, after a couple years, after maybe four or five albums, they start trying to duplicate themselves. The Beatles gave us everything they had, and then they stopped. We have 230-some songs, perhaps the most remarkable songbook, aside from Hammerstein and Rodgers, that we know of from the 1900s on. The Beatles songbook I would put up against anybody’s. I think maybe if they had stayed together, they might have lost some of that spark.

COWEN: Think how many more George songs we got from this split, or Paul songs for that matter.

SPITZ: Absolutely right. George, toward the end, George really came into his own. Even after, in his solo career, we got some real gems out of George. I think it took him a little longer. More than that, I think he learned how to step out of the Lennon-McCartney shadow and stand on his own two feet.

COWEN: What did you learn jamming with Paul McCartney?

SPITZ: Boy, that was an experience.

COWEN: What year is this, just for context?

SPITZ: 1997. The New York Times Magazine sent me to the UK right after Paul was knighted to talk to him about that and give me a few of his memories of John Lennon. We were in Hastings in his house. It was a strange experience because I expected Paul McCartney to have an expensive house. It was really this tiny two-and-a-half, three-bedroom cottage. I said, “Do you actually live here?” He said, “I do.” I said, “But you have five children. You have three bedrooms.” He said, “Linda said that we all need to live on top of one another. That’s what we do. We are a family here.”

As I was leaving, he said, “Hey, you’re a musician, right? Want to see the studio?” Of course, that was like catnip to a guy like me. We went downstairs, and he shows me. It was a room no longer than say my dining room in New York City, but there were all the instruments from Abbey Road that he had, as well as Bill Black’s bass. Bill Black was Elvis Presley’s bass player. Paul had bought all these instruments and maintained them.

He said, “Sit down.” I said, “Sit down?” Paul sat down at the piano, and he nodded me into a guitar. What did we play? We played a few Beatles songs. It was frightening. I played with some great musicians before, but when you see Paul McCartney nodding you into a song, it’s a different feeling altogether, believe me.

COWEN: He was good?

SPITZ: Was he good? Oh, yes. I would say he was good. Then I let him sing “Maybe I’m Amazed” by himself on the piano. That was freakish, having a private audience in a tiny room. Never experienced anything like that before. [...]

On Robert Caro

COWEN: What is Robert Caro like?

SPITZ: Robert Caro is the guy I look up to whenever it comes to writing biographies. That man has a way with words that has often intrigued me and humbled me. I was at a party one time, and a guy came over and said, “I hear you’re writing a book about Ronald Reagan.” There were about 150 people in this party. I said, “I am.” He said, “Could you talk to me about it a little?”

We sat down on the couch. I looked, and I saw over the man’s shoulder, my wife was going, “It’s Robert Caro. It’s Robert Caro.” At which point, my semi-intelligent dialogue became bedab, bedab, bedab, bedab. He was an incredibly thoughtful man. He sent me a number of notes from time to time. He is the biographer’s biographer. I don’t know how he does it. A great read.

COWEN: Why doesn’t he do more in public? Is it a Bob Dylan kind of thing, or just he’s too busy writing and researching?

SPITZ: I think he’s too busy writing. This guy writes and researches around the clock. I have learned not to do that. From what I’ve gathered, he’s up to his eyeballs in work day and night. He lives to do that. That’s his process.

COWEN: Does he understand how much of a cult surrounds him since he’s not out in public much?

SPITZ: I think he does. When he’s out in public, people stop this guy on the street. He’s like a rock star. He gets a lot of letters from people, especially people who want to know if he’s ever going to finish that last installment of the Johnson biography. I expect we’re going to see that any day.

by Tyler Cowen and Bob Spitz, Conversations |  Read more:
Image: uncredited/Conversations with Tyler

Into the Maw

When Barack Obama took office, he faced the biggest combination of crisis and opportunity that any incoming president had since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1932 the Great Depression had ravaged the country and was only getting worse. Even as he prepared to move into the White House, a fresh wave of banking panic swept through the nation, and it was clear that if Roosevelt was to save American democracy, he needed to put forward a sweeping set of reforms, which is exactly what he did via two major rounds of policy initiatives in 1933 and 1935.

In 2008, Obama faced a similar crisis: The economy was in free fall, and the financial system was gripped by panic. Unemployment had not yet come anywhere close to Depression levels, but like FDR, Obama had the opportunity—even the mandate—to enact far-reaching reforms. Unfortunately, he did not use this opportunity. Faced with a shattering economic breakdown, Obama and his key advisers largely sought to restore the wobbly precrisis status quo, inaugurating a decade of economic stagnation and dislocation that culminated in the election of Donald Trump.

The story of Obama’s missed opportunity to fix the rot in the American economy is frequently noted by the left, but it is also the subject of two recent books written mainly by Obama administration insiders—A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions, by Reed Hundt, who worked on Obama’s transition team, and Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons, by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Henry Paulson (the former Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO who served as George W. Bush’s treasury secretary). The former is a brutal and devastating indictment of Obama’s strategic missteps as he confronted the crisis, while the latter attempts an apologia for the Bush-Obama crisis management strategy that inadvertently confirms Hundt’s key points. What both books show is that Obama and his administration burned up most of their political capital rescuing the banks from a crisis caused by their own mistakes, and they offer us a warning about doing the same thing again as we face yet another potentially disastrous recession.

As the winds of financial crisis gathered strength in late 2007, the key question faced by both policy-makers and those in the banking industry was what should be done about the supposedly too-big-to-fail firms. Several keystone institutions—the gigantic insurer AIG, the megabank Citigroup, the investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and many of the other big Wall Street players—were heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities that turned out to be stuffed with the financial equivalent of toxic waste, and it was clear that, left to their own fate, they would implode.

Worse, the wholesale funding market—the unregulated “shadow banking” system that provided the daily credit flows on which the whole global financial system depended—was experiencing a kind of bank run, and financiers could no longer get the loans necessary for their daily operations. Savvier firms like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase had already shorted (or made bets against) the housing market and so were able to defend themselves against a disaster centered there—but if any of the other big players went down, they were all too aware that they would likely go, too. After all, the counterparty for many of those shorts was the now-ailing AIG. If it failed, it would take down Goldman and probably most of the rest of Wall Street as well, since they were all so intertwined. Thus, without some kind of government rescue, the entire financial system would collapse.

Yet even if everyone agreed on the necessity of a rescue, there was much less agreement on the form it should take. This was the question that the economic advisers for both the president and the president-elect were grappling with in the last months of 2008. One option, which Paulson favored, was simply to buy up toxic mortgages in order to get them off the banks’ balance sheets. A more compelling option was the one favored by Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and soon to be Obama’s treasury secretary: He recommended “capital injections,” in which the government bought a whole bunch of bank stock—in other words, a partial nationalization—that would help strengthen the banks’ balance sheets and thus stabilize the financial system. The banks could then lend against the government’s fresh capital and further fortify themselves with more good assets to offset the bad ones.

For those financial companies in dire straits, the government would also have the option to simply buy them outright should their collapse threaten financial stability. The Federal Reserve had broad powers to buy up failing firms by declaring an emergency under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. In “unusual and exigent circumstances,” the Fed could use its money-creating authority to simply purchase a failing company. Once owned by the government, a problem firm could be prevented from going bankrupt, and there would be time to examine its books and either fix it up or isolate it from the rest of the market and let it collapse.

Paulson opposed Geithner’s plan on ideological grounds, saying that it was “socialistic” and “sounded un-American.” But as the crisis gathered strength and it became clear that asset purchases would not be enough to save the system, the “socialistic” options won out. In early September, Paulson directed the Treasury Department to take control of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (already partly backed by the state anyway), which were then teetering on the brink of collapse. A worried Bush informed Paulson that “we have to make it clear that what we are doing now is transitory, because otherwise it looks like nationalization.” But this caveat never came to pass; to this day, Fannie and Freddie are still owned by the government (and incidentally have turned a steady profit since 2012).

But Paulson refused to do the same thing for Lehman Brothers, which was nearing collapse a couple of weeks later. As Hundt writes, he maneuvered to prevent a Fed rescue and instructed the company to declare bankruptcy, thereby setting the stage for the largest bankruptcy in American history. This instantly caused market panic and put AIG on the brink of failure as well. As the markets tanked, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke threw caution to the wind, declared a Section 13(3) emergency, and rushed in with an $85 billion loan in return for almost 80 percent of AIG’s stock—making good old Uncle Sam the owner of the world’s largest insurance company. [...]

Regardless of whether the government should have purchased Lehman Brothers too, the issue with the bailouts of AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac was that they were wildly unpopular—but not because people were worried about the government becoming “socialistic.” What infuriated them was the unfairness: AIG blew itself up making stupid bets, and now the government was leaping to its rescue with $85 billion (later increased to $180 billion). And yet the Bush administration did little about the company’s executives, who had played such a crucial role in wrecking the American economy in the first place. Meanwhile, the people suffering from their atrocious decisions were not similarly bailed out; they continued to see their jobs disappear, their homes foreclosed on, and their pension funds devastated.

Paulson recognized this growing outrage, and so he turned to the Democratic-controlled Congress for additional powers and money—$700 billion in all—thereby pinning “the tail of responsibility on the Democratic donkey,” as Hundt puts it. The bill, to create something called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), was voted down by Congress the first time, but with Obama’s support as president-elect and more oversight and structural controls built into it, TARP passed the House and Senate the second time around, thus making it “the first and most significant decision” of Obama’s presidency, Hundt writes: one in which he “let Paulson pick his presidential priority” and “chose bank bailouts—euphemistically, stabilizing finance—as his top strategic goal.” [...]

Once in office, Obama only doubled down on Paulson’s agenda, nominating Geithner as his treasury secretary and turning the foreclosure policy over to him. The TARP bill included a sweeping grant of authority and an unspecified appropriation to pursue foreclosure relief—meaning interest rate reductions, payment reschedulings, principal reductions, and “other similar modifications.” Obama previously promised to pursue “cramdown,” a policy that would have allowed homeowners to write down their mortgage to the home’s assessed value during bankruptcy proceedings. But since real homeowner relief would have harmed the banks (by reducing the value of their mortgage assets), Geithner refused to include principal reductions in his foreclosure plan and made the program such a Kafkaesque nightmare that few participated in it. Those who did found themselves at the mercy of mortgage servicers who had direct financial incentives to foreclose, and that is exactly what they did: They proceeded to trick thousands of homeowners into foreclosure. While more and more Americans lost their homes, Geithner quietly and successfully lobbied Congress to stop cramdown altogether. Through it all, Obama did nothing—just as he did nothing when Geithner disobeyed a direct order to draw up plans to wind down Citigroup.

In Hundt’s interviews with administration officials, the logic of this choice is discussed explicitly. “The only problem was that there was $750 billion of negative equity in housing—the amount that mortgages exceeded the value of the houses,” says Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee. “For sure the banks couldn’t take $750 billion of losses and for sure the government wasn’t willing to give $750 billion in subsidies to underwater homeowners, to say nothing of the anger it would engender among non-underwater homeowners.” Christina Romer, the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, puts that figure higher but comes to a similar conclusion. “There was about $1 trillion of negative equity,” she tells Hundt, “and getting rid of it would have helped increase consumer spending and heal the economy. But for the government to just absorb it would have been very expensive.”

Thus, since the banks couldn’t handle these losses and the government was unwilling to do so, the Obama team decided to quietly shove them onto homeowners. This choice would result in about 10 million families being forced out of their homes through foreclosure or some other process—roughly one out of every six homeowners. These foreclosed properties would then become economic time bombs, since abandoned houses damage neighborhoods and the value of adjacent homes. The political side effects were also disastrous. As Hundt writes, “In swing states affected severely by the housing market downturn, the reduction of mortgage credit supply had five times the negative effect on votes for the presidential candidate of the incumbent party than the increase in the unemployment rate.” Eventually, Rust Belt states were the hardest hit. “Chicago had the highest rate of negative equity among large markets,” he writes. “The surrounding states proved fertile territory for Donald Trump’s campaign.” [...]

Obama’s advisers often explained many of his choices by invoking legal constraints, but there was no technical or legal reason that a more just and thoroughgoing overhaul of the financial sector, coupled with support for homeowners and the rest of the American people, couldn’t be done. The administration could have insisted that any financial company receiving government support must fire its top management, ban all bonus payments, end dividends and share buybacks, and break itself up into smaller pieces—and that any company that refused would be left to fend for itself. The Fed could also have nationalized any company whose failure posed the risk of taking down too many others with it, as it did with AIG. Directly owned companies could then have been restructured, their bad debts written off, and sold once they were sound again. This would have purged the bad debt from the system, allowed the Obama administration to actually help underwater homeowners, and reduced the power of the banking lobby, which hamstrung the administration in Congress at every turn. Hell, the government could have even hung on to some of the banks to give to the US Postal Service to set up a public option for banking.

Politics would have been an obstacle to this plan but not an insurmountable one. Obama could have insisted on stringent conditions for the TARP bill, given the fact that Democrats were providing most of the votes for its passage. “We could have forced more mortgage relief. We could have imposed tighter conditions on dividends or executive compensation,” Goolsbee admits to Hundt. Failing that, Obama could have simply bided his time until he took office. Bernanke at the Fed was a bigger obstacle, given that his term was to last until 2010, but Fed chairs are still susceptible to political pressure. For example, Obama could have threatened to publicly attack Bernanke’s policy if he didn’t go along—especially his backdoor lending programs, which he was very keen on keeping quiet. Obama could have driven the big banks into bankruptcy and forced the Fed to take action. Most obviously, he could have appointed reformers to the Federal Reserve’s governing board. Instead, he left two Fed seats open for the critical first year of his administration and renominated Bernanke when his term was up.

In all likelihood, the government would have ended up owning a good portion of the American financial system for a time, though it’s worth noting that then-FDIC head Sheila Bair dismisses the fears of a nationalization-induced panic. “I didn’t believe in a domino effect,” she tells Hundt. “If you have a controlled failure, the markets will adjust.” Whatever the case, while the Republican right would have howled bloody murder—just as it did over every Obama policy—the rest of the US electorate almost certainly would have been satisfied, so long as the bankers were made to pay and regular folks got a cut of the bailout money. And the financial system would have been much more stable and far safer in the end. What happened instead was a hideously unfair and economically disastrous mess. Obama spent most of his considerable political capital on defending a cabal of corrupt, rotten financiers who very nearly ruined the world economy. His party alienated millions of voters, who felt abandoned and betrayed by the Democrats, which ended up costing them thousands of seats in state and local government. Thus, when the 2016 presidential election rolled around, Obama’s successor could not even beat a tawdry game-show demagogue.

by Ryan Cooper, The Nation |  Read more:

Image: Mandel Ngan/Getty

[ed. Worth a revisit, I think, with the stock market continuing to hit new records every other week (for no obvious reasons). Incredibly, many people have forgotten the details and/or never really understood the cause and effect nature of bad policy decisions during the 2008 banking "crisis" (Chernobyl meltdown would be a more apt description). The fundamental issue being of course "moral hazard" ie., when institutions (and individuals) are encouraged to take excessive risks because there are no consequences - in this case, because the government will bail your ass out when things go south (too big to fail). This attitude now infects nearly every part of the economy not just banks: from hedge funds, to tech companies, healthcare, ag, -  nearly every major corporate sector. So this precedent has now become institutionalized. The first tell was when Obama nominated Larry Summers to be his treasury secretary, but the most egregious example has to be Hank Paulson's arrogant one-page request/demand that Congress approve... what, $700 billion? $900 billion? in bank bail-out money immediately, with no strings attached. Various versions of TARP then followed, mortgage holders got shafted, massive bonuses continued across Wall Street using taxpayer money, and almost no one was criminally charged. The Federal Reserve which is supposed to focus on two main responsibilities - fighting inflation and promoting job growth, now has a third unstated mission: propping up the stock market. So the system is now much worse than it was prevously. But, by virtue of carefully crafted post-presidential narratives emphasizing empathy, stability and technical proficiency, Obama is now considered an elder statesman who did the best he could.]

Critical Mass

Rick Beato Versus the NY Times

Fifteen days ago, the New York Times published its list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. Since then, all hell has broken loose in the music world. And in the last 48 hours, that Hades just got a lot hotter.

I’d been one of the 250 “music insiders” surveyed by the Times for the article—so the day after the list was published I shared my ballot here.

I was unhappy with the results, as were many other music fans. But that might have been the end of the story. Surveys are always a bit dodgy—but what can you do about it?

Then I took time to learn about the Times methodology and was even more dismayed. In fact, I was miffed.

I assumed that I was voting for the songwriters who would be included in the list. But I now see that the experts consulted by the Times only got to make nominations. The final 30 names were chosen by six New York Times music critics.

There never was a real vote. The Times got the results it wanted internally—the insiders made the final call. But the way they explained it to their readers was intentionally vague.

In small print, readers were told that industry experts “weighed in”—whatever that means.

Readers were invited to click on a link to learn “how we made the list.” But even here, the Times served up fuzzy language.

If you kept on reading, you eventually learned the truth. The Times took the verdict of the “experts” and then “ran it through a filter.” The survey was just a “starting point.” The actual top thirty was decided via a “conversation” among its internal team.

Huh?

The Times did share a few ballots, and even this small sample made clear how different the final list was from the survey of experts. That would be embarrassing for the Times under the best of circumstances, but especially so in the current environment—when that same newspaper has repeatedly expressed outrage about voter suppression and attempts to subvert democracy.

If the Times really believes in the importance of voting and standing by results, why doesn’t it just share the actual ballot count?

Even so, this all might have been forgotten. But last Friday, the Times made the mistake of releasing a video entitled “In Defense of the NYT ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List.”

Here members of the inside team came across as smug, maybe even contemptuous, in responding to music fans who reached out to them. At one juncture, a Times critic laughs at a comment from a reader—simply for saying that he went to the Berklee College of Music. Then he continues to chuckle and smirk as he reads the rest of the reader’s comment, before finally throwing it on the floor.

This music lover had made the mistake of defending Billy Joel. For a serious critic at the Times, that is apparently very funny. [...]

During the subsequent 72 hours, the backlash intensified. A fiery response from esteemed jazz pianist Brad Mehldau was ostensibly a defense of Billy Joel, but focused mostly on the problems with music criticism of this sort. He describes a music critic character type very similar to the one I warned against in my article:

He is a snob who wants to be hip, so he becomes a critic. He listens to music not because he loves music, but because of how it defines his understanding of himself, narcissistically.

But even this response was mild compared to Rick Beato’s take, which went live yesterday. Rick is a very smart guy with big ears and a deep understanding of music—much deeper than those Times insiders. And his words carry weight. By my measure, Beato has more influence than any music critic in the world right now, and when he says something, it gets attention.

Rick had already released a video about the Times songwriter list, and he rarely deals with the same issue a second time. “I don’t usually make videos back-to-back on the same topic,” he explains. But he was also irritated by the tone of the Times video and felt compelled to respond to it.

His rebuttal is going viral with a vengeance. It’s been up for less than a day, and already has ten times as many views as the original Times video.

For the most part, he just shares clips from the Times podcast—which are damaging enough—before asking in frustration: “You hear these guys competing for the worst take?” In his words, they come across as “the most pretentious, cork-sniffing smug people”—whose condescension is all the worse because they have “no background in music.”

Rick, I should add, is not just a pundit, but is also a very skilled guitarist, record producer, music educator, etc. He possesses real credentials—the same ones the Times critics lack—and not just opinions.

But did he go too far?

The people watching his video clearly don’t think so. It already has 10,000+ comments—that’s more responses than the original Times article received. And they are brutal.

That first comment has almost 8,000 likes. As I said above, Hades is getting hotter—especially that level of Dante’s Inferno reserved for music critics.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:
Images: NYT/YouTube

[ed. No Paul McCartney, Jimmy Webb, James Taylor... but Missy Elliot, Taylor Swift, Young Thug (?!), Babyface, Stephen Merrit, Romeo Santos, Outkast (?!), Lana Del Ray (?!), The Dream (who?), Bad Bunny, other greats...]

May 10, 2026

There were two very different celebrations in Russia and in Hungary yesterday.

Russia celebrated Victory Day, the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Most of the Allies honor Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, on May 8, the day in 1945 that jubilant celebrations broke out as news spread of the Nazis’ unconditional surrender in Reims, France, on May 7, 1945. The Russians celebrate victory over the Nazis on May 9, for by the time the Germans surrendered to the Soviets in Berlin, the time difference meant it was already May 9 in Moscow.

May 9 is an important national holiday in Russia, marked with parades and honoring of relatives who fought in the war. In 2005, when Russia was still embracing democratic nations, more than fifty world leaders attended the sixtieth anniversary of Victory Day, including President George W. Bush; the leaders of China, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Denmark; the secretary-general of the United Nations; and the president of the European Commission.

But for the past several years, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has used the event to demonstrate the nation’s military strength and to rally supporters behind him and the war in Ukraine. He has showcased troops and military hardware in a grand parade in Moscow’s Red Square.

This year, as Zahra Ullah of CNN reported, Putin followed his usual pattern of equating the troops fighting in Ukraine with those who fought in World War II. As he has often framed the war as a struggle against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), he claimed today’s soldiers for Russia are “standing up to an aggressive force armed and supported by the entire NATO bloc.”

But the similarities between past celebrations and yesterday’s ended there. This year, the parade was dramatically scaled back. The parade included four parade units, including some from North Korea, and there was no heavy military hardware. Instead, screens spread across Red Square showed pre-recorded videos of drones, air defense forces, and submarines that state media claimed were from the front lines.

Although foreign leaders have attended the event in the past, this year there were few. As Matthew Luxmoore noted in the Wall Street Journal, Russian allies Venezuela and Hungary have recently lost their pro-Russian leaders, and Russian ally Iran is at war with the U.S. China’s leader Xi Jinping attended last year but did not attend this year. Russian officials allowed few foreign reporters to cover the event and warned people there could be restrictions on texting and the internet “to ensure security during the festive events.”

Putin’s scaled-back celebration reflects fear of Ukrainian drone strikes, which are hitting deep inside Russia. It also reflects growing discontent over the war and its devastation of the economy, and anger at the increasing repression with which Putin is trying to control opposition.

As former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted in McFaul’s World, Putin’s war on Ukraine has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s war with Nazi Germany and has achieved none of the goals Putin set out for the conflict. He has not subjugated Ukraine and has not succeeded in regime change. He has not “demilitarized” Ukraine; indeed, Ukraine is more militarized than ever before and has become an important player in global weapons systems. And not only has Putin failed to stop NATO from expanding, but in response to his invasion of Ukraine, both Finland and Sweden have joined the defensive alliance.

Instead of achieving Putin’s goals, the war has killed or wounded more than 1.2 million Russian soldiers and eaten up the economy. As criticism of the regime has become more outspoken, the Kremlin has curbed access to the internet, not only exacerbating that criticism but also, as McFaul notes, making it harder for people to use mobile banking, order a taxi, or use other online services. Rumors are circulating that Putin is increasingly concerned for his own safety. Rather than walking to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to lay flowers as usual, yesterday he took an armored bus. [...]

In Hungary, a different kind of celebration was underway as Péter Magyar took the oath of office as prime minister after winning a landslide victory over Putin ally Viktor Orbán.

In his 16 years of rule, Orbán rejected the liberal democracy his country used to enjoy, saying that its emphasis on multiculturalism weakened the national culture while its insistence on human equality undermined traditional society by recognizing that women and LGBTQ people have the same rights as straight white men. The age of liberal democracy was over, he said, and a new age had begun.

In place of equality, Orbán advocated what he called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” “Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal,” he said in July 2018; “it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues—say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.”

Orbán focused on LBGTQ rights as a danger to “Western civilization.” Arguing the need to protect children, his party has made it impossible for transgender people to change their gender identification on legal documents and made it illegal to share with minors any content that can be interpreted as promoting an LBGTQ lifestyle. After Orbán put allies in charge of Hungarian universities, his government banned public funding for gender studies courses. According to his chief of staff: “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women.”

The American right wing championed Orbán, who called for the establishment of a global right wing to continue to work together to destroy liberal democracy and establish Christian democracy. Before Hungary’s April election, Trump not only repeatedly endorsed Orbán but also promised “to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian people ever need it.” Vice President J.D. Vance actually traveled to Hungary to campaign for Orbán.

But the Hungarian people overwhelmingly rejected Orbán and his party, giving Magyar’s party more than a two-thirds majority in parliament. This will give it the power to overturn not only the laws Orbán and his party passed, but also the changes Orbán made to entrench himself and his party in power permanently. Magyar promised to root out the corruption that has made Orbán and his cronies rich, to restore the rule of law and freedom of speech, and to repair Hungary’s ties with the European Union, which Orbán had frayed almost to the breaking point with his loyalty to Vladimir Putin.

In his inauguration speech, Magyar vowed to “serve my country, not rule over it.” He noted that the corrupt members of the outgoing government “stole from the pockets of Hungarians” and left behind a huge budget deficit and a broken healthcare system. He vowed accountability for those who plundered the country and broke its laws, and promised to rebuild the nation’s shattered checks and balances. He urged Hungarians always to criticize their leaders and hold them accountable.

“We inherited a country where politics deliberately pitted Hungarians against each other,” he said, and he explained how Orbán mobilized supporters with hatred and fear, poisoning “the collective psyche of an entire nation.” “The Hungarian state must never again do this to its own citizens,” he said. He vowed to heal the country: “We will once again learn to think of ourselves as one nation,” he promised. [...]

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Sunstones

For over a thousand years, historians thought the Viking "sunstone" was nothing more than a myth, until the ocean gave up its secret. The Norse sagas repeatedly referenced a mysterious object called a "sólarsteinn" or sunstone, a navigational tool so powerful that Viking sailors could locate the exact position of the sun even on the most overcast and cloudy days. For centuries, scholars debated whether this was real technology or simply folklore embellished over generations of retelling. Most assumed it was legend. They were wrong. 

In 2013, marine archaeologists excavating a British warship that sank near the Channel Islands in 1592 made a stunning discovery buried among the wreckage. Alongside navigational instruments including a pair of dividers and a slate, they found a rectangular chunk of translucent crystal. Testing confirmed it was Iceland spar, a remarkably pure form of calcite with extraordinary optical properties. The fact that it was found stored alongside other precision navigation tools was not a coincidence. 

Iceland spar possesses a property called birefringence, meaning it splits a single beam of light entering the crystal into two separate beams. When you hold the crystal up toward the sky and slowly rotate it, the two beams will vary in brightness independently until, at one specific angle of rotation, they become perfectly equal in intensity. That precise angle points directly toward the sun, regardless of whether the sun is visible to the naked eye. Cloud cover, fog, and even twilight conditions cannot defeat it. 

Researchers from the University of Rennes in France conducted extensive testing and published their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Their experiments demonstrated that Iceland spar could locate the sun's position with an accuracy of within one degree, even under completely overcast skies. For Viking navigators crossing the North Atlantic toward Iceland, Greenland, and eventually North America, this accuracy would have meant the difference between a successful voyage and sailing hopelessly off course into open ocean. The Viking Age spanned roughly 793 to 1066 AD, and during this period Norse sailors were completing oceanic crossings that would not be replicated by other European cultures for another 400 years. Historians had long puzzled over how they achieved such consistent navigational precision without magnetic compasses, which did not reach Europe until the 12th century. The sunstone appears to be a significant part of that answer. 

What makes the Channel Islands find especially compelling is that the 1592 shipwreck is far outside the traditional Viking era, suggesting that knowledge of this navigational technique survived and was still being used by European sailors centuries after the Viking Age officially ended. The crystal was not a relic or a curiosity on that ship. It was working equipment. 

via: SubRosa/X

Interview: Interesting Times

A Legendary Investor on How to Prevent America’s Coming ‘Heart Attack’

I feel that lately we’ve been having an “end of the American empire” moment.

In part, I think it’s the stalemated war in Iran. In part, it’s the strain that Donald Trump is putting on American alliances. And in part, I think, it’s a sense that our biggest rival, China, is sitting back, biding its time, and waiting for the collapse.

My guest this week has been on this beat for a while now, and he has a grand theory of history that predicts that America is headed for a fall. He’s kind of an unlikely Cassandra.

Ray Dalio built one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater Associates, from the ground up. But these days, he mostly wants to talk about our imperial decadence, and whether there’s anything we can do to pull the American empire back from the brink. [...]

Douthat: So people say. So you’re someone who spent your career making bets, and a substantial number of them have paid off over the last few decades. Lately, you have been arguing that the United States of America is maybe not such a good bet at the moment.

So if someone is looking at America right now, trying to decide, let’s say, whether to bet on the American empire as a dominant force in the 21st century, what are the big forces or factors that they should be looking at?

Dalio: I’d correct that. I’m not saying that America is a bad bet or a good bet. I’m just describing what’s going on. And what I learned through my roughly 50 years of investing is that many things that are important that happened to me didn’t happen in my lifetime before, but happened many times in history.

So I learned to study the last 500 years of history to find what caused the rises and declines of reserve currencies, their empires, and so on. And you see a pattern over and over again. There is such a thing as a big cycle, and the big cycle starts when there are new orders.

There are three types of orders. There’s a monetary order, a domestic political order, and an international world order. These are three big forces that evolve.

So on the first force, as we look at that monetary order, there’s a debt cycle. When debts rise relative to incomes, and debt service payments rise relative to incomes. For countries, for individuals —— That squeezes out spending. That’s a problem.

For example, the United States now spends about $7 trillion. It takes in about $5 trillion, so it spends about 40 percent more than it takes in. It’s been running those deficits for a while, so it has a debt that’s about six times its income, the amount that it takes in.
And you can see throughout history that that produces problems. It’s a very simple thing: The debts for a country work the same as the debts for an individual or a company — except the government can print money. [...]

But what that does is it also devalues money. So that’s the mechanics. That’s why there’s a long-term debt cycle, as well as short-term debt cycles and money cycles and economic cycles that take us from one recession to an overheating to another recession.

Related to that is the domestic political and social cycle that relates to the money part. And when you have very large wealth and values differences, big gaps in those ——

Douthat: Meaning, between rich and poor?

Dalio: Between rich and poor, and those with different values. And you get to the point where there are irreconcilable differences. Then you have political conflicts that are such that the system is at risk.

OK. I think we have the first cycle going on. I think we have the second cycle going on — the political left and right and their irreconcilable differences. We can get into those.

Douthat: How does the international aspect factor in?

Dalio: And then international is the same thing. Following a war, there is a dominant power, and the dominant power creates the new world order. The order means the system.

So that began in 1945.

Douthat: For us. The United States was the dominant power establishing that system.

Dalio: That’s right. And it established a system, which was largely modeled after the United States system in that it was meant to be representative. The United Nations, for example, was a multilateral world order. And so all different countries would operate and there was supposed to be a rule-based system.

But the problem with that is, without enforcement, it’s not going to be an effective system. It was an idealistic system and it was a beautiful system while it lasted, but we no longer have a multilateral rule-based system.

We have what existed prior to 1945 through most of history, and now you’re going to have geopolitical disagreements, such as even what is existing with Iran.

How are those disagreements resolved? You don’t take it to the World Court and get a verdict and get it enforced. It’s power that rules. [...]

Douthat: And again, just to emphasize what is distinctive about this moment relative to the past few decades, it’s the strength of the alignment on the other side?

Dalio: It’s the relative strength, and the breakdown of that order. In addition, there are big debtor-creditor relationships that enter into it. For example, when the United States runs large deficits, it has to borrow money. And that is very risky during periods of conflict. So are interdependencies.

In other words, in this world of greater risk, then you have to have self-sufficiency. Because history has taught us that you can be cut off. Either side can be cut off. [...]

Douthat: As an investor myself, I do want the investment advice. But as a pundit, a columnist — whatever I am — who’s trying to describe or anticipate reality, even accepting that we can’t know for sure, if there are these lessons from history, if there are these cycles that repeat, and we’re headed for a kind of bottoming out or reset, that maybe we bounce back from it, but I’m just trying to get a sense of what you think life looks like at the bottom of the cycle and whether it is a stagnation and a persistent unhappiness, or is it more like crisis and clashes in the streets kind of thing? Because the ’70s versus the ’30s seem like different examples. That’s all.

Dalio: I’ll give you my concerns. I think we have these big issues — the money issue, the political social issue domestically, and the international geopolitical issues. As I look at the clock, we’re going to come into the midterm elections and I think that the Republicans will probably lose the House. I think from that point on, you’re going to see an intensification of political and social conflict that’ll take place in that period, particularly between that election and the presidential election in 2028.

I worry that those can be irreconcilable differences. I don’t know how they will go down. I don’t know how the respect for rules and law and order and whatever will keep law and order.

I am concerned about, but I’m not predicting, broader-based violence. You could have broader-based violence. There are more guns in the United States than people [...]

Douthat: Tell me how you think the debt picture and the political and social picture interact, because it seems like if you ask people what they’re divided about right now, they don’t say interest payments on the national debt. They have a much longer list of things they’re divided about.

I’m just curious: Interest payments go up, they crowd out other forms of investment. What is the economic force that interacts with social disarray here?

Dalio: They’re divided about who has what money and who gets it, which is very much related to the deficit.

I wrote my most recent book to explain how it works with 35 examples. It was called “How Countries Go Broke.” And I’ve been speaking to top levels of both the Democratic and the Republican Parties, and everybody agrees on those mechanics.

When I go down and I say to them, you’ve got to get to 3 percent of G.D.P. deficit through some mix of raising taxes, cutting spending and controlling interest rates — because that’s how you have to do it mechanically.

Then they say, Ray, you don’t understand, in order to be elected, I have to make at least one of two promises: “I will not raise your taxes” and “I will not cut your benefits.”

What the country’s divided on is, let’s say, the multibillionaire class and those who are struggling financially, the left and the right and populism, and so on — and that has a money component. So the deficits and the money part is a very big part of the social conflict part.

Douthat: So you’re talking to politicians about this, and they give you this spiel about how we can’t raise taxes and we can’t cut spending, I think the follow-up that they would say is that people experience those things as threats to opportunity or equality. That people who rely on Medicare and Social Security think this is the guarantee of equality, and people who rely on low taxes to build a business think this is the guarantee of opportunity.

If you are trying to sell those people on cutting deficits to 3 percent of G.D.P., what do you tell them you’re saving them from?

Dalio: You’re saving them from a financial crisis.

Douthat: And what happens in a financial crisis in the U.S.? What does that look like?

Dalio: The financial crisis will mean that the capacity to spend will be very limited. In other words, you can’t afford military expenses and social expenses, and so on. You’ll be very constrained. And because the demand won’t meet up with the supply, you’ll have interest rates going up, which will curtail borrowing, will hurt markets, and so on. And that will lead to the central banks trying to balance that by printing money, which will also devalue the money and create a stagflation kind of environment. [...]

It is like the plaque building up. It’s like you saying, “I haven’t had a heart attack yet.”

Douthat: “I feel OK.”

Dalio: And I can say: OK, I understand you haven’t had a heart attack yet. Can I show you the M.R.I. of this plaque building up in your system? And can you understand what I’m saying about that plaque, that you will have a heart attack if that plaque then starts to get there? Can you understand that? Can you understand where the numbers are, and where you are? Look, it’s your life. It’s your choices. Ask yourself, “Is that right or is that wrong?” That’s what you need to do for your own well-being.

Douthat: In your story, it sounds like if you combine that diagnosis with your sense — and my sense — of how the American political system currently works, that you’re going to get at least a mild version of the heart attack before you get change.

You said at the outset, you weren’t really betting against America, in spite of my podcaster’s framing. Are you optimistic that we could have, I guess you could call it, a minor heart attack and recover?

Dalio: I think we’re going to come into a period of greater disorder as there’s a confluence between the monetary part; the domestic, social and political part, where there’s irreconcilable differences; and the international world order part.

I would say then, I should bring in two other factors. One of them is acts of nature through history ——

Douthat: Pandemics.

Dalio: Droughts, floods and pandemics. And if you take what most people think about what’s happening to climate, it’s not a movement toward improvement, it’s a movement toward worsening. And then technology and A.I. [...]

We have to talk about technology and A.I. as it enters into this picture because it plays a role. And it does so in three ways. It can be a tremendous productivity enhancing result that can help to mitigate maybe a number of the debt problems — perhaps. We can get into this. I don’t think it’s going to come across at that speed. [...]

The second effect of that A.I. is it is now creating enormous wealth gaps. Those who are the beneficiaries of it are approaching “Who will be the first trillionaire?” The wealth gap thing has increased at great amounts, and it will replace a lot of jobs. So that’s No. 2 as a factor. Those gaps are an issue however we deal with them. They will have to be dealt with, and that’s going to become probably a political question, but that’s an issue.

And then No. 3 is that the technologies themselves can be used for harm — a lot of power. It could be used by other countries. It can be used by those who want to inflict harm. It could be used by those who want to steal money. It can be used for harm. [...]

For all these forces, these five forces, over the next five years it’ll be like going through a time warp. There will be huge changes over the next five years, with all of these forces coming together. And on the other side of that, it’ll be almost unrecognizable. It’ll be very different, and it’ll be a period of great change and great turbulence. [...]

Douthat: ... I guess what I’m interested in is, in your account of the rise and fall of empires — Spanish Empire, British Empire, the Dutch mini empire, and so on — you don’t have these case studies of a great power going through this cycle, hitting what you think of as the bottom, and then bouncing back and having another run. Or do you?

Because, look, as Americans, that’s our goal. If someone buys into your narrative, they would say: OK, but history isn’t determinist. We can make choices and we can have ourselves another cycle. Right?

Dalio: Yes. I think that’s possible, but here’s what has to happen — and history would suggest it: Plato talked about this cycle ——

Douthat: Yes.

Dalio: In “The Republic.” And he talked about the democracy and the problems with the democracy because the people don’t vote for what is good for them and the strength. About 60 percent of the American people have below a sixth-grade reading level, and there’s a problem with productivity, and so on. And they vote and they determine a lot.

The question is: How in a democracy can that happen? His view is that’s when you have, ideally, the benevolent despot — somebody who is going to take control, be strong and give for the country. In a sense, bring people together.

However that happens, what you need is a strong leader of the middle who recognizes essentially that the partisanship and the conflict is going to be a problem, but has the strength to get people and everything working in a way that it needs to work so that there can be a debt restructuring of some form, there can be an improvement in our education system, there can be the structural changes in efficiency.

by Ross Douthat and Ray Dalio, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: New York Times
[ed. If there's one benefit to having Trump in office (and only one that I can think of) it's that he's shown how fragile and ricketty our democratic system has become over the last fifty years. I'm beginning to think it might be time for a new approach. Not on board with Plato's "benevolent despot" idea, but some form of modified socialism, or maybe a Professional Managerial Board (grounded in the Constitution, and composed of experts in every field making scientific, economic, social, and other decisions), or something else altogether, idk. Because whatever we have now is not working.]