Metallica frontman James Hetfield gave a concert at the Las Vegas Sphere over the weekend, and kicked off with a few words about his band’s “agenda”:

Thanks for coming to celebrate with us. And I just gotta say: Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit. We are here to forget about all the outside shit. Metallica’s agenda is love, energy, and heavy music, baby!

On cue, every activist on the planet lined up to denounce the band. My own former podcast cohost Katie Halper called Hetfield a “loser and a coward” and had former Pink Floyd lead Roger Waters on to deploy the obligatory talking points that not only is Hetfield spineless, but Metallica sucks and always has (“never heard anything so appallingly out of tune in my life… can’t play a note”). Waters added:

“I’m apolitical” is not an option. Nobody can step away from this. You are being killed. Gaza is just the first bit. They’ll get to you. Don’t you worry. They’ll either enslave you or murder you. Because that’s that’s their ethos. This goes back, you know, 500 years, to the beginning of European white settler colonialism.

This all takes place on the heels of a related speech controversy, in which the stadium tour of Ed Sheeran hit an iceberg after people like New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft objected to warmup act Macklemore’s “Free Palestine” speech at MetLife stadium in New Jersey. Kraft and Sheeran promoters the Messina Group were on the wrong side of free speech culture to cancel the show, and now Waters, Katie, Jimmy Dore, and all the Metallica-bashers are just as bad, if not worse, for declaring “all art is political,” “art must take a side,” and “‘I’m apolitical’ is not an option.”

In the Marxist conception art either exists in service of revolution, or, like religion (which Marx dismissed as the “sigh of the oppressed creature”), it exists to narcotize and distract the masses on behalf of the colonialist/capitalist establishment. That’s why every wannabe activist in the world today is lining up to denounce Hetfield as a rich twerp who’s a “lifeless,” “soulless” tool of people like Sphere majority owner Steve Cohen.

I grew up reading and listening to artists who came down on both sides of this argument, but was always more persuaded by the ones who believed a) art spoke to something higher than politics, and b) the enemy of all good art is certainty. Chekhov felt an artist’s job wasn’t solving problems but “posing the question correctly,” Auden eulogized Yeats by saying, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” Pushkin said poets were born “not for gain, not for battles,” but “for inspiration, for sweet sounds and prayer,” Wilde said “all art is quite useless,” MacLeish said “A poem should not mean, but be,” and Keats said “we hate poetry that has a palpable design on us.”

What sane person looks back at any of these people and sees reactionary tools and political oppressors? No one. Since they all dedicated their lives to art, they obviously weren’t saying art is meaningless. All of them, and countless others from Baudelaire and Blake to Moe Howard and Louis Armstrong and Weird Al and a million others, saw their vocation as being about making people laugh or inspiring or lifting spirits, and they’re remembered for producing art that belongs to everyone, in a realm above politics.

Of course, to see that, you have to believe there’s something in life more important than politics:

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Actor John Leguizamo, breaking down while receiving the Career Achievement Award from the Critics Choice Association:

Leguizamo has been in a hundred movies and is fresh off a gift gig in the representation Olympics that was The Odyssey. He once boasted that voicing a dipshit sloth in the Ice Age series “got me a brownstone. It got me two extra homes, it got me a beautiful beachfront house in the Hamptons, it got me two pools!” and the next movie might buy “a helicopter” — and that was before he said that even if you “write like Shakespeare” but “look Latino,” the “odds are against you in Hollywood.” He’s whined that Spain’s Javier Bardem (thirty times the actor Leguizamo is) got parts in Before Night Falls and Being the Ricardos, railed against Antonio Banderas being cast in El Mariachi, and decried the choice of James Franco for the coveted role of Fidel Castro (“No more appropriation Hollywood… he ain’t Latino!”). He complained about Carlito’s Way co-star Al Pacino’s iconic performance in Scarface, moaned that John Turturro’s Jesus helped make The Big Lebowski comedy legend, and even blasted the great Eli Wallach, who once received a residual check for two cents (“I’m not a rich man”), for helping turn The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly into an international hit.

Forget that “long-dead British guy” Shakespeare can’t even stay in English departments in America (his portrait was pulled off the walls at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016), Leguizamo is the latest high-profile American male to demonstrate that crying and playing the victim is how a man gets things done now (he should be digitally removed from John Wick for the offense). This is especially true in Hollywood, where Boys Don’t Cry has no meaning, beyond of course being an Oscar-winning role for a woman.

Most men know crying as a real show of emotion is fine, encouraged even, but making shows of loss for material gain has always been considered despicable, from Coriolanus through Kipling (“If you can make one heap of all your winnings/And risk it on one turn at minute nine…”). There is such a thing as manly behavior in a positive sense, and Leguizamo embodies the increasingly common phenomenon of its complete absence in a technical specimen.

Who cares about one actor? No one. I do care about the adult world my sons will soon join. Take a more serious example, the “Cornell 7” case. If any of my boys were involved in a sordid episode like that I’d be horrified for a hundred reasons — because it’s undignified and shows a lack of respect for women, yourself, even your housemates to dance with a girl for five minutes before shopping for a third to play drunk wiener polo, because ketamine makes you dumb as a squirrel, because if you’re too high for sex, she probably is, too, because if you text “free pussy” about any woman you’ll deserve it if her brother shows up to throw you out a window, because no man worth admiring has ever agreed to be the fifth or sixth person to climb on a woman in a night, and so on.

At the same time, it’s outrageous that women have somehow won the right not be named in court papers or media reports after making accusations, or that no one in the intellectual world since Camille Paglia has suggested it’s wrong to allow people to selectively surrender “agency” and personal responsibility (two years ago Jane Doe was voluntarily “ten shots deep” and high as a kite, now she was “plied with alcohol and drugs”). The next generation of boys will have to compete with men and women in an era when “positive masculinity” has been devalued almost out of existence. That’s thanks in significant part to the craven wimphood of American men, who spent most of the last four decades smiling nervously and waving on the transformation of university humanities teaching into one big seminar on men as historical oppressors.

As a result, the taxonomy of male public figures is littered with absurd caricatures like Leguizamo. There are many types, each representing a different spineless strategy for how to compete in a world that tells them their sex is dangerous and superfluous:

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 09/30/26:

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 09/28/26:

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These people are just trolling now. My God. From a New York Times article titled, “I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think”:

What if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought? The evidence that supports this belief is thin at best… I don’t rely on prepared scripts when I teach, and few of the teachers I most admire do. Instead, I engage my seminar students through messy, searching conversation… If the only way that I could teach my courses was to sculpt written paragraphs, I’m not sure I would actually know the material. If I do not treat writing as essential for achieving thought, it is not clear why I should force my students to.

The latest diatribe in the Times against a once-uncontroversially wonderful human activity is written by Professor Joe Cruz, chair of the philosophy department at Williams College. He appears as an advocate for permitting students “the use of A.I. writing tools,” which he believes can take place “without undermining the next generation of thinkers.”

After all, Cruz reports, when he allowed students to use A.I. for their final essays within “specific guidelines” — a comical set of “restrictions” that boil down to “you shouldn’t let A.I. completely compose your essay” — the only notable result was that students performed better:

I was reassured by the results. In no case did I suspect that an A.I. had written a student’s paper in the substantive, objectionable way that we are all concerned about. The students were all too sharp on the ideas, too deft in reconfiguring their thoughts and extending them dynamically. Moreover, at least half of the class was more agile, more reflective and clearer during oral exams than they were in their papers.

I was aghast reading Cruz’s description of a beneficial use of A.I. The aforementioned rules at Williams don’t allow students to offer prompts like “come up with a topic” or “generate a thesis,” but do allow them to solicit “objections” from the machine. In other words, instead of writing for people, you can bounce your ideas off an A.I. This is like calling an erotic chat with a bot a form of sex.

It isn’t. The writing process does not work without the element of pain and rejection from a human audience. The whole idea is to put a part of yourself on paper and allow yourself to be vulnerable by showing your writing to another person. A negative reaction can be crushing, but it forces writers to confront the reality of how others view them. It might hurt the first time, or the first thousand times, but the human element is how you learn.

Replacing that process with an A.I. mirror that gives pillow criticism before helping students touch up “their” prose for presentation to an actual person is the ultimate in participation trophy-type infantilization. Worse, it inserts a machine — a deeply politicized, biased machine that teaches a conformist, submissive intellectual instinct — in the middle of a student’s thought process.

To the extent that a student taught this way ever learns writing (or as Cruz puts it, “archiving”), he or she will be like a healthy, ambulatory person trained to get through a Wal-Mart with the aid of a “mobility scooter.” The benefit of mobility scooters for Wal-Mart is obvious: they get everyone through the store. Functional shopping! Doing this with writing, though? It might be good for a school, in the sense that students will be able to present the appearance of literacy all the way through graduation, but it turns thinking — for college students — into a machine-aided process. Who imagines this will incentivize better thinking? Has it made fitter Wal-Mart shoppers?

I’m not anti-A.I. I think the technology is amazing, and people will be able to do wonderful things with it, already have in fact. What Cruz is arguing, though, is nuts. He goes far beyond saying A.I. can be a useful tool and makes the case that perhaps we shouldn’t teach young people to write, because writing may not be so inherently valuable. He reduces it to a technical process, useful for “cognitive scaffolding” and organizing, but not for learning, which takes place through “speaking, answering, and defending our ideas.”

He references Socrates, who once said that “only through conversation among minds… does reason yield real insight.” What we need more of, Cruz argues, is precisely this “messy” conversation, and if we spend less time writing, we may end up “spending less time isolated, gain more practice resolving disagreement and find ourselves a clearer sense of what we believe.”

This is suspiciously like the argument the Times went with earlier this week about romance, suggesting men and women don’t “need” to get married. It’s the same category error. Cruz argues we don’t need to teach young people a miraculous and distinctly human form of communication, when that’s not the point. We should want to give them this gift.

More insidiously, he’s saying A.I. helps people find “a clearer sense of what we believe,” when it does the opposite. Dialogue with an A.I. can trick impressionable minds into thinking they’ve arrived, on their own, at ideas that in fact have been advanced by a monstrous, invisible consensus-making machine. Ironically, learning to write well, which only takes place after a person learns to read well, is the best protection young people can get from being deceived in this way.

The part that blew my mind was the notion that writing is an antiseptic, solitary behavior, lacking benefits that students gain from dialogue. Just consider, Cruz says, what “we might gain if we practiced speaking more and carrying around the resources of mind through our own attention, memory and engagement with one another.” Right, because why would a chair of a philosophy department think writing is a form of “engagement with one another”?

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The New York Times just greeted readers with the following headline, as part of a series asking writers to “revisit previously published guest essays”:

Eleven years ago, on the occasion of the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges case legalizing gay marriage, the Times asked novelist Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld to write a “Welcome, everyone, to the right to marry!” column. She’s since divorced, so the paper is running her annotated downgrade of the institution. Note the loony image of two ink-blot humanoids crawling off the wedding cake, as if sniffling: We couldn’t do it! It’s too sad! You may or may not find it significant that the Times decided to revisist the merits of marriage at the same time it printed another rethinking-prior-assumptions piece called, “A Hospital Death Can Be a Good Death.”

The last few years have seen a spate of features and columns and TV segments describing “exhaustion” between the sexes. Headlines both in the media mainstream (tending to the anti-marriage position, i.e. “Women aren’t too picky to date. They Just don’t need men to feel fulfilled”) and on social media and YouTube (tending in the other direction, e.g. “Women actually NEED men. Here’s why”) have increasingly assumed a martial tone, with groups lining up to do battle over whether or not men and women need one another.

The UK paper i was typical in embracing the theme of “heterofatalism” as a left-right matter, in which misogynists are “fuming” that women are finally admitting they have “zero interest in living with a man who will mess up their scatter cushions, eat all their food, and try to shag their friends.” The tone of the new Times piece isn’t as political, but like so many of these pieces, it’s remarkably pessimistic and joyless. The word “love” does not even appear in the body of the 2015 piece, which was supposed to be the passionate pro-marital proclamation.

In the original article, Sittenfeld instead compared the decision to marry to the question of whether or not to bring a cardigan on a walk. The answer is yes, because when the temperature falls below 70 degrees, and “I didn’t bring a sweater, I usually wish I had.” (Yes, her husband is the cardigan in that metaphor.) In the annotated update, a changed Sittenfield asked: “Maybe, between perimenopause and climate change, I no longer need to bring a sweater?”

Her other observations about marriage included noting that it confers major financial and legal benefits, but also “less tangible” ones, like that “it’s reassuring to officially have an ally, or extra cushioning between the individual and a sometimes harsh world.” In other words, it’s better to have a husband than not, like that cardigan you take on a walk in middling weather.

That’s a remarkably grim endorsement not just of marriage, but romance. Nobody who’s been in love or even dreamed of it would think this way. The very idea has been a joke for as long as people have thought about the subject. In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick and Beatrice spend the early part of the play declaring themselves immune to romance, only to have a smitten Benedick declare in the end, “The world must be peopled!” In real life, love hits like a hurricane, and no one has time to ask the “need” question.

But you’ll constantly find the word in headlines about romance now: here and here and here and here and in a million other places. The issue of need was always obviated by the fact that men and women so clearly wanted to be together. No one needed to leave an instruction manual for audiences to understand the Katherine Ross-Dustin Hoffman ending in The Graduate — people have always instinctively wanted to ride off into the sunset in someone’s arms. For men and women, searching for and ultimately finding that person has always been one of the great joys in life, far above pragmatic questions, a thing for poets and artists to describe, not social scientists.

Are men and women really so “exhausted” now that they can’t be happy together without the glue of “need,” or are we just being lied to, again, by a cultural elite that demands that everyone else be as miserable as they are? It has to be the latter again, doesn’t it?

A good starting point with this question is a reminder that one of the dumbest media errors in modern memory started the ball rolling on a lot of these “do we really need love” articles:

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Racket readers should recall an interview published in this space in March with Dimitri Simes, a prominent Russian journalist who in August of 2024 became inveigled in one of the strangest and most disturbing speech cases of our times. While he and wife Anastasia Rurikova Simes were away, the FBI raided his Virginia home, seizing all his possessions but one. “My handgun,” Simes said. “They put it on my night table.”

A month later, Simes was indicted under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”), charged essentially with violating a sanctions regime by hosting a television program in Russian, in Russia. It was “a totally unprecedented use of the sanctions laws,” said Michel Paradis, one of several attorneys representing Simes. Paradis has worked on some of the more vexing national security cases of this era, including representation of Guantanamo Bay detainees. In the Simes case, Paradis — who’s written books about Dwight Eisenhower and the extraordinary flight over Tokyo by the “Doolittle Raiders” — finds a prosecution with few historical analogs. He and fellow Steptoe counsel Jason Wright will be part of today’s press conference.

While speech advocates have tended to focus on offenses that either took place before the second Trump presidency (e.g. the Twitter Files) or after his re-inauguration (the “jawboning” of Jimmy Kimmel, the recent revocation of White House passes for MS NOW, CNN, and Politico, cases involving defendants like Simes who’ve been pursued by both Democratic and Republican administrations have garnered little coverage. Simes today will give an update on his case, with lawyers Paradis and Wright on hand to answer legal questions. I’ll be moderating. You can participate in the event here.

Or, watch the event live on Substack, YouTube, and Twitter.

Below also is the press release issued by the Simes team:

DIMITRI SIMES, INDICTED JOURNALIST, TO HOST PRESS CONFERENCE FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 TO DISCUSS PRESS FREEDOMS & RUSSIA/U.S. RELATIONS

Moderated by Matt Taibbi

Dimitri Simes, the federally indicted, internationally celebrated journalist and political commentator, will speak with U.S. press in a virtual press conference from Moscow on Friday, September 25th, from 2:00 pm to 2:45 p.m. Eastern time.

Matt Taibbi, award winning author and journalist, will moderate the discussion. Simes will make a brief opening statement and then will have a moderated discussion with Taibbi. Journalists will be able to ask questions after the discussion.

Simes, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Russia, is under a federal indictment filed in the waning days of the Biden Administration. He and his wife’s Huntly, Virginia, home was raided on August 13, 2024, and their possessions, including valuable art and an icon that was a gift from Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, were seized by federal agents.

The Simeses were in Moscow at the time of the raid and were indicted in September 2024. They presumably will be arrested if they return to the U.S.

The accusation against Simes is simply that he openly works for Channel One, a Russian television channel that the U.S. government placed under economic sanctions in 2022.

Simes and his attorney will discuss the prosecution and the First Amendment freedoms he believes the Department of Justice violated by indicting him, as he puts it, “for the so-called crime of working as a legitimate journalist for a Russian television station.”

Simes, who is 78, helped to establish and served as president of the Washington-based think tank, the Center for the National Interest, and advised former Presidents Nixon and Reagan on security matters, particularly regarding the former Soviet Union. He also informally advised members of the Trump campaign and transition team prior to the President’s first taking office in 2016.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel who investigated alleged ties between the Russian government and the 2016 Trump campaign, carefully studied Simes’ role in the alleged “Russiagate” conspiracy, mentioning the journalist some 100 times. Simes was completely exonerated in the Mueller Report.

Simes has frequently been a contributor to major American media, including The New York Times and Washington Post. He has also appeared dozens of times as a guest on American television as an expert commentator.

Simes began working as a talk-show host in Moscow in 2018, for Russia’s Channel One, which was sanctioned by the Biden Administration in 2022.

The New York Times recently interviewed Dimitri Simes and has described Simes’ criminal case as a core test of the First Amendment. “This moment highlights the importance of the First Amendment protections against the government efforts to crack down on whatever it wants to call propaganda,” Stanford Law Professor Evelyn Douek told the Times, “because once you give that power to the government, you don’t get to choose which government gets to wield that power.”

The DOJ added money-laundering charges against Simes, apparently because he paid his substantial U.S. tax bill with earnings from Channel One. The indictment does not allege that Simes hid or misappropriated any money.

“It’s perfectly understandable that the Department of Justice would look askance at a Russian-owned business, whether in concrete or communications,” Simes says. “But attacking a journalist just trying to do his job is miles beyond what the First Amendment allows.”

He continued: “I value my American citizenship, and I revere the freedom of the press as historically championed by the United States. This indictment is an outrageous perversion of that freedom, and is an affront not only to me, but to anyone who embraces the free and open exchange of ideas among journalists and the public at large.”

“My work falls entirely within the realm of what our Constitution was designed to protect—vigorous, informed dialogue, including ideas contrary to the majority view. The Founders formulated no exception for ‘speech we don’t like.’”

Simes and his U.S. lawyer will address the details of the U.S. indictment; the progress of his defense against the DOJ case; and the general circumstances of his struggle to remain free and to be able to resume working in both countries and to visit with and consult his former colleagues in the U.S.

“Working for a foreign broadcaster should not make me an exile,” Simes added. “My journalism work is just another piece of American apple pie, if of a different flavor.”

DIMITRI SIMES PRESS CONFERENCE

What: Dimitri Simes, Russian/American television commentator, holds press conference about his federal indictment.

Who: Dimitri K. Simes, dual U.S./Russian citizen, Matt Taibbi, and his legal counsel, Michel Paradis and Jason Wright.

When: Friday, September 25th 2 p.m. Eastern Time

Where: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86984468429?pwd=Dv5t5VkEWB7YBcQEzF46chqdzSa9oH.1

Note: The Zoom feed will also concurrently stream on Substack, YouTube, and Twitter.

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 09/21/26:

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For at least a quarter-century, this Court has made clear that, even though a person has no “right” to a valuable governmental benefit, and even though the government may deny him the benefit for any number of reasons, there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely. It may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected interest, especially his interest in freedom of speech.

This doesn’t rate high on my personal list of First Amendment threats (I actually laughed the first time I heard about the “Gulf of America” story), but it’s clearly verboten and when Trump does things like this, it underscores that he doesn’t care about rules. If you want to show that you “cherish” the free press, do what every president does: mess with them legally.

From the New York Times:

CNN, MS NOW and Politico filed a legal challenge on Monday against President Trump’s order barring them from the White House grounds, the latest battle in a fight over journalistic independence instigated by the president. Four major TV networks said they were suspending their shared coverage of presidential events in response to the president’s action.

In yanking the White House credentials of outlets like CNN, Politico, and the artist formerly known as MSNBC, Donald Trump is clearly on the wrong side of the First Amendment. His Truth Social post spelled out his rationale, deeming “fake news” not protected speech:

I don’t have much sympathy for corporate outlets that whine about credentials, since not one would ever help independents get passes. Also, it’s not like you need tags to cover the White House. News outlets should be comfortable being on the outside, geographically and figuratively. They should be more upset about being denied FOIAs than White House passes. Listening to coverage, you’d think Jim Acosta losing his pass was the modern version of Bobby Seale gagged in court. It’s absurd.

However, it absolutely violates the First Amendment when the Executive gives benefits to some organizations, and denies others because of what they say. In that sense, Trump’s “Truth” made things worse by spelling out the reasons for his “assault” (limited to purveyors of “FAKE NEWS”). If he’d just found merely underhanded and unscrupulous ways of punishing disfavored networks, like every previous president, he’d be fine. Even Trump’s most ardent supporters by now have to face the fact that he has a unique talent for handing political opponents the perfect bludgeon to beat his head in. He also continues to make an ass of every legislator, lawyer, or reporter who spent the pre-2024 period defending him on speech grounds.

That pre-2024 period, however, is the reason this story (and most every other speech story connected to Trump) will be misreported. I’m giving a talk in Philadelphia later this year that will spell out the problem more, but reporting on this administration’s speech offenses is increasingly becoming the means of whitewashing worse history by other actors. This story is a gruesome example:

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Today on Get Lit we are finishing William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

In the second half of the novel we finally get to hear from Addie, and learn that she was a deeply neurotic and disturbed woman who deserved the terrible family she had and sent them on this quest out of pure malice. We also hear from Jewel’s real father, and the deranged math by which Addie “made it up” to Anse for having a son by another man. The odyssey reaches its tragic conclusion, with Darl going insane and getting sent to Jackson, the crippling of Cash, and the rape of Dewey Dell. However, in a surprise ending that is hard to make sense of, everything seems to work out for Anse, who continues his streak of always getting the help he doesn’t deserve.

We hope you have enjoyed spending time in this most gothic South. Faulkner has certainly shown readers the grotesque.

Next week, we will be doing the first two sections of Émile Zola’s Germinal, his masterpiece about striking coal miners in 1870’s France, which will give us an entirely different view of the depravity of poverty, something which seems to be becoming an unintended theme on this podcast.

— Brad Pearce

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Today on Get Lit we are finishing William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

In the second half of the novel we finally get to hear from Addie, and learn that she was a deeply neurotic and disturbed woman who deserved the terrible family she had and sent them on this quest out of pure malice. We also hear from Jewel’s real father, and the deranged math by which Addie “made it up” to Anse for having a son by another man. The odyssey reaches its tragic conclusion, with Darl going insane and getting sent to Jackson, the crippling of Cash, and the rape of Dewey Dell. However, in a surprise ending that is hard to make sense of, everything seems to work out for Anse, who continues his streak of always getting the help he doesn’t deserve.

We hope you have enjoyed spending time in this most gothic South. Faulkner has certainly shown readers the grotesque.

Join us at 4:30 PM ET today on:

Substack

Rumble

YouTube

You can also find us on X, @mtaibbi or @waywardrabbler. See you soon!

Next week, we will be doing the first two sections of Émile Zola’s Germinal, his masterpiece about striking coal miners in 1870’s France, which will give us an entirely different view of the depravity of poverty, something which seems to be becoming an unintended theme on this podcast.

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 09/10/26:

Listen to subscriber-only audio in your podcast app

Share the free versions of Racket To Go on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Racket readers may have noticed it’s quiet in here. There are three reasons, two temporary. I’ve been working on a book for two years and am in a home stretch. The second involves a breaking-type story that is a document-heavy slog, but coming.

The third is more complicated. Call it an existential pileup. When I entered journalism I filed as unimportant the fact that many of my heroes left warnings to avoid the profession. The most famous are known, like Hunter Thompson calling his profession a place where “thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs,” or Oscar Wilde saying, “journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.” Balzac said journalism was a “bottomless pit of iniquity and treachery and lies,” while Flaubert, whose Dictionary of Received Ideas was one of a handful of books I lugged around the world throughout my twenties, wrote in a letter to George Sand that the press is a “school of demoralization” that “dispenses with thinking.” H.L. Mencken, whom I idolized, said the newspaper was a “public organ for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

I laughed all this off once, and ignored a professor (one who’d been good to me and deserved my attention) who implored me to listen. Journalism is an easy target. Many of its harshest critics were cheerful practitioners, and even the most savage satires, like Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, were lovingly rendered. The best American writers revered the job, Mencken being the most obvious example. He talked of living the “life of kings,” even as he denounced newspapers as factories for mass-producing the opinions of Babbitts, jobholders, and other assorted Boobi Americani. When Thompson teed off on journalism, it was usually in the same breath as an admission there was no other life that allowed a person, in a snap, to go from being broke to abusing drugs in the Nevada desert on a stranger’s tab.

Now, I wonder.

A writer’s most unforgivable sin is being boring, which makes saying anything in this time period tough. Whether you’re reporting or commenting, the game is up once audiences are able to classify according to current political taxonomy. You can publish 50 words or 5000, but what you’re producing for most audiences is a compass heading, showing where you reside on a map in relation to Donald Trump. Maybe you wanted to say something else, but the compass reading is the only thing most people care about, so that’s how the thing will be compressed, summarized, and circulated.

It’s fine if you find talking about Donald Trump interesting, or if it’s important to you that neighbors and family receive an unambiguous signal about where you’d like to place yourself on the TrumpScape. You can put out a strong “against” signal in legacy media – that’s allowed – while almost any other strong statement is interpreted in the other direction.

For instance, we’ll soon come up on the ten-year anniversary of Peter Beinart’s 2017 “The Anti-anti Trump Right” column in The Atlantic, which defined most anything that isn’t explicit opposition to Trump as “evading the reality” and “opposing the people who oppose Trump.” Under that logic, just about anything could be dismissed as throat-clearing on the way to a refusal to Say The Required Things, about Trump. This half-clever formulation arrived in sync with a large chunk of American academia electing to purge the social sciences of “objective” pursuit of knowledge, or what one Literature professor derided as the act of “intentionally [dissociating] their work from the political and ideological exigencies of the time.”

If the challenge is to allow people to have identities independent of this scheme, then the task becomes creating work that resists taxonomy. If neither Norm Eisen nor Stephen Miller can classify a thing, and people still enjoy reading it, you’re on to something. The original thinking behind discussions about old books with Walter Kirn was to remind myself (and, hopefully, others) that we once read all sorts of things that were smart, funny, and provocative that had little to do with politics. Some things are timeless, which is why we loved them. In his recent essay, “Advocacy in Literary Studies,” Northwestern Professor Gary Saul Morson wrote:

As William Hazlitt pointed out in his essay “Why the Arts Are Not Progressive?” literature, unlike the hard sciences, does not progress. Aristotle’s Poetics is still relevant in a way that his physics is not. Any first-year physics student knows more physics than Aristotle, but no dramatist has surpassed Shakespeare. Novelists of the present have not created works as significant as War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

The good professor’s essay was part of a “State of Scholarship” report formulated and promoted by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University of St. Louis. Naturally, that report has already been denounced as a “diabolical” attack on academics who are “critical of configurations of power in the Trump years.” Call it anti-anti-Trump academia; even the simple observation that Anna Karenina will probably always be a great book offends someone’s current politics.

This is not to say that journalism is dead or that there isn’t a point to doing interviews and leaving a record of what this weird and unhappy time was about. However, I’m beginning to appreciate those old warnings.

You know you’re operating in a dysfunctional landscape when the most influential stories of a period are set in the distant past (Julius Caesar, The Crucible) or in a fantastical other-world (Gulliver’s Travels, Minority Report). Take The Master and Margarita. Mikhail Bulgakov knew by the mid-1930s he’d never see his characters in print, not in Stalin’s world. He wrote partly for a hypothetical future, and partly for his sanity. In a severe totalitarian landscape, he created a story about mortality, art, love, bravery, and other timeless questions, laughing all the way. People reading that book 50 years from now won’t have a clue he wrote it in the middle of the purges, which seems like the ultimate triumph over those purges.

Of course, that’s different. I bring it up only to ask for patience as I try to find new ways to do more prosaic traditional reporting or research on this site without being dull. I have ideas, including a project where I’m looking for academic escapees who might be interested in helping dig for a thing or two. Until then, please hang in, and don’t be shy about offering suggestions. If you want me to visit an event, I’m now more able to do that. I just don’t want to play the binary game. The whole country can’t be the same desert. Can’t we find new worlds to explore?

In the meantime, catch up on the “Get Lit” Book List:

See you next week!

Nine years ago I was assigned to write a story about Donald Trump and the 25th Amendment. I was given the numbers of mental health professionals ready to say Trump was crazy. It was not to be quickie commentary; I was sent on the road to follow the president. As he was during the campaign, Trump was bombastic, paranoid, unpredictable, and occasionally even seemed to see or hear things that weren’t there. However, before filing, I spoke with lawyers, including a Fordham professor who’d help draft the original 25th Amendment bill. A president could only be removed, he said, for “inability,” not for “policy and political differences, unpopularity, poor judgment, incompetence, laziness or impeachable conduct.”

Weeks later, in an MSNBC green room, a Democratic aide complained about the article. I asked: if he were a juror judging Trump in a gas station robbery, would he vote not guilty by reason of insanity? “That’s different,” he said. This was at a time when it was widely expected that Trump would eventually be impeached for Russiagate. I told the man he couldn’t have it both ways, that Trump couldn’t be both criminally responsible and crazy. His answer: “If anyone can do it, it’s Trump.”

After the declaration of a mistrial in the horrifying Massachusetts murder case involving Lindsay Clancy, what is there to say, except to note how wildly inconsistent we’ve become in measuring concepts like “capacity” and “responsibility.” We’re a culture that doesn’t forgive, but quickly excuses. I don’t know what it means, nor do I understand how this case became a such a rallying cry for — something? What, exactly? How can “mental defect” have a lobby? What’s happening to people?

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 09/02/26:

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