“‘Scenius’ stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”*…
Zachary Hastings Hooper on Mark Wilkerson‘s Pub Rock, an appreciation of a now largely forgotten legacy…
The history of popular music is one of continual evolution, with one generation inspired by and then replaced by the next. Think the Beatles and Rolling Stones usurping their idols Buddy Holly and Muddy Waters. In the U.K., conventional wisdom holds that the pretension and precision of early 1970s prog rock acts like Yes and Genesis were smashed by the intentional amateurism and outrage of later-decade punk rockers such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash. This is perhaps best represented by the image of Johnny Rotten’s “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt.
Pub Rock (Bloomsbury), a new book by Mark Wilkerson, biographer of Pete Townshend and Thunderclap Newman, shines some light on the overlooked genre of pub rock that catalyzed the shift from prog to punk. Wilkerson traces the genre’s birth in London pubs in the early seventies and its gestation of the world-shattering punk and New Wave scenes that followed.
I’m the audience for this book. As a teenager honing his musical tastes in the late eighties, I was introduced, by MTV and college radio, to the sounds of angry young men like Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and Graham Parker. Digging into their back catalogs, I discovered that Lowe especially was deeply intertwined with something called pub rock; his old band, Brinsley Schwarz, had been a major player in that scene. At the same time, I realized that Stiff Records—home to Lowe, Costello, and Parker, as well as the Damned and Madness—was run by two pub rock managers [see here]. In a sense, I’ve been waiting for this book for decades. And now that it’s here, I’m happy to dust off some old records while cueing up some new (to me) selections.
Wilkerson characterizes pub rock as “simply music that was played in pubs. A diverse mix was represented there: Roots rock, country, R&B, soul and rock’n’roll—both the good-time variety and the harder-edged stuff.” Unlike the sounds dominating airwaves and filling stadiums, pub rock was unadorned and earnest. It was neither glam nor grandiose.
While sonically similar to more mainstream rock and roll, pub rock had a slyly subversive allure. These seemingly square guys (yes, they are all guys) were about to birth punk. Every budding music snob tries to earn their bona fides with obscure knowledge. So learning that the dude behind “Cruel to Be Kind” had a previous professional life and that “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace Love and Understanding” was a cover gave me an undeserved sense of superiority.
Pub Rock is part of the 33 ⅓ Genre series of primers on musical subgenres. It hews to the imprint’s mission, offering a quick, accessible entry point to a genre with little or no knowledge required, just curiosity. Like any good synopsis of a genre or musical scene, it sends the reader off to their favorite streamer or record store in search of a new listen or three.
In the age of the algorithm, we’re accustomed to being told, “If you like X, you’ll like Y.” However, snapshots like Wilkerson’s go beyond the “what” to tell you why you should add Dr. Feelgood or Brinsley Schwarz to your playlist.
As the book’s title indicates, the scene grew around a series of pubs in London. Groups like the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Band strongly influenced the nascent pub rock bands, but as Wilkerson notes, pub rock arose as big-name British acts were increasingly focused on selling out stadiums in America, and economic pressures were closing the venues that sustained the sixties scenes. Pubs, which had historically featured jazz acts, gave new bands opportunities to hone their skills and build followings. Wilkerson posits that intimate venues forced bands to up their game: proximity to Carlsberg-swilling audiences meant that you had to play your instruments and entertain the crowd without hiding behind light shows and heavy amplification.
The pub rock movement yielded a couple of minor hits, notably Ace’s “How Long,” now a staple of yacht rock radio. But many of its key figures became leaders in the punk and New Wave era. Ian Dury from Kilburn and the High Roads became the iconic leader of the Blockheads, while John Mellor from the 101ers became the even more iconic Joe Strummer of the Clash. Ace’s Paul Carrack had chart-topping success with both Squeeze and Mike + the Mechanics. The aforementioned Lowe went on to chart success as a solo artist, producer, and songwriter. Parker and Dave Edmunds enjoyed long careers. And pub rock’s DIY ethos—finding new places to play, hauling your own gear, building audiences from scratch—directly inspired the punk and New Wave scenes that followed.
It’s been said the Velvet Underground and the Ramones only sold a few copies of their debut albums but everyone who bought them started a band. It could be suggested that, similarly, everyone who encountered Eggs Over Easy or Brinsley Schwarz at the Tally Ho did the same. Artists as diverse as the Sex Pistols, Costello, Madness, and the Stranglers trace their roots to pub rock shows…
“Punk’s Pub Crawl,” from @ctrrelpol-washu.bsky.social.
For more, and videos of exemplary pub rock performances, see “Raising the bar: the chaotic story of pub rock.”
And for more listening suggestions, see “A beginner’s guide to pub rock in five essential albums.”
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As we give credit where credit is due, we might recall that it was on this date in 1976 the one of the core pub rock bands, Dr. Feelgood, scored their only No.1 UK album when their live LP Stupidity went to the top of the charts– the first ever live album to go to No.1 in the UK chart in its first week of release.
Hear it here.
“You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play”*…
Henry Oliver on John Locke as an exemplar of the importance of play…
One day, when my son was three years old, he stuck his finger into a candle. We were sitting at the table before dinner and he touched the flame without warning. When his sister asked him why he had done it, he told her he just wanted to know what the flame was like. I remembered this when I was reading Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in the section when Locke discusses how certainly we can know the world beyond ourselves, and he writes: “he that sees a candle burning, and hath experimented the force of its flame by putting his finger in it, will little doubt that this is something existing without him.” (IV.xi.8) This is how the love of philosophy begins: in a curiosity of the world and a willingness not just to question it, but to test it directly. It illustrates Locke’s larger point about man’s capacity to reason without the use of formal logic. “God has not been so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational.” (IV.xvii.4) We become philosophical as we become interested in knowing the qualities and limits of the world and ourselves. And that begins in childhood.
For the modern, empirical, skeptical mind, Locke’s finger-in-the-flame is akin to the philosopher leaving Plato’s cave. In that experiment, my son became a novice of philosophy. What he learned, he could not communicate. He did not have the language he needed. He was, essentially, at play when he touched that flame. To philosophise, then, requires some play. To be rational requires us to do “irrational” things, like touching a flame.
Play is formal. It might follow the rules of a game, the conventions of the theatre, or the tropes of impersonation—but play is a form of something else. In this way, language is a form of play for our experiences, not the things themselves, but a means of presenting them. Play can be a means of acquiring knowledge that we can express in language, but to begin with it is a means of acquiring impressions, ideas, concepts, feelings, and sensations.
Free play is informal. It is unfamiliar. In its freedom, it is play, just as in their rules the other modes of play are play. Free play might be random (like when children slap paint on paper) or it might be stylized (like free-style swimming) or it might be simply open-ended (as when an invented game keeps changing its content, rules, methods). This is why some play seems both formal and informal, such as when we “play around” with something—an instrument, some materials, an idea—and we are both working at the margin of the known rules and forms and being informal and open-ended.
Over time, play can become practice. The more predictable play becomes, the less playful it is. Children get bored with their imaginary games and begin to expand them: new characters, scenarios, scenes; the old ways of playing are either formalized or discarded. Practice is inherently more boring; it is a form of work. To maintain a good practice, we must, at intervals, allow for some play to revive, reinvent, or reinvigorate the practice. So, the athlete or chess player must know the patterns of their games and must be able to play creatively. So, the thinker or professional must know the accepted knowledge and forms of their discipline and be able to think creatively.
Many modes of life—education, occupations—have to be both work and play, the dynamic development of practices. In ‘Nature: A Fragment’, Goethe says, “we live within her, yet are foreign to her.” So it is with children at play, with students at study. Play is part of the quest for knowledge: we must play both in the sense of removing limits and of pretending. As with children, we must be able to say “this is in the game”, without compromising our sense of the game not being the same as “real life.”
When my son touched that flame, he was playing. When he told his sister that he merely wished to know what the flame was like, that was a similar way of thinking about the world as when they both tell me that something is “in the game.” Occasionally, I hear them saying things that are extraordinary, rude, or that sound like they need help—or that are just downright weird. In response to my puzzlement or offers of help, they explain, off-handedly, “Dad! It’s in the game!” Play is, without them intending it to be, a way of conducting thought experiments with their accumulating knowledge of the world. Touching the candle was a more traditional physical experiment. It was a means of playing that confirmed to my son the existence of the flame, in a way that words and ideas alone never could.
Philosophical play can become abstruse, distant from reality. Locke is hardly a “playful” philosopher, in the colloquial sense. But the plain and clear nature of his prose makes him intellectually exciting because he is always at play, always in the dynamic development of practices and conclusions. He is searching for truth. His insistence on the “plain and clear deductions of words” (IV.viii.11) and his opposition to general and trifling propositions (IV.viii.9) make him substantively and rhetorically compelling. It also brings a repetitive but playful structure to his arguments…
[Oliver considers Locke’s thinking, concluding…]
… Just as my son touched the flame to know the world (and thus to acquire the materials to begin to reason about it), Locke remembered the water and the colours on the bubble (materials he had long ago acquired). The “play” of this way of thinking is all the interplay between mind and reality, idea and experience. What starts as a game of child’s play becomes a practice of reasoning, but in Locke’s hands, the practice is always being played with, always being dynamically tested, refined. New things are always allowed to be “in the game” so long as they enable the pursuit of truth. Locke is not overly formal, following the “rules of philosophy”, but allows the rules of his method to be determined by their ability to enhance his pursuit of truth. Of the metaphysical philosophers who make “trifling” general propositions, he writes:
one may make demonstrations and undoubted propositions in words, and yet thereby advance not one jot in the knowledge of the truth of things: v.g. he that having learnt these following words, with their ordinary mutual relative acceptations annexed to them: v.g. substance, man, animal, form, soul, vegetative, sensitive, rational, may make several undoubted propositions about the soul, without knowing at all what the soul really is: and of this sort, a man may find an infinite number of propositions, reasonings, and conclusions, in books of metaphysics, school-divinity, and some sort of natural philosophy: and, after all, know as little of God, spirits, or bodies, as he did before he set out (IV.viii.9)
This “trifling” is all abstracted play, not based on any experience: it does not base the game on the world. The player is not required to have touched a flame.
Philosophy, as Locke practices it, requires play because there is so little we really know. There are no substances which do not have something in them that “baffles our understandings”, to see ideas and their connections, and to know the proofs of these, requires “single and slow steps, and long poring in the dark”. Our knowledge comes not only short of reality “but even of the extent of our own ideas.” (IV.iii.6) He constantly emphasises that the world cannot be entirely known to us through reason.
…how vain, I say, it is to expect demonstration and certainty in things not capable of it; and refuse assent to very rational propositions, and act contrary to very plain and clear truths, because they cannot be made out so evident, as to surmount every the least (I will not say reason, but) pretence of doubting. He that, in the ordinary affairs of life, would admit of nothing but direct plain demonstration, would be sure of nothing in this world, but of perishing quickly (IV.xi.10)
We must feel the world. We know things through our sensations. To those sensations we must apply reason. We must accept as revealed certain aspects of life and make ourselves more precise in how we discuss those aspects. That is: we find the world through play, and we find the language to describe the world through play, and that play becomes the practice of reasoning.
Some games are high-spirited and dramatic; some are slow and tense; some are hard to see as games, such as when a child sits quietly on the beach and moves the sand around, or re-arranges the pebbles. Locke’s reasoning is often over-determined, persnickety, and can feel like he is attempting to separate out each grain of sand, but in this, as much as in anything else, he has the playful quality of a child who simply wishes to know what it is like to touch the flame, to satisfy himself that the flame does not only exist within the confines of “in the game.”
Frolic is fundamental: “John Locke: The Playful Philosopher.”
Apposite: Richard Feynman (e,g., “Richard Feynman, Spinning Plates and Serious Play“) and Claude Shannon (e.g., “We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it.”)
* Johan Huizinga, in his remarkable Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (And as for the kinds of games we might play, see James Carse‘s Finite and Infinite Games.)
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As we celebrate coltish curiosity, we might send lighthearted birthday greetings to Art Clokey; he was born on this date in 1921. An animator, director, producer, screenwriter, and voice actor, he was a pioneer in the popularization of stop-motion clay animation, best known as the creator of the character Gumby (and as the original voice of Gumby’s sidekick, Pokey).
“They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot”*…
For 60 years, Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act has required federal agencies to “take into account” the effects of their actions on historic properties and places, enabling public participation and comment in the process, and empowering state and local governments and Tribal communities to have a voice in the process– often leading to project improvements and better outcomes. Now, the Trump Administration is working to remove that requirement, as it is to eliminate other heritage and environmental safeguards.
The impacts are already being felt, and wholly unsurprisingly, in a sector that has been consolidated by private equity players…
Chronicle Heritage, the largest cultural resources management company in the United States, abruptly announced it was shutting down, Science has learned. The October 1 move, which has not been announced publicly [as of October 7], came as a surprise to the firm’s more than 600 employees, including numerous archaeologists and paleontologists who were recalled from digs and other projects around the world.
“Our response was absolutely shock, anger, sadness, and fear,” said one employee who asked to remain anonymous.
Chronicle Heritage, which was backed by venture capitalists and formed through the merger of several smaller firms, was a major player in the for-profit cultural heritage industry. It had more than 20 offices and an estimated annual revenue of $100 million. Such firms are often contracted to conduct legally required archaeological surveys and other reviews prior to major development projects. They have been a major source of archaeological data, and some observers estimate they conducted up to 90% of the archaeological research performed in the U.S. each year.
The mass layoff will leave many archaeologists without work just as the warm weather field season comes to a close. The shutdown could also complicate the stewardship of archaeological, Indigenous, and paleontological collections that the firm helped manage.
The closure also comes as the cultural resource management industry is facing profound uncertainty. President Donald Trump’s administration has proposed changes to preservation laws that could vastly reduce the number of federally funded or federally permitted projects requiring archaeological reviews. And a bipartisan group of senators has unveiled legislation, designed to streamline the issuing of federal development permits, that could also lead to fewer archaeological surveys. A broad coalition that includes archaeology organizations, historic preservation groups, and tribal nations has formed to oppose the changes…
“Archaeology megafirm abruptly shuts down“- The largest “cultural resources management” firm in the U.S. deserts the field. From @tmitchellbrown.bsky.social in @science.org.
* Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi”
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As we honor heritage, we might recall that it was on this date in 2024 that archaeologists from the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia and the University of Münster uncovered the remains of a previously unknown early (4th century CE) Christian church in the ancient city of Artaxata, in the heart of Armenia. This remarkable find, the oldest documented Christian church in the country, offers new insights into the spread of Christianity in the region, which was one of the earliest nations to adopt the faith.
“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.”*…
Writer and teacher Drew Calvert on the benefits of reading, and more particularly, on the danger of turning fiction into self-help…
… My understanding has always been that people fall in love with books and only become professors or critics in order to spend more time with them. In college, I felt closest to the scholars who shared this basically affective view of literature: Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty. These teachers treated literature as a higher form of therapy: a training ground for emotions, a study in human virtue. I recall being perhaps inappropriately moved by Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love,” a commentary on King Lear that helped me think differently about my own relationships. Ditto Murdoch’s “Against Dryness,” in which she argues that novels help us countenance reality and reject “consolation.” Adam Phillips, the writer and psychoanalyst, was helpful, too, first because he expressed himself in a literary register, and also because he was friendly toward the human imagination—a legacy of his intellectual forebear Donald Winnicott, who claimed that art was a site of healing, a place where one prepares, as Olivia Laing puts it in her book The Lonely City, for “the dangerous, lovely business of intimacy.” It’s a nice idea. And it resonates with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy (that it purifies the soul) as much as Freud’s idea of transference (that all of our relationships are at least in part fantastical).
Fiction has power, in other words, because, for better or worse, we are all each other’s surrogates and will therefore find compelling archetypes in vivid characters. In a more expansive mood, I might even claim, as Marilynne Robinson does in “Imagination & Community,” that fiction exercises our capacity to love, or that novels contribute to social hope (as Richard Rorty puts it, in a more secular register) or that characters are important sites of readerly compassion, as Zadie Smith argues in her own recent defense of the genre, “Fascinated to Presume.”
My English major was useless, of course. After college, I went to work and learned that nobody reads Iris Murdoch anymore. Instead, they all read self-help and gauzy genre fiction. I worked with intelligent people. They were consultants, psychologists, engineers, economists, and policy wonks. They spoke fondly of charismatic humanities professors, and they often watched videos from The School of Life or other sources of lifelong learning. Wellness apps and podcasts were more popular than novels. One had to be a sport about this cultural defeat, but the odor of cliché was at times overpowering. A book my colleagues couldn’t seem to stop recommending to me was Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, which promised “modern truth” and “ancient wisdom.” Happiness was big in the aughts and early 2010s; the positive psychology movement had learned how to market the work of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Martin Seligman. Harvard and Yale both hired happiness professors. In 2011, happiness was a topic of discussion at the UN General Assembly, and in 2012, the first World Happiness Report came out.
The problem with books like Haidt’s, at least from my point of view, is that they were almost always addressed not to Aristotle’s suffering crowds or Winnicott’s social organisms or Rorty’s hopeful citizens or Robinson’s noble souls but to optimizing meritocrats angling for leverage. In early press interviews, Haidt recommended Benjamin Franklin’s self-improvement regime, which I took to be a bad sign, for I had come to think of myself as a budding Emersonian. My colleagues, of course, were Franklinites, even the ones who had taken Interpersonal Dynamics, the “touchy-feely” class offered at Stanford and other business schools. Their reasons for wanting to cultivate emotional intelligence had little to do with virtue or love; the point was simply to outperform one’s peers in the boardroom. This atomizing tendency manifests today in a certain brand of Stoicism—what the scholar Beth Blum calls “apathy prestige.”…
[Calvert reviews the history of the tension between literature and self-help…]
… It’s hard to keep up with all the overlapping crises. There’s the crisis of democracy, and the mental-health crisis, and the crisis of the humanities, and the death of the English major, and the spread of AI tools through the education system and the publishing industry. My sense is that these crises have an element in common: the refusal of experience. Ideology is one way to refuse it. Social-media use is another. (Haidt, to his credit, calls Instagram an “experience blocker.”) Formulaic self-help and fantasy might qualify, too, since those books fail to engage the moral imagination, relying instead on stereotypes and clichés to build a fan base. One has to be suspicious when a genre attracts pundits. David and Arthur Brooks are both riding the self-help gravy train, and Ross Douthat is serializing a fantasy novel on Substack. None of them seems to have read much literary fiction. Ditto our tech overlords, whose lists of favorites always include the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, both of which they misread fairly catastrophically.
Can literary fiction solve the polycrisis? Probably not. But it might not be a bad idea to preserve its place in the culture, even at the risk of sounding cringe or lame or snobbish…
… The comedy of self-improvement has fueled the novel ever since the origins of the genre, whether one traces it back to Don Quixote or Confessions. George Eliot’s characters are always seeking virtue in their hearts and in their communities. Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet follow amateur scientists who embark on absurd but ultimately moving quests for how to live. “Who does science belong to?” these novels seem to ask. “Who, if not the Church, will be the authority to guide our lives?” I read these books in 2015, at the height of the so-called “replication crisis” in social science, and I can’t help but think of Bouvard and Pécuchet as podcast bros “doing their own research.” Their experiments in gardening, husbandry, chemistry, and spiritualism are silly and disastrous. (At one point, they use the gastric juice of a duck to “produce digestion artificially.”) If the novel had been written today, its wayward bourgeois characters might have tried shakes and supplements, like the narrator of Jordan Castro’s recent novel Muscle Man, a disillusioned English professor who copes with the absurdities of the modern university (“People wanted clear-cut moral lines, like cocaine on a mirror”) through a strict regime of powerlifting.
Given how obnoxiously reductive self-help can be, it’s tempting for the discerning reader to mock the whole industry and even, at times, the impulse. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, published in 1966, Philip Rieff does so on behalf of moral order. Douthat, drawing on Rieff, bemoans what he calls the “Oprahfication” of Christianity. In Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy, addressing himself to the “post-religious technological society” of 1983, satirizes the genre with deranged glee; each chapter ends with a silly quiz or thought experiment.
But the industry is one thing, and the impulse is another. A management consultant once told me she was reading How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. Why not read Proust himself? Because that would be an experience, and what my colleague wanted was a few key takeaways. I, too, have browsed the shelves in search of key takeaways. Last year, when my daughter was born, I did so rather desperately. Yet the books that meant the most to me were still novels and memoirs: Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature; Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors; and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a story of early motherhood that quotes Proust and Edith Wharton between descriptions of sleep training and horrifying play dates. This memoir taught me nothing, but I highly recommended it. There was something about the experience.
In May, during an audience at the Vatican, Pope Leo connected the practice of serious reading to the “culture of encounter.” I find this phrase useful for explaining what I value about the transfer of consciousness between an author and a reader or the deep sense of compassion one can feel for a fictional character. The problem with self-help is that in offering solutions, diagnoses, boundaries, and methods, it protects suffering readers from a genuine encounter. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn calls that tendency in therapeutic culture “gnostic escapism.” In Ars Vitae, a book that attempts to wrest philosophy back from the corporate festival crowd and YouTube intellectuals, she makes a persuasive argument against that ancient heresy, which claims to offer access to a secret knowledge beyond the “hurly burly” of human experience. Gnosticism, or “knowingness” (the red pill, the life hack, the silver-bullet insight) “destroys revelation, and revelation is the necessary ingredient to transform the constitution of a self to a soul.” For Lasch-Quinn, the antidote is Neoplatonism. In particular, the work of Plotinus, who accused the Gnostics of arrogantly treating life as a puzzle they could solve instead of the mystery it is. The same accusation could be leveled against the authors of many popular psychology books.
Can a novel really offer the kind of revelation that transforms a self into a soul? A version of this question came up recently on an episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy. At the end of a conversation about religion and politics, cohost Sam Adler-Bell admits that he would be worried “to a theological degree” about the humanity of someone who’s incapable of reading a novel. Half in jest, his cohost Matt Sitman recommends the Bible. “Well, let’s start with Tolstoy,” answers Sam (Matt is a practicing Catholic and a former editor at Commonweal; Sam is a secular Mets fan with a serious interest in Freud). The episode ends with a quote from Marilynne Robinson, a shared touchstone. What occurred to me in the moment (I was jogging on the treadmill) was that Robinson, in her latest book, Reading Genesis, invites us to consider the fact that Tolstoy and the Bible offer similar spiritual benefits.
The Old Testament, in Robinson’s view, is a kind of realist novel featuring complex characters, high stakes, a narrative arc, comedic tension, and carefully chosen imagery. “The remarkable realism,” she writes, “is a product of the interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature.” Of course, there are genre elements—trickster tales, flood narratives, threats of human sacrifice—but ultimately, the Bible has a deep concern for the psychological nuances of life. In this sense, it achieves a higher literary quality than the tales and myths from which it emerged, just as Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, turned tabloid gossip into art through the force of his authorial attention, or as Dostoevsky used the popular structure of a trial in The Brothers Karamazov. Whereas self-help offers insight and fantasy offers what Iris Murdoch calls “consolation,” a good novel requires us to transcend our atomized, alienated condition and allows us to perceive the world precisely and humanely. It also helps us pass the time between loads of laundry.
Encouragingly, the self-help crowd, including the happiness warriors, are suggesting that we ditch our phones and pick up books instead. Haidt, in particular, has identified the loss of immersive reading as a problem as severe as teen depression. But Haidt is a social psychologist employed by a major business school. As much as I support his recent antitech crusade on behalf of young people, I would not want to entrust him with the power of recommending which books they should read when they turn off their devices. I imagine the list would include more formulaic guides to life than challenging modernist novels. I imagine they would be the kind of books that only help the self…
Eminently worth reading in full.
Turning fiction into self-help amounts to a refusal of experience: “Literature Is Not About You,” from @drwclvrt.bsky.social in @commonwealmagazine.org.
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As we read on, we might note that today is the final day of the 2026 Banned Books Week.
Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools. Held in the last week of September or first week of October, the annual event highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community — librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.
By focusing on efforts across the country to remove or restrict access to books, Banned Books Week draws national attention to the harms of censorship. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) compiles lists of challenged books as reported in the media and submitted by librarians and teachers across the country. – source
Sadly, the problem seems to be growing. In a report timed to coincide with BBW, PEN International detailed nearly 12,000 instances of book banning affecting 7,370 unique titles across 114 U.S. school districts during the 2025–26 academic year, a record high since PEN began tracking literary censorship in American public schools in 2021. (And, of course, this is in addition to censorship in libraries, book stores, and elsewhere.) Texas (8,193 bans) vaulted past the prior “champion” Florida (3,212 bans), in part because schools in Texas have attempted to comply with SB13 (a censorial state law that applies to “broad categories” of books) by ham-fistedly asking chatbots which books they should ban. More on these bans here.
Lest we need a refresher on why this matters. the estimable Richard Ovenden reminds us that “there is no political power without power over the archive” (“Titles banned, data deleted, the nation’s librarians sacked without explanation – Donald Trump’s war on books is a threat to democracy across the world.”)
“If you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.”*…
Ah, but how best to resist?
In a short piece adapted from his recent book, On Resistance- A Manifesto, Curtis White offers a plain-spoken, almost playful– but at the same time provocative– prescription in the form of “seven theses on resistance”…
(1) Our politics are a binary melodrama: humanist against evangelical, Democrat against Republican, socialist against fascist, woke against racist, Kimmel against Trump, comedians against reality-show celebrities. By dominating the stage, these dramas exclude other ways of understanding who we are and what we want, in other words, what we lack.
(2) These melodramatic struggles distract us from the real question—what values shall we live by? Our true values are not to be found in what we think, or in what we say we believe, but in how we live.
(3) This contradicts the idea, common among us, that we are a free country rich in belief. “I believe X,” we are told, with the expectation that others will respect that belief, even if it makes no sense. It is as if belief has been reserved only for the unbelievable.
(4) The value we live through in the present moment is no different from the foundational value of ancient Greece and Rome: the “right of conquest.” This may sound hyperbolic, but the people of Gaza, Venezuela, and even Greenland understand it well. This value instructs friend and foe alike, “You can do whatever you want on the condition that you make your desires fit my ends, or else.” As Trump aide Stephen Miller acknowledged in a CNN interview in January 2026, “We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Vae victis, woe to the victims.
(5) The worst psychopathology of everyday life is to be treated unjustly and not to know it. This injustice inevitably concerns money, its inequities, and its specious allure. Buddhist philosopher David Loy writes, “Money is the flight from emptiness that makes life empty.” This is the truth, but it is also something that we don’t know.
(6) Rather than seeing emptiness as a mark of failure, can we see it as something to reclaim? Emptiness is a fundamental human joy if we feel free to respond to it. Freedom to play, to create, to live in our own strength. As Tibetan Buddhist Tarthang Tulku thought, “Life is the play of energy in the void.” Children are primed for life through play, but their play only prepares them for a world that doesn’t exist.
(7) Jesus was a heretic because he hated hypocrites, those whose “throats were open graves.” In Nietzsche’s estimation, this made him “the noblest of men.” Jesus made himself useless to the ways of the Temple and useless to the ways of Empire. He encouraged us to take back our emptiness from the ethical absolutes of the Mosaic Law and from the false gods of Rome. He began the very human remaking of his Father’s earthly kingdom without any ethical guidance beyond the primordial aspirations of love. As Saint Augustine taught, simply, “Love and do what you will.”
Make yourself useless! Take back your emptiness! Make something beautiful!
As universities rid themselves of the arts, humanities, and social sciences, they become glorified vocational schools for those seeking jobs in tech or business. One might object that there is no human interest in the skills developed in such schools, but at least the people are employed, we’re told, and they’re getting the “good jobs.”
But even that logic is in doubt when so many students find that entry-level employment has been monopolized by AI, and, amid the West’s never-ending Industrial Revolution, by automation. This reality is leaving tens of thousands of people, heads filled with expensive skills that nobody wants or needs, living in their childhood bedrooms or their parents’ basement, gloomily doom-scrolling through the day, wondering how in the world their student loans will ever be repaid, and feeling just generally unneeded and unwanted. Not surprisingly, the consequences for mental health have been bad. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 47 percent of Gen Z adults are anxious or depressed “often or always” because of social media, financial stress, and isolation.
But the numbers are, indeed, brow-raising: in late 2025, the unemployment rate among college graduates stood at nearly 6 percent, while the general unemployment rate was just over 4 percent. So, why go to college at all? Sure, apprentice to one of the trades. Go for construction, as if there were no downside to manual labor.
Techno-capitalism’s circle in hell is the hole (or parental basement) of the Empty Self. Imagine Dante walking in this hell, wondering about the devilish devices that the damned are staring into, fingers flying, and Virgil commenting, “They’re looking for themselves.”
Dante asks, “What are they seeing, master?”
Virgil replies, “Ghosts.”
“And what sin did they commit for this punishment?”
“Their sin was their lifelessness.”
Virgil has Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” on heavy rotation.
Gen Z youth imagine that their future is dependent on studying subjects for which they have no living interest. They have only the failing assumption that writing code, analyzing data, programming, or engineering software will eventually lead to prosperous material lives—or just survival, no matter how dull the reality is.
This is made even more hellish by the fact that the people in it are alone. My generation had to disengage from television, but a life lived online is another level of insidious alienation and, worse yet, it is all on the inside, eroding inner life, leaving nothing for the soul, nothing for soul-work, everything for addictive pleasure and profit. As David Foster Wallace commented in a 1996 interview with David Lipsky for Rolling Stone, sounding out a now familiar doom:
At a certain point we’re going to have to build up some machinery inside our guts to help us deal with this. The technology is just going to get better and better. And it’s going to get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. If we don’t do that, then (a) as individuals, we’re going to die, and (b) the culture’s going to grind to a halt.
But Wallace didn’t mean to blame the young. The difference between Gen Z and earlier generations is that our young have to suffer the effects of techno-alienation much more intensely because the technology has indeed gotten “better and better.” They will be caught within it for a much longer time, and without the helpful memory of any sort of “time before tech.” Perhaps this is why Gen Z is currently experiencing a paradoxical nostalgia for the analogue world of the 1990s.
Well, then, what are we to do? How about, “Workers of the world, relax! Make yourselves useless, you have nothing to lose but your virtual chains!”
In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder asks us to say no to rising fascism by preserving liberal democratic institutions. But he never imagines that there might be reasons to say no to those institutions, to our “managers of despair,” as well. He offers little understanding of the importance of a resistant culture, innately anarchic, opposing all that is anti-human. Resistant cultures seek to provide a place where we can become who we really are, a place where we are not mere functions of the world we happened to be born into, not diminished creatures whose being has been reduced to a marketable “skill set.”
Resistant cultures work through honesty, intelligence, and beauty. They ask of us what Buddha asked of his followers: listen, consider, and cultivate. Listen to what we have discovered; consider what you have heard; and if you like what you have heard and considered, if it speaks to you, then join with others in the sangha, the Buddhist community, where you can cultivate a path that others in their turn may follow. This is the ideal way to join any human group: not by thoughtlessly inhabiting its damaged forms and conditions, but by freely engaging, considering, choosing, and, with this freedom in place, making something beautiful. As Thich Nhat Hanh taught, “The next Buddha will be a sangha” [community].
I have written this manifesto in what Vladimir Nabokov called “a state of aesthetic bliss,” which he defined as: a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.
That’s the hill I intend to die on, for all the good intending will do me. Because that hill may already be gone. I have reclined in its grasses for so long—gazing down on moving water, assuming that all I had to do was turn and I’d be looking up toward the crest—that I may have missed the moment when the earthmovers came in, noisy though they are, and the mountaintop removal began. And then a guy in an orange vest and a hard hat comes up and explains to me that, “Son, you’re living in the world of yesterday.”
Stefan Zweig’s complaint in The World of Yesterday was exactly this: A form of moral beauty had disappeared beneath him and he was left suspended in air. As Goth Rock legend Robert Smith of the Cure sings in “Endsong,” the last song on their album Songs of a Lost World (2024): it’s gone, gone, “Nothing left of all I loved.”
And yet, I hope that this manifesto, in its playfulness, its nonlinear anarchy, expresses not a longing for the work of the past but energy for the future. Not illustrations for an ideology, but the pure energy of worldmaking. In a sense, we need to “forget the Beatles” and the countercultures they inspired. Presently, that culture lives only a gray half-life through Spotify playlists, Hollywood biopics about Dylan and the Doors (et tu, Led Zep?), and the blasphemous productions of corporate giants like Universal Music Group, selling us our own past. That music has been, in tech parlance, the victim of “enshittification,” the apotheosis of which will be that quickly approaching time when music’s “zone” is flooded with AI slop. As one AI music generator named “imoliver” commented, “I have no musical talent at all. I can’t sing, I can’t play instruments, and I have no musical background.” All this under the cover of “democratizing songmaking,” never mind that the mark of the best music has heretofore been its soulful heresies. What was once alive and full of the warmth of sharing is now only about creating a brand and making a buck in a world where anyone, anywhere, could make the next big hit.
You’ve heard of the Land of Cockaigne, that fanciful place where abundance reigns [see image at top, and here]. Well, welcome to the Land of Cliché, where AI rummages through all that has been said and sung and then throws it against the wall to see what sticks. Someone should be ashamed, but we’re all too excited about this brave new world to know it.
The arts need to de-shittify and return to peasant energies, ready to be changed, changed utterly, into something a new generation can live in and live through. In the Imagination, a new comedy will rise, because its loving playfulness, its caring embrace of others, is always with us, regardless of every inhuman distortion of the world as it stands. Hegel called this comedy the “World in Love.” Ultimately, that is what Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” seeks, too: love not as an ethical command but as an artful metaphysic.
Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD IS NEW!”—William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
Seven theses on resistance: “Song of a Lost World,” from @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social.
Triangulate with: “Planetary Politics Now,” from Susan Buck-Morss (“The planet is indifferent to political discourses. It counts time in eons, not presidential tenures. Planetary-thinking forces awareness that the cognitive maps of modernity no longer make sense. Neither conservative nor liberal political positions are up to the task of the present.”)
… to all of which your correspondent would humbly add, yes and– VOTE.
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As we ponder positive possibilities, we might recall that on this date in 1635, in Massachusetts, the General Court of the then-Colony banished Roger Williams for speaking out for the separation of church and state and against the right of civil authorities to punish religious dissension and to confiscate Indian land. Williams moved out to edge of the Narragansett Bay, where with the assistance of the Narragansett tribe, he established a settlement at the junction of two rivers near Narragansett Bay, located in (what is now) Rhode Island. He declared the settlement open to all those seeking freedom of conscience and the removal of the church from civil matters– and many dissatisfied Puritans came. Taking the success of the venture as a sign from God, Williams named the community “Providence.”
Williams stayed close to the Narragansett Indians and continued to protect them from the land greed of European settlers. His respect for the Indians, his fair treatment of them, and his knowledge of their language enabled him to carry on peace negotiations between natives and Europeans, until the eventual outbreak of King Philip’s War in the 1670s. And although Williams preached to the Narragansett, he practiced his principle of religious freedom by refraining from attempts to convert them.
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