#17: The Old Guard, The New Guard
This week in culture/progressive politics/media: West Village politics, the ruling class's political ambitions, the 'Old Guard' Jewish political organization, and watching Interview with the Vampire.
New The Cut Article Hit the Building: Brock Colyar’s “It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl.” Highlight of this article: The first girl interviewed identifying herself as a Carrie. Why would you say that about yourself??
I’ve been thinking about this paragraph: Interests of “Brunches, coffees, dinners, drinks with your girlfriends — that type of energy.” Something has happened, and now we’re seeing social ambition as somehow akin to actual hobbies.
Ars Technica put out an utterly terrifying interview with Adam Becker about the ruling class’s focuses:
Adam Becker: They actually have a great contempt for expertise. They don't see it as necessary because they think that they're the smartest people who've ever lived, because they're the wealthiest people who've ever lived. If they were wrong about anything, then why would they have been so financially successful? This is also where you get the obsession with things like prediction markets. They believe that there are super predictors, that expertise is not necessary to understand or predict what's going to happen in the world, and that they themselves must be experts because they have enormous amounts of money.
Adam Becker: There was a really good article about this in The New York Times by Tressie McMillan Cottom, where she said that AI is "mid." It's not great. It's not terrible. It's just mediocre. The AI art is a great example of that: It is somewhere between mediocre [and] terrible, and so is the writing. My general line about it is these AI systems are using the cultural heritage of humanity to spit out a smeared-out, averaged voice of all of that, but it doesn't have a conception of what's in the world and is incapable of doing most of the things that humans do.
A large language model is never going to do a job that a human does as well as they could do it, but that doesn't mean that they're never going to replace humans, because, of course, decisions about whether or not to replace a human with a machine aren't based on the actual performance of the human or the machine. They're based on what the people making those decisions believe to be true about those humans and those machines. So they are already taking people's jobs, not because they can do them as well as the people can, but because the executive class is in the grip of a mass delusion about them.
Dear Media’s Tradwifeification: Jessica Testa wrote for the New York Times about Dear Media’s role as ‘The Manosphere for Women’. Dear Media produces everything from MAHA content to mainstream shows as the Toast, which apparently is receiving backlash because the hosts’s mother is a prominent anti-Islam activist.
The World of AI: Cade Metz and Karen Weise wrote for The New York Times about the rise in AI hallucinations. Terrifying fact from this article: OpenAI’s most powerful system hallucinates 33% about public service. Related, 404 Media reported on the lack of consideration given to AI’s impact on classrooms early in its existence. And Grok was instructed to be more supportive of white genocide, as you can tell easily and with a prompt which New York Times op-ed columnist Zeynep Tufekci may have discovered:
If you poke around its White Genocide answers (as many did yesterday), you can find Grok referring to “the provided analysis” or “the post analysis.” This phrase also appears in some tweets where Grok appears to be regurgitating a secondary prompt specifically geared toward replies where a user is asking about another post:
”You are Grok, replying to a user query on X. Your task is to write a response based on the provided post analysis.”
Internet Friends: Variety wrote about the rising importance of gaming as a method of Gen Alpha socialization:
But here’s what’s different: Gen Z and Millennials were the guinea pigs of growing up online — oversharing, overposting and learning the hard way what it means to etch a digital footprint.
Gen Alpha, on the other hand, has taken notes. Rather than using social media to connect with friends, they treat it more like a cultural mood board. TikTok and Instagram are not actually where they socialize; rather those platforms are a place to watch, absorb and curate their tastes.
This really feeds into an article I’d like to write someday about the lack of acknowledgment in discourse around social media about the beneficial power of taste curation via the internet. Is having your entire life revolve around the digital bad? Yes. But there’s also maybe space for celebration of the extremely detailed, not-known-by-your-real-life-friends Tumblr account detailing every niche interest you developed in your teens. As I feel like I’ve said before, the internet can be good for you.
Gay Agendas: Mark Harris wrote for The New York Times about the shift in the definition of the closet:
Sharing information about celebrities with one’s gay friends may have been a way of asserting insider knowledge, but it was also a contribution to a kind of ever-evolving group project, a map of homosexuality that you could help make a little larger and clearer, one name at a time, in an era when most gay public figures would not or could not stand up and be counted. One effect of all that dish was to turn the idea of the closet into something more complex than an in-or-out binary. It was widely understood that there was a third category, “those who know know,” that nodded to the existence of a gray area in which one could be out in certain circles while remaining reasonably certain that the information wouldn’t penetrate to the wider world. That was the zone in which, for a long time, Reubens lived — a closet, but a large one, with free access to a safe perimeter that surrounded it.
Feed Me Presents: Spring Break With the Wealthy. Okay, not just the wealthy, and many of these were actually quite charming (ski trip!); some, though, are definitely more influencer-heavy. Also, a lot of this sounds slightly unpleasant. One sophomore writes “I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve done this all before,” which is so sad. Since when is a spring break trip to Cancun with your college friends even expected, let alone boring? Also, I want to go to Chichén Itzá now, because how come a college student has traveled there and not me.
Hinge is trying to get Gen-Z dating via a Substack series of testimonials from couples who met on the app. I met my delightful partner on the app, and I think they should hire me.
The New Yorker showed a variety of New York apartments.
As per usual, it sucks to be part of this generation. According to the Financial Times, job postings for college grads are down 15% year over year.
On the internet, Casey Lewis rounded up all the TikTok ‘propaganda’ trend:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Christine Emba wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about pornography. My reply to this would probably be exactly the same as commenter Jared:
No solutions offered here, only reductive anxieties. The author stops short of implying that porn should be banned, but that’s what she’s driving at. Or perhaps porn should be regulated, in order to make it more appropriate? But who decides what kind of sex is more appropriate? A congressional committee? The author of this article? Donald Trump? Who gets to determine what we can and can’t desire, how we can and can’t express ourselves? This whole subject seems part and parcel of the new authoritarian instinct sweeping through this country. We’re so quick now to dictate values. We’re too comfortable in limiting freedoms. Porn is an easy target, but what’s next?…
And finally, gossip of the week: Ten prisoners escaped a New Orleans jail and wrote above their escape route “too easy, lol”. I feel like judges should be able to grant special release if the escape attempt was balsy enough.
News You Probably Already Saw: Biden was diagnosed with Stage Four Cancer. The big megabill saw GOP difficulty but ultimately passed the House, and now faces a tough battle in the Senate. Moody’s Ratings downgraded the U.S. government’s Triple A credit rating for the first time in a century, citing a decade-long increase in government debt and interest-to-GDP ratios to “levels that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns.” Harvard was threatened with a ban on enrolling international students. And two mid-level staffers for the Israeli embassy were murdered in DC, which is in my opinion a very senseless act of political violence. (What are the staffers going to do? Make calendar invites?) Embassy staff should be off limits for assassinations — a principle which the Israeli government has of course flagrantly ignored.
In Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, the Trump administration presented a plan to forcibly move a million Palestinians to Libya. This is, definitionally, ethnic cleansing. Israel allowed the first aid trucks it has, as it has been starving Gaza for the last three months, but still hasn’t allowed in enough to feed thousands. This is also, definitionally, a war crime. Israeli soldiers also fired in the air to disperse Western diplomats in the West Bank. Firing on diplomats: Famously Democratic thing to do.
Internationally, Trump and Putin spoke about a ceasefire. Another interesting Trump win for the wrong reasons: Trump gave a speech in Saudi Arabia denouncing Western intervention and vowing to end “lectures on how to live.” Modi’s government shut down domestic dissent towards his work against Pakistan. And according to a report from ProPublica, the Trump admin is leaning on African countries including Gambia to promote Elon Musk’s business.
A list of all of Trump’s deals: Qatar is both gifting a $400 million Boeing 747 aircraft and chipping in to help finance a Trump-branded beachside golf from which he will profit, and a Saudi Arabian real estate firm is investing $1 billion in the Trump International Hotel and Tower project in Dubai. I see no issues with any of these.
White House aides are pushing ideas to keep parents at home, under the theorem that kids do better with one parent at home. The strategies include eliminating federal tax credits for day care, which seems beyond unhelpful.
Supreme Court News: The Supreme Court’s hearing about whether or not to end birthright citizenship is pivoting around a different question: Can a single lower-court judge block the president’s policies across the whole country? Meanwhile, John Oliver did an excellent segment last week on the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Constitutional Crisis: The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled that the Trump admin broke the law by impounding money meant for EV chargers — a ruling that may indicate more to follow, as Trump continues to claim the power to control purse strings.
The Climate: Hawaii has added a 0.75% fee on hotel stays to go towards climate defense. Meanwhile, Andy Masley wrote for The Weird Turn Pro about the overplaying of the climate concerns around ChatGPT.
MAHA: A report is out! It finds accurately that ultraprocessed foods and chemicals may be bad for kids, and less accurately that vaccines may be. While RFK Jr. is very obviously a quack, and I’m concerned that some of the report’s findings around vaccines are at odds with science, I am cautiously interested to see what happens here. While ‘European-style’ food regulations always carry a risk of cutting farmers’ income, there is absolutely room for improvement in the American food system, and I’m interested to see where this goes. (Of course, though, the administration has drastically cut science research funding at universities and labs.)
Medical Advances: We’ve gene edited a baby! 9 month old KJ became the first patient to be healed by a custom gene-editing treatment. More than 30 million people in the U.S. have a rare genetic disease, and this new technique could allow many of those — particularly those caused by single mutations — to be cured without individual cures having to be found. Doctors also performed the first human bladder transfer.
COVID News: Shots are no longer recommended for most Americans. Thanks, I hate it.
The Free Speech Crowd Doesn't Want Free Speech
The right-wing Free Speech crowd has based a platform around free speech and their being censored. Nevermind that the random Twitter user who hates your speech isn’t a government censor. Nevermind that in reality, the right-wing free speech crowd has become increasingly ready to police
I wrote last week about how Republicans don’t love Free Speech, and on that topic, the Nation wrote about the hypocrisy of the anti-cancel-culture crowd.
Live From New York City: A profile of Zohran Mamdani in Intelligencer.
Op-Ed of the Week: Eric Alterman for The New Republic, “The Coming Jewish Civil War Over Donald Trump”, a great piece on the wide disconnect between mainstream discourse about antisemitism promoted by the ADL; the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the American Jewish, and the reality most American Jewish voters see:
Despite this, the leaders of the large “legacy” American Jewish organizations, without exception, have chosen to side with Netanyahu, defending Israel against all critics and demonizing as “antisemitic” anyone—especially other Jews—who they believe threatens it. In doing so, however, they face the problem not only of opposing the views of the vast majority of American Jews, but also of throwing in with a U.S. president and political movement that seek to destroy the democratic pillars and educational institutions that have helped to make Jews secure and successful in the United States and are shot through with neo-Nazis and Jew-haters of all sorts.
A reminder as per usual: J Street, the best funded of what Alterman calls the ‘Next Generation’ groups (in favor of both Israeli and Palestinian statehood), has assets totaling only $9 million — in contrast to groups like the ADL, with $250 million. Even though the popular opinion of Jewish voters (2/3 of whom vote Democrat) is behind the Next-Gen groups, the discourse is dominated by the Old Guard, because they’re the ones with both the funds and the clout — and because Republicans like Israel far more than they love actual Jewish voters.
And one more thing: Popular opinion is evolving further. A May 2024 Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs survey showed that over half of American Jews support withholding certain weapons from Israel, and a third agree Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — a year and tens of thousands of deaths ago.
Gossip of the Week: Kristi Noem wants to host a reality tv competition for citizenship. Charming.
Friend of the Week: My good pal Sankeerthna wrote an excellent review of Audrey’s Children, a new film directed by Ami Canaan Mann and starring Natalie Dormer. I am now interested.
The Murderbot Diaries series is now out! Extremely exciting news. I have yet to watch it, because I am a failure of a Murderbot Diaries fan. I also am still catching up on The White Lotus, and I still think it’s deeply fine. It’s simply hard to love a show where not a single character is ever particularly likable or compelling.
I spent most of my last week watching season 2 of Interview with the Vampire on AMC, season 3 of which is airing in 2026. I have so much to say about this. Generally, this is one of my favorite television shows I have watched in a long time. Each of the main five actors are giving career-defining performances and making me root for characters that are, let’s be honest, deeply terrible people. I knew about 98% of the plot reveals that come in season 2 from my presence on Twitter, which was convinced I’d already seen and enjoyed this entire show, but the how was still beyond haunting.
Here are some of my additional thoughts:
The San Francisco torture episode (s2ep05, Don’t Be Afraid, Just Play The Tape) is one of the single best and most disturbing episodes of television I have seen in my entire life
Daniel is in fact my favorite character because I am so entertained by him. He spends all of season 2 having to hang out with maybe one of the most annoying couples you’ve ever met in your life and hating it. And that’s what great journalism is all about!
My enjoyment of this show is similar to my enjoyment of Succession I feel because I am most invested in chanting “get divorced!” at one of the main couples
Generally, I have a movie night suggestion: Watch the pilot of the television show (and if you really want to get crazy, the San Francisco backstory episode) and then in immediate quick succession watch the movie. The whiplash of watching the movie, which stars Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas except made to look oddly pale, Christian Slater, and Kirsten Dunst (easily the best casting choice in the movie) is utterly insane. Particularly the wigs. I’ve made a friend do this and it was in fact a surreal experience.
Postcards By Elle wrote for her Substack about ‘how to get smart again’ — advising deleting social media apps from phone, a reading syllabus, an essay per morning, movies > shortform, niche research topics, and a morning walk & album per day.
Film Critic Alison Willmore wrote about the canonization of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman as a symbol of the modern-day sigma male grindset:
“The irony is that while the character was a nightmare, he was also wildly compelling, which meant that overinvesting in him was inevitable. Like Walter White, he’s someone people couldn’t help but turn into an anti-hero, actual text be damned.”
Speaking of which, remember that Ashton Hall video?
Jason Sanford wrote for their Substack about the Hugo Award AI controversy. The reason this is an issue, long and short, is that many sci-fi fantasy writers object to the unpaid usage of their work to train LLMs.
The Arthur C. Clarke awards dropped their finalists. Shortlist:
Private Rites – Julia Armfield (4th Estate)
The Ministry of Time – Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre)
Extremophile – Ian Green (AdAstra)
Annie Bot – Sierra Greer (The Borough Press)
Service Model – Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK)
Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock – Maud Woolf (Angry Robot)
Also in the sci-fi fantasy universe, as per Transfer Orbit, Netflix is adapting S.A. Cosby's All the Sinners Bleed into a tv miniseries. Additionally, the next Game of Thrones miniseries, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, is now slated for early 2026.
Substacker The Yearning wrote about a straight TikToker who used a queer ghostwriter to write her book. I’m actually usually very pro straight women writing about queer women — it is the unspoken truth of queer fiction that most straight women writing about gay people just think it’s hot for men to fuck each other — but this is unbelievably weird behavior.
If Tinx is the ally she claims to be, then there is an opportunity here to properly honor Gabrielle’s contributions by amplifying her own novels or co-hosting a book tour stop as collaborators. The two writers could do a joint interview to speak to their mutual interest in writing an informed queer story. Gabrielle could join the writers room for the TV adaptation of Hotter in the Hamptons. Instead, Tinx’s name, platform and reach as an influencer is what will rocket up the sales of Hotter in the Hamptons and add the Hollywood heat necessary to get a TV show on the air.
We Renaissance Women, one of my favorite Substackers, introduced me to Expressionist artist Paula Modersohn-Becker:
Transit of the Week: WMATA is closing many bus stops. New free app MetroPulse will advertise train and bus departures in real time, which is an upgrade from current option CityMapper. We’re also getting credit card tap-to-pay. On the long term, city councilors have agreed to a twenty-year $5.6 billion plan to both automate the system and provide repairs, but no guarantee yet.
A new poll from WaPo and George Mason University shows that 4 in 10 D.C. area residents who “live in households that experienced a federal worker or contractor layoff, firing or being put on leave” have not been able to pay all bills as a result. Even more concerning, one in every five residents is considering moving away altogether in the next 12 months. Our economy is in a major slump, and the layoffs are making it so much worse.
Pictures of the trans quilt from the National Mall.
And finally, 730DC wrote a very interesting op-ed about the newly uncanny nature of DC — and reviewed the new ‘Uncanny’ exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. New museum to go to for me.
Thank you so much for reading!! I'm honoured to hear you enjoy the newsletter. Love what you are doing as well xxx