Strange Frequencies

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Programming Note: Substack Move

Quick and rare programming note

On Conservatism

The great historian/poet/all-around Renaissance man Robert Conquest famously formulated several laws of politics, of which the first ran: Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

Worst Christmas Ever

Is Eyes Wide Shut an unsuccessful erotic film or a successfully subversive unerotic one? Or neither?

Fascism, always fascism

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said there are no second acts in American lives. And while Donald Trump has returned to the Oval Office after a four-year intermission, in a sense this nonetheless holds true for him as well. For he never really left the public eye...

Innocents Abroad

A public intellectual is a generally shabby human type, and one that should be avoided as much as possible—both in the sense that one should avoid others of that type and the sense that one should oneself avoid becoming one.

Not Just an Idea But What Then?

When a Vance claims that America is not just an idea but a nation, he is in a literal sense merely stating a truism. But what he’s really doing is making a kind of ethical appeal: he and his political allies will represent the actual interests of Americans in a way his opponents won’t.

The Man Who Wasn't There

How can we continue to evaluate the world and our place in it, when the evaluative standard itself loses its substance? How can we know if the future we are hurtling toward is good, and what should good mean anyway?

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Mapping the Global South

These days a similar condescension is more likely to be applied to a different end of a compass point. I am referring, of course, to the so-called “Global South”—a loose, collective term for the world’s have-nots that has recently regained currency.

What is music writing for?

The recent announcement of the (possible) coming demise of Pitchfork, the online music publication, must have seemed like the distant light from a dying star to those of us of a more advanced age.

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Tempest in a Teapot, Academic Version

The highly-public humiliation of the Ivy League presidents has prompted many to suggest that we’re finally witnessing the beginning of a sea change in higher education. I think this is mistaken.

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What States Are Made Of

I can see no reason in principle why an ethnostate cannot be a democracy; the devil is in the details.

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Do nations have navels, or what does it mean to belong?

Considering the tension in our understanding of political societies, which we see as both socially constructed and natural at the same time.

Whither Palestine?

For the past so many years, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” has gained remarkable currency, repeated in demonstrations, stamped on flyers, tacked to the bios of leftist professors...

Up With People?

...the “who is the people?” question is itself a contributing factor to our constitutional dilemma.

Blimp Lives!

A somewhat esoteric reading of the great film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

A Brief History of the Bourgeoisie, or We Are All Bourgeois Now

The bourgeois is no longer just a particular type; it is the only type.

Beware of false mea culpas

Any anniversary of a major event inevitably brings with it the usual by-the-numbers reminiscences. These are typically driven by a media desire for eyeballs and clicks, but occasionally the stakes are high enough to introduce more complex motivations. The 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq is one

On masculinity, toxic and non

I saw that Michelle Goldberg, perhaps inevitably, had yet another column referencing the dreaded “toxic masculinity,” one of those many terms that now exists almost solely to invoke a sense of disgust or antipathy in the reader rather than to serve as a clear referent for a recognizable phenomenon. This

What price enlightenment?

Years ago, Mastercard launched its famous “Priceless” advertising campaign, the theme being that there are some things money can’t buy—a clever denigration of materialism in the service of a sale. For example: a professional baseball game setting with the superimposed words: “Tickets—$46. Concession—$26. Taking your son

On Aging as an Imperative, or same as it ever was?

This essay was prompted by several things. The first was this semi-dismissive comment I tweeted out regarding the news [https://t.co/mZnAyp5SCq] that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would be funding research to halt and possibly reverse aging: > The notion that aging is a kind of illness requiring

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The Liberal Leviathan

There’s a very funny moment in the movie O Brother Where Art Thou, in which Pappy O’Daniel[1], a southern politician and would-be populist, is conferring with his brain trust. His dim-bulb son remarks that their opponent is doing well with a message of reform: “People like that

Of Conspiracies

C’era una volta, not long after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I up and moved to Rome. It didn’t take much time for me to view that decision as one of destructive idiocy (invading Iraq, I mean, not moving to Rome). But its causes seemed relatively transparent,

What Is it Like to Be a Human

Our enormous, epoch-defining dependence upon technology has also made us dependent upon a class of people who, to put it mildly, do not appear overly invested in the pleasures and pains of phenomenal experience.

Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?

There are two false dichotomies that routinely appear whenever the subject of nationalism comes up: the supposed distinction between patriotism and nationalism, and the one between “creedal” and cultural or ethnic nationalism. This topic was generally on my mind, as I was reading Steven Smith’s (very good) book: Reclaiming

The Shield, or how greatness is rarely recognized in its own time

After thinking more generally [https://www.strangefrequencies.co/no-other/] about underappreciated cultural artifacts, I was reminded of this piece I wrote for the now-defunct Rebeller on one of my all-time favorite shows. As that site no longer exists, I'm reposting it here. Underappreciation is a curious cultural phenomenon.