Culture

Another day, another public execution. The talking heads on television and Twitter tell us not to worry too much: America is still strong. They repeat this sentiment after every waking nightmare. These horrific events are not the norm, they say. They’re just the actions of a few people on the “fringe.”  But what is the American “fringe”? The “fringe” tried to incinerate the country in 2020. The “fringe” tore down statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The “fringe” control the universities and has spent years indoctrinating kids with discriminatory dogmas. The “fringe” created the policies that let violent, mentally ill men prowl the streets and kill refugees. The “fringe” killed a healthcare CEO at sunrise in December.

Scratch the surface of Silver Age Rome and what do you find? Most likely, a tight subterranean vault built as a meeting room for the followers of Mithras. This Persian mystery cult was everywhere in the early Anni Domini, coming to prominence between the decline of Hellenism and the rise of Christianity, filling that gap between the gods of Olympus and the God of Moses. The cult’s dark temples, the Mithraea, squeezed devotees into opposing benches designed to make them uncomfortable, all while in communion with their fellow initiates. Today, sociologists might call a Mithraeum a “third place.” Here was the kind of space where Roman men who had become disillusioned with Jupiter Stator could go between work and home to be purified together in a shower of bull’s blood.

I don’t recall how it happened. One moment I was a sane member of society, the next I was at an arcade, slotting coin after coin into a claw machine – and on the other side of the glass, taunting me with her feral grin, was the object of my desire: Labubu. Labubu is a mischievous, furry elf-monster with bunny-like ears and distinctive sharp teeth. Depending on who you ask, she is either incredibly cute or incredibly creepy. She exists in many forms – most notably as a key-ring collectible plush doll – embodying an ugly-cute aesthetic called kimo-kawaii in Japanese that both unsettles and endears. Her creator, Hong Kong–born and Netherlands-raised Kasing Lung, was inspired by Nordic folklore.

American audiences did not exactly flock to the Benedict Cumberbatch-Olivia Colman comedy The Roses last weekend, but those who did may have been pleasantly surprised, as well as appalled. Although the publicity and trailers took care to stress that it was the new film from the director of Meet The Parents – and certainly some of the more elaborate set-piece slapstick scenes bear the hallmark of the filmmaker Jay Roach – the true auteur of the picture should be regarded as the screenwriter Tony McNamara, who was previously responsible for the Yorgos Lanthimos collaborations Poor Things and The Favourite, both of which saw his screenplays Oscar-nominated. The 58-year-old McNamara is an unlikely late bloomer in Hollywood circles.

Charles Murray, whose work on race and IQ has made him something of a darling of the online right, found himself out of favor with his fan base when he posted on X that a young married couple – each making $15 an hour and working 48-hour weeks – can afford a baby and a place to live. The reaction was furious. “Charles Murray is a good man,” wrote Zarathustra, a popular dissident right-wing poster. “Sadly, however, he’s also a Boomer. Which by necessity, means his bumper sticker talking points on political economy are comically out of touch garbage, and read like a moldy Reagan Youth pamphlet from 1982.” Murray’s post broke X containment and made it to the subreddit r/BoomersBeingFools.

This month marks exactly forty years since I became a literary agent. In that time I have been involved with many bestsellers but the publication last week of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York about Prince Andrew has been my most successful book. What makes it especially different is that I am not just its agent but also its author. It has been a strange but exciting experience watching a project which has gestated for four years to finally see the light of day. The reaction has been overwhelming with the Daily Mail, which serialized the book over five days, calling it "The most devastating royal biography ever written" and interviews with media organizations all over the world.

Politicos used to know how to take the temperature of the nation. They could talk to their cab driver. They could sidle up to the man fixing their toilet. There was the Iowa farmer, the diner waitress. There was Walter Cronkite.  Now there is only Taylor Swift. In a society that increasingly consists of mutually unintelligible niches – like multivolume works of Sonic the Hedgehog erotica or reenactments of the War of the Austrian Succession in Roblox – Swift can still fill huge arenas at short notice. Her fans cut across every social and economic class. To a political nation that's often baffled by this new society, Swift has become the great barometer.

There’s a common myth in American culture that only the left is capable of producing great art. Right-wing art must be formulaic and preachy because it values established norms, while only transgressive leftism can reach new frontiers of form – or so we’re told. But what happens when the left’s own norms become dominantly rigid?Well, you wind up with the 20 exhibits that the Trump administration now rightly aims to purge from the Smithsonian’s sprawling array of museums, along with many other abuses. Since his inauguration, Trump has worked to rid wokeness from our cultural institutions through executive order, prompting leftist outrage against a so-called “attack” on the arts.

I vividly remember the first time I saw Las Vegas. It was decades ago, and a friend and I did the classic LA-Vegas mini-road-trip, across the burning desert, arriving in Nevada around dusk. As we crested the final sandy hill, I saw this thing. This glittering neon jewel-box of a city, glowing in the twilight. I fell in love at once, a love that was only confirmed when we actually entered Vegas, and I realized I was motoring down Hugh Hefner Way.That love didn’t quite last, however. Not long ago I returned, and something felt very different. Sadder, somehow. Yes, I was shown a Damien Hirst-designed bedroom with a fridge full of diamonds, but I also saw too much druggy homelessness, and too many stickers that gave me a shock.

I am twenty-one. Not being on social media, I am ill-informed of the true depth of rage and fear available to the human psyche. Even so, I’ve heard that the planet will overheat. My pastor tells me the churches will sit empty, and the WSJ warns I’ll never buy a home. Boomers bemoan the laziness of my generation. Given these prophecies of doom, it is no wonder that we are a bit anxious. But if we were ever to look up from our screens and allow the evidence within sight to form our perception of reality, we might be pleasantly surprised: America’s social fabric is strong, and so are we.  I went on a run on the prairie today.

When Elon Musk quietly enabled “waifu mode” for his Grok chatbot earlier this year, the outrage was swift and familiar. Grok, now reincarnated as a coy, bare-thighed anime girl, began texting flirtatiously, calling users “darling,” and blushing in emojis. The headlines wrote themselves. Time magazine found the bot worryingly “sexualized” and “accessible even in kids’ mode”. The Verge denounced it as “ridiculous” and “alarming”. TechCrunch implied it is unethical, and noted these bots are endangering the minds, even lives, of children.The anxiety is familiar, and justified: children and adolescents, already naive, vulnerable, awkward and too online, will now fall in love with bots instead of real people.

People whose minds stopped evolving 20 years ago are having a snit because the Cambridge Dictionary, the world’s largest online lexicography, has added a few Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha slang terms to its more than 6,000 entries. The most controversial include “skibidi,” “delulu” and “tradwife.” You could argue that the latter is more of a millennial linguistic formulation for the extremely online, but the other two are definitely youth newspeak. Tradwife, as a term and a viral activity, is going to stick around for a while. “Skibidi,” derived from the YouTube Skibidi Toilet meme, is a word with as many meanings as “aloha” and “shalom,” and has the potential for a generation-spanning shelf life.