Culture

Back in March, Donald Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History.” Its aim was to counter the “revisionist movement” in our cultural institutions that sought “to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”   Exhibit number one was the Smithsonian Institution, the sprawling agglomeration of museums, libraries, historical landmarks and assorted educational centers in and around Washington DC with affiliate institutions in 47 states.  Founded in 1846, the Smithsonian was the culmination of an earlier movement, supported by such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, to “promote science and the useful arts.

​​President Trump announced a major vibe shift on Truth Social today, declaring that he, like any other sane red-white-and-blue blooded American, finds Sydney Sweeney sexy, especially because she toes the party line. “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the “HOTTEST” ad out there,” he posted. “It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are “flying off the shelves.” Go get ‘em, Sydney!” Why Trump put “flying off the shelves” is a question only for advanced semioticians, but the White House’s stance is clear on this cultural hot point: Sydney Sweeney good, left-wing “Nazi” denunciations of Sydney Sweeney bad.  But Trump wasn’t done. He turned his Sydney Sweeney boosterism into a full-blown cultural critique.

Hulk Hogan, who died today at 71, will be sorely missed. But in July 1996, arguably the most famous and beloved pro wrestler of all time was standing in a ring as fans booed and threw trash at him. He had just turned into a bad guy for the first time ever.  This was the second time Hogan would take professional wrestling to unprecedented heights.  Nearly 30 years ago, Hogan formed the villainous “New World Order” (NWO) for Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW). Because of Hogan’s group, WCW would beat the former top wrestling company, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) for 83 straight weeks in the TV ratings.  No other company had ever beaten WWE in the ratings.

I write thrillers for a living. All kinds of thrillers. At one point I was in the business of penning Dan Brown-style romps, where ruggedly handsome academics find themselves embroiled in a global chase for the Holy Grail. Then came a stint in domestic noir – sad, isolated women on Scottish isles. Then I had a brief mid-career burst of erotic chillers. Now I’m moving on to folk-horror meets psych-thriller. This might sound ludicrous. It is quite often ludicrous. But it’s also fun: the books translate well and the location research can be a blast. There is a downside, though: plotting. Building a plot is fiendishly hard. You have to steer a fine line between entertainment and believability. The Holy Grail in the jungle can’t just show up – it needs some explanation.

Ever since roughly 2010, politics on both sides of the Atlantic has been dominated in large part by the ‘Great Awokening’, a sudden upsurge among graduate professionals of a kind of radical identitarian politics usually called ‘wokeness’. It has come to define most of the left while the right has reactively defined itself by its opposition. This radical politics appears to be detached from economics and material concerns (a point made forcefully by old-fashioned socialists in places like Jacobin magazine). However, the rise of cultural radicalism among both public and private sector managers has a material cause. That cause is elite overproduction.

“People who have kids do need to have 3 kids to make up for those who have 0 or 1 kid or [the] population will collapse,” Elon Musk recently wrote on X, in response to a post by the influencer Mario Nawfal warning that “if things continue as they are, humans have their days numbered.” This is increasingly the tenor of the right-wing discourse around declining birth rates: it is not enough to feel serious concern about the consequences of fewer humans coming into existence—about schools and colleges shuttering, about pensions running out of funds, about the intangible loss that comes with fewer children, fewer siblings, fewer friends, fewer souls.

Something has changed in America’s psyche. Violence has become more acceptable. It’s not just that we’ve seen two attempted – and very nearly successful – attacks on Donald Trump’s life, it’s that a worrying number of young Americans cheered on those attempted assassinations and still wish they had succeeded. Since early this year there has been widespread public support for smashing up Tesla dealerships – and for shooting Elon Musk. An unprecedented 10,000 new threats have been made against Senate and congressional members just this year, according to Capitol Police. Applause for the actual murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December goes on, unabated, online.

One of the first pieces exhibited in Superfine: Tailoring Black Style – The Met’s annual spring Costume Institute exhibition – is a small and faded tan wool livery coat, most likely created by Brooks Brothers, the oldest apparel brand in continuous operation in the States. On its website the New York-based Brooks Brothers proudly claims that since it was founded in 1818 it has dressed no less than “39 presidents, along with industry leaders and cultural innovators.” What it doesn’t say it that it also dressed southern slaves. The mid-19th century tan coat was worn by a black enslaved child, just before the Civil War, at a time when household servants reflected their owner’s status.

Both of my parents are Jewish, as were theirs, going as far back as anybody remembers – probably to Abraham. As with many secular, Jewish-American families, God was practically non-existent in our house, though we still observed holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover. There came a point, however, when I had to ask why we partook in any of these traditions if God, who commanded their observance, wasn’t real. I figured that the Greeks had Zeus, the Romans had Jupiter, the Norse had Odin, and now we have God. This one will pass, too.In college, I studied progressive politics and devoured the writings of Marx and Engels, forming a firm foundation for my socialist beliefs.

The narratives we tell ourselves about the past are hardly set in stone. It’s in this ambiguity where Tancredi Di Carcaci finds inspiration. Through his practice, the British artist contemplates, and sometimes perpetuates, the blurring of straightforward histories, especially that of art, as traditionally passed down. His sculptures – a mix of ceramic works and assemblages combining cast bronze, ceramic and hunks of marble and stone sourced from Siena, Egypt and elsewhere – have aesthetic and thematic roots spanning the Renaissance, neoclassical revival, Romantic painting and 20th-century modernism.“For me, with art, I don't try and restrict myself.

In the 1950s, witch hunts were stoked by pamphlets identifying supposed communists in the media. Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo fell victim to this vicious whispering campaign. He was blacklisted by Hollywood and only given full credit for his work after his death. Today, witch hunts happen on Twitter – with the speed and ferocity of lightning. Kevin Spacey was struck by just such a bolt when he was accused of various sexual assaults on social media and then formally accused in courts in the US and UK – where he was cleared. And now, in trying to recover his life and his reputation after being scorched by the #MeToo movement, the double Oscar-winner has recognized that there is nothing new about his experience.

Over the past half century, media and academic sources repeatedly suggested that increasingly dense cities would dominate the future. Places such as London, San Francisco and Chicago would dominate an economy. Today, this assessment seems grossly dated. Even in the pages of the urbanista New York Times there are widespread fears of an “urban doom loop.” But this, too, is a stretch. Great core cities will not go the way of post-imperial Rome, but their role is being recast as the urban frontier shifts increasingly to the periphery. What we are seeing mirrors H.G. Wells’s vision. He predicted that most economic life, and most families, would shift to the suburbs and exurbs.