Culture

When I try to sleep at night, I can't relax. I blearily turn on the TV, but I can't change the channel. My TV is telling me I am going to die, maybe from Covid (they say there's a new variant, you know, called Monkeypox); maybe from climate change because it is likely already too late. Before I drown because of climate change, I'll be hungry because supply chains don't work anymore, and inflation is stripping away my purchasing power, and some sort of fascist coup will happen, and I'll probably have to wear all gray clothes all the time like in the dystopian movies. Then there are the TV diseases, bowel disorders and skin problems that medicines I can't afford might fix except side effects can include blindness, paralysis, saying thingstoofasttounderstandanditallisjustablur of fear.

We're all in major trouble anyway, so may as well throw another culture war onto the bonfire. How about this: specialists versus generalists. You can picture it now: the specialists refuse to fight except through a very esoteric discipline that only they understand and won't shut up about. While the generalists fight any way they can, on the beaches, on the landing grounds — and badly all around. The debate between specialists and generalists is an old one, and these days it isn't much of a debate at all. The specialists have all but routed their generalist foes, and are busy dictating terms (in extremely technical language with plenty of appendices).

An unfortunate milestone has been passed in the United States as it is reported that for the first time ever there are more marijuana smokers than cigarette smokers in our once great nation. To put it bluntly, so to speak, this societal transformation has taken iconic American glamor, the Marlboro Man, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and replaced it with Cheech, Chong and Otto the school bus driver from The Simpsons. Here in New York City, where once men in suits and hats and square dames in heels hustled, cigarette betwixt fingers, plowing ahead to the future, it now just smells like weed. Everywhere. Rockefeller Center? Smells like weed. Subway stations? Smell like weed. Washington Square Park? Well, OK, Washington Square Park always smelled like weed. But you get the point.

Eliza Fletcher was abducted and murdered on her morning run last Friday. The mother of two young boys was up at 4:30 a.m. to squeeze in a workout before a hectic day of prepping her kids for school and teaching kindergarten. Many working moms understand why Fletcher was out running so early. There was probably no other time in her day to do it. Many runners understand why she was running in the dark. Training takes time and discipline, so pre-sunrise hours are popular to get in necessary miles. Fletcher was a serious runner who had qualified for the Boston Marathon and was heavily involved in the running community online. A chilling video image of Fletcher, dressed in purple shorts and a pink sports bra just before the abduction, left female runners nationwide gripped with fear.

Every writer from the New York area who lived through 9/11 has to write about it, right? Not long after the terrorist attacks — I was about eight years old, keep in mind — I came up with a game, which my mother indulged. I called it “Pilot.” I would approach my mother, and I might or might not have a little puzzle piece or something hidden in or under my clothes. My mother would then pat me down, trying to find it. If she found it, I would be “arrested.” If I hadn’t hidden it, I’d walk into the next room — “boarding the flight” — with no incident. But if I had hidden it and slipped it past security, I’d “board the flight” and then knock over a “skyscraper” I’d built out of wooden blocks. Yes, at age eight, I was pretending to be Osama bin Laden.

Quirky actress Jennifer Lawrence has come clean about her fears in a new interview with Vogue. Spiders, you ask? Heights? No. J-Law claimed that what keeps her up at night is… Tucker Carlson. Cockburn's thoughts drifted back to the height of Lawrence’s fame and realized that claims like this are nothing new for the sanctimonious Hollywood sweetheart. After all, here we have a woman that for years was synonymous with cringe. Striding up and down the red-carpet telling interviewers how hungry she was and demolishing pizza at the Academy Awards. Every OTT gesture screamed "relate to me, women of America!" It was inevitable that her obsession with coming across as ~subversive~ would drip downstream into politics.

Kim Kardashian’s behind is on the front page once again. This time, it’s being accused of disrespecting the great people of America. The forty-one-year-old and her bare buttocks grace the cover of Interview magazine's September edition, the "American Dream" special. https://twitter.com/kimkardashian/status/1567135904183250944 Cockburn must admit that the bleached eyebrows are lost on him. But he wonders how warranted the other criticisms of Kardashian are. Some people online were eager to compare Kim’s look to that of male make-up artist Jeffree Star. Journalist Piers Morgan quoted her tweet of the cover, saying, "You think the American Dream is about baring your ass in front of the flag?" (Nice American English, Piers!).

Read chronicles of ancient peasant life, or examine photographs taken a century ago. Behold castes, tortures, and endless annals of servitude and uncertain order. Backbreaking work and darkness fill short lives in a cruel world of grandees, subjects, and slaves. The injustices and trials of 21st-century life in this thing we call the US and West pale by comparison. Did this freedom and plenty just happen by accident? Or should we rethink what seemed to be political, economic and social triumphs as crimes against nature, and for good measure reimagine world history as a global casualty of Anglo-European rapacity? History is in trouble. Less-than-progressive staff at historical societies, archives, and libraries have been retired or purged.

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend being shoved overboard as soon as she reaches the ripe age of twenty-five. But while killjoys are moaning online about the actor’s disposition, Cockburn believes that DiCaprio is actually carrying out God’s work. Climate change, pollution, the energy crisis — the reason for these disasters is simple: there are just too many people on earth. How does this relate to a middle-aged actor dating young supermodels, you ask? Simple: Leo is stealing their best child-bearing years one at a time without impregnating them. Now, Cockburn is no scientist — but he bets that if Leo keeps this up for a few more decades, you will literally see the oceans get clearer. He’s done the math.

Cockburn understands there's no accounting for choice of swimming hole, but he also knows there are limits. For Kiwi singer-songwriter Lorde, her announcement during a performance in Washington, DC that she had spent the day soaking in the Potomac River was met with a murmurs of disgust and horror from concertgoers in fear for her health. https://twitter.com/whyets/status/1564445416657141760?t=tpOXYvpbM6G_6AWIVqDgIA&s=19 https://twitter.com/_NatalieEscobar/status/1564425696637747201?t=eNV9VSGCGbF85pUT5Msong&s=19 The Potomac is a fitting body of water for the capital city, slick with grime and corruption, rivaling the best that Congress has to offer.

About two weeks after I graduated college, I realized I was pretty much useless. I was in North Carolina for a friend’s wedding, getting ready with the rest of the groomsmen, and I was having a hell of a time ironing my dress shirt. The shirt itself had an ungainly shape that I struggled to map onto the board, and each stroke of the iron seemed to create new creases. My mother handled the laundry at home, and in college I rarely had to dress formally. When I did, I’d transfer my shirts directly from dryer to closet, and that was usually good enough. Finally, I gave up and asked my friend John for help. John, a confident, capable guy who always made me feel inadequate, agreed.

There’s an expression that’s been mainstream for a couple years now that most people refer to in its abbreviated and more G-rated form as “BDE.” (I am too proper to write it out, but you can be enlightened by HuffPost here.) The term, denoting the magnetism of the manly, “strong silent type,” has apparently been around since at least 2020. But it’s been trending over the last month as Kari Lake, the Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate, and Kim Kardashian, the reality star who recently beat Hillary Clinton at a legal knowledge trivia game (it’s not her fault; the laws don’t apply to her) both used it.

It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Beverly Hills and Bill Maher — stand-up comedian, late-night television host, prophet of the great American silent majority — is ruminating on what the hell has gone wrong with the left: “It all comes, I think, from two terrible sources: bad parenting and insane universities. That’s where the craziness is coming from.” Maher is sitting with me in “Club Random,” the neon-light-festooned, decked-out bungalow he converted into a television studio in 2020, after social distancing requirements forced his weekly HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher, to shoot remotely.

Upon opening Louise Perry’s new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, I’m moved to tears by the dedication: For the women who learned it the hard way Unlike many other people who have read and reviewed Perry’s work, reading her book wouldn’t be some academic exercise in contemplating how liberal feminism has let women down. It wouldn’t be evaluating what those poor sluts over there have endured in the wake of the sexual revolution. Reading her book was personal. I’m one of those sluts. I’m a case study for her thesis. A cautionary tale. I knew this book was going to be difficult. And it made me realize it’s time to finish this essay — one I’ve been trying to write for four years.

Eighty-year-old Julie Jaman has been banned from her local YMCA swimming pool in Port Townsend, Washington, where she’s been a member for thirty-five years. Why? She “discriminated against” and “harassed” a transgender employee who was in the locker room by asking “Clementine Adams” “if he had a penis” and demanding he leave the ladies’ room. The disturbing incident has sparked a controversy and way more uproar than should ever exist over something so bizarre and perverse, leading one to wonder: are genital checks inevitable? Jaman recounted to the media: “I heard a man’s voice, very distinctive. I saw a man in a woman’s bathing suit where two toilets are and there were two little girls standing there taking down their suits to use the toilet.

Fifty years ago, everything seemed to be breaking down, kind of like it is now. In fact, it can feel like the 1970s redux. Searing issues of war, ecology, race, and “malaise” have never really disappeared. A silent majority, political schism, limits to growth, and price inflation — all are here. Yet there are new uncertainties too. Even to optimists, debt-induced fragility clouds the economic horizon. Investor Charles Munger notes that bitcoin actively undermines the Federal Reserve System; any gain comes from trading, not from creating products, crops or rents. As fantastic as non-binary sexuality, cryptocurrency points to additional contemporary follies.

Recently, Demi Lovato has been feeling more feminine. The singer and actress a few days ago told “Spout Podcast” host Tamara Dhiaan that when it comes to pronouns, she’s “adopted she/her again.” Lovato, who came out as nonbinary in 2021, explained her decision: “I’m such a fluid person.” “Fluid” would be one word to describe Lovato, whose Instagram profile since April has read “They/them/she/her.” Cue the confusion from even woke media, though podcaster Dhiaan followed up the interview with this very helpful clarifying tweet: “For the record: Demi Lovato did NOT say she is abandoning they/them as her pronouns, she simply said she is adding she/her.” The Washington Post also chimed in to help make sense of this very important celebrity announcement.