Month: February 2025

“Novelists (forgive me if you’re a novelist who disagrees with this) seem not to give much of a shit about story structure. On my shelves right now I see Rachel Cusk, David Mitchell, Mark Danielewski… Even more mainstream authors think little of introducing a character, then jumping back in time in the next chapter to fill in some relevant detail, then jumping sideways to bring in a new person etc etc. There’s no reason why a movie can’t do this (plenty of movies already do). There’s no reason why a movie HAS to start with the status quo, then introduce a complication, then have a debate, then cross some stupid threshold…”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/on-authenticity

“What’s going on here is the construction of a very interesting emotional accountability sink which might be nicknamed “Tell Me More About This Not Our Fault Theory, I Find It Strangely Compelling”. If you create an image of the planning system as so ridiculous that it’s literally impossible to build anything, then nobody can criticise you for failing to build the specific thing that was your job. If you proliferate anecdotes about underwater fish discos and words with no vowels in them hahaha, then you avoid awkward questions about what actually went wrong. In general, the aim is to encourage a complete resignation that the whole planning system is broken, so as to avoid consideration of what specific things are actually broken”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-only-growth-industry-is-excuses

“Once upon a time the norm was a kind of musical detente, a spirit of mutual disinterest across fans of different genres; saying “I’m a metalhead” would have been sufficient for most people to simply nod and understand that Lamar was not an object of particular interest for me. But alas, here again we live in a world of musical appreciation that the poptimists have made, and simply not having an opinion on popular artists is not an option. (To suggest indifference towards Swift is no different from directly insulting her; go on TikTok and try it.)”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/kendrick-lamar-talented-musician

“This insistence on one’s own weakness a contemptible way to live in the world. But the style of the Soy Right is as important, and in some ways even more depressing, than its animating resentments. If the online right of the first Trump administration was an unstable blend of Facebook credulity and 4chan nihilism, the Soy Right is an unbearable mix of Reddit corniness and Twitter self-satisfaction. We can look at some examples. Renaming a government agency after a decade-old memecoin and making the website an A.I.-generated cartoon–that’s Soy Right”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/soy-right-ascendant

“That is not to say that every single fascist is a libertarian or vice versa, or that they exactly have the same psychological origin story. What they both share is a fundamental misrecognition of the Other: the other is just a thing, some material for exploitation or domination. As such, they cannot understand and fundamentally distrust anything that doesn’t openly declare a relation between self and others that is non-exploitative or based on non-domination. They both cannot recognize any universal interest, only the wars and temporary alliances of particular interests, be they individuals, nations, or races”

https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/gold-and-brown

“You can wander through the Smithsonian Museum of American History looking for hints of where it all started, for the historical analogs for this point in our oscillating cycle of glory and blood. We brought the slaves and built the land of freedom; we killed the natives and planted the tree of liberty; we won the war of liberation and fell in love with Jim Crow. On and on and on. It’s a mistake to ever get too comfortable with where America is going. There is always someone somewhere plotting to drag us back into the past. “How did we become Us?” asks the museum’s centerpiece exhibit of social movements. Turns out we haven’t, quite yet. In that exhibit is a black and white news photo of columns of KKK members, holding hands, marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, with the US Capitol behind them. I peered down at the date: 1925. A perfect century ago. The cycle is turning right on time”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/revolution-town