We bought one recently, to make it easier to cook food for the baby—who mostly eats boiled and blended-up vegetables and legumes—since the pressure radically reduces the time necessary to cook things like beans. But I was terrified of making some blunder under the influence of new parent sleep deprivation and turning this pot into a giant Unabomber-type explosive device, killing us all. And since I do more of the cooking it sat unused for a while.

Pressure cookers aren’t really common in American households, although I have the sense that they were in the 1950s. They somehow went out of fashion, maybe because of the rare instances when something like the above accident did take place. My impression is that they were supplanted by the 2000s or 2010s by the slow cooker (the “Crockpot”).

That transition is an interesting one, in that it seems to have something to do with what I call petty modernity. This term is supposed to refer to a kind of retreat since the 1960s, or perhaps since the Second World War, from an earlier, grander, “Promethean” modernity that more unabashedly took risks in harnessing the power of science and engineering to dominate nature in service of human convenience.

The pressure cooker is a creation of Promethean grand modernity: it pairs an understanding of chemistry, which teaches us that cooking can be done at higher temperatures if the contents are under pressure, speeding up the cooking process, with the ability to manufacture pots that can create that pressure in the comfort of your domicile. Pressure is dangerous, and you have to follow the instructions that come with the pot to make sure something doesn’t go wrong, but if you follow the instructions this natural force can be made use of to help make your daily routine more efficient and your homecooked meals tastier.

The slow cooker, goes in the other direction: it allows you to stretch out a cooking process that goes along on autopilot. It bespeaks harmlessness—though I always found the idea of leaving a cooking appliance on while you leave the house to be a bit frightening—and seems attached to that current of back-to-the-land, reactionary-romantic-hippie-organic thinking that undergirds a good portion of petty modernity. “Slow food” as a revolt against the violent velocity of the pressure cooker.

Slow cookers are almost impossible to find in Brazil. The ones I found on Mercado Livre, the country’s leading ecommerce platform, were expensive and would be shipped from China or the US. I thought about bringing one from the US, but got tripped up by the voltage differences and thought: better not try it.

So I ended up screwing up my courage and trying out the panela de pressão, and the result was the best red beans and rice I’ve ever made. Linguiça, sausage, of the kind here called linguiça calabresa—not sure why, because it seems to me more Portuguese than Calabrian—makes a decent substitute for andouille, the key ingredient in a good New Orleans-style pot of red beans, and you can get little bottles of Tabasco in supermarkets here. I never have the patience to get the beans properly creamy cooking in normal pots—you have to boil them for three or four hours, I think, but I get too hungry after two. The pressure cooks them to a delightful creaminess in under an hour: it’s a marvel.

Why did Brazil keep the pressure on when America dialed it down? “Petty modernity” is something further advanced in the “advanced nations” of the world, no doubt about it, though it leaves its marks on the periphery, too. The country that built Brasília bet big on one modernist version of Promethean modernity and although a range of forces are now conspiring to narrow Brazil’s horizons, the process is not as complete as elsewhere. Underdevelopment preserves, here and there, traces of the old Fordist order in Brazil (like the almost automat-style bakeries of São Paulo), and Fordism and Promethean modernity are almost one and the same.

But we can be more specific. The slow cooker, in America, was a cooking implement made for a late-twentieth-century society where millions of middle-class women now had full-time jobs but were still responsible for doing most of the cooking. You could throw some stuff in the slow cooker in the morning as you were preparing to drop off the kids at school and come back home to find dinner ready to be served to dad and the kids.

In Brazil, on the other hand, much home cooking is still done by maids, a vanishing rarity among the American middle classes. And the slow cooker is not so convenient for the domestic worker who comes for a few hours to clean and cook. Much better that the cooking be completed in a matter of minutes than for it to take eight hours.

The best explanation, though, for the enduring popularity of the pressure cooker in Brazil, in my opinion, is the bean. Beans are practically inevitable in Brazilian cuisine: I feel bad for a dear friend who is coming to visit soon and whose stomach does not tolerate this legume very well. He may find himself going hungry.

Beans are also a pain to cook under the constraints of the modern middle-class schedule. How to fit soaking the night before, sorting, and hours of cooking in between work, the commute, and everything else? In America we work often with canned cooked beans; even the great contemporary reference on these matters for the supposedly cosmopolitan and gastronomically sophisticated upper-middle class, the New York Times Cooking app, often recommends using canned beans in its recipes: a concession to reality.

Here canned beans are very hard to find. You must cook them from dry, and for that, there’s no two ways about it: you need a panela de pressão.

Apologies to my readers for the long silence from my corner here. I have a good excuse, which is that I got married and my son, Sebastian, was born. I should now be able to issue posts on a somewhat more regular basis again. This one ran today on the Hedgehog Review blog.

On a recent visit to Atlanta, my sister and I took a walk along the city’s Beltline, the project that represents the crowning public-works achievement of this southern metropolis’s boom.

It’s an attractive space—a 22-mile loop of bike paths, promenades, and trails that, in warmer months, serves as a promenade for the city’s young, active, multiracial upper-middle class. Like New York City’s smaller and similarly named High Line, it is a magnet for tourism, an emblem of contemporary urbanism, and a fillip to real-estate speculation in surrounding areas. Bare-chested men and sports-bra-clad women roller-skate past new glass-and-steel apartment buildings, glistening with sweat in the southern summer heat, tugged along by equally well-muscled dogs. Parents push strollers. People do yoga in the shade on patches of grass.

Also like the High Line, Paris’s Coulée verte René-Dumont, and several other linear parks, the Atlanta Beltline was made from abandoned train tracks, ruins of a past industrial age converted into a playground for a new, postindustrial bourgeoisie. “Adaptive reuse,” as it’s known in the planning and architecture world, adds to the appeal of a project. It sounds very environmentally responsible but also feasible.

All of these parks are agreeably nice, and, at the same time, somewhat disappointing. Perhaps it is because they have come to seem predictable in their understated modesty. A century and a half ago, a rising New York City built Central Park, a massive undertaking that remade the geography of the city, demolished a black neighborhood, and cost more than what the United States paid for Alaska.

By comparison, the Beltline is a layup. The train tracks were already there. How much could it cost to tear them up, put down some asphalt and plant a few trees? (A lot, it turned out, in part because the project also involved building transit—a real investment in the city, to be certain, but of a more functional nature.) The project penciled out nicely: Its defenders were rightly convinced that the boost to the value of the surrounding area, and the investment it would attract, would more than make up for the outlays.

The result is a very attractive and usable urban amenity that nonetheless seems timid for a great rising city’s banner public works project. There are any number of reasons for this, from the American South’s traditional aversion to state involvement in the economy to the bloated costs and timetables that bedevil all kinds of public-works programs in the contemporary United States.

Atlanta, a sprawling city in need of more high-quality public space, is better off because of the Beltline, and the city easily might not have ended up with an amenity of its scale and quality. You could fairly call the project innovative, even if other cities were doing similar things at the same time. But you could not call it grand, the way that Central Park is grand.

Few new things are grand these days. Each successive invention seems to operate on a smaller, meaner scale than what it replaces. The movie goes from the theater to the laptop screen, the warm sodium-vapor light gives way to the cold diodes of the LED. The late-night television host with his studio and his band is tied down like Gulliver by a million podcast hosts. Even warfare has lost a measure of its grandeur: The great machines of past decades, tanks and submarines and battleships, now fall victim to attacks by tiny, cheaply made drones, piloted remotely.

Modernity once seemed to be an age in which things operated on an ever grander scale. That great machines, structures and trends would grow greater over time was a conviction shared by Marx and Tocqueville in the nineteenth century. During World War II, a massive war of movement fought around the globe with more men and materiel than ever before—accompanied by industrialized genocidal slaughter—this concept seemed to reach its high-water mark.

And with the end of the war, modernity seemed to become still more grandly simple, converging into a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union to decide whether capitalism or communism was the great master ideology of modernity. Each system availed itself of schemes of what the political scientist James C. Scott (among others) calls “high modernism”—grand, top-down, apparently rational, systematic plans, from the construction of Brasília or the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects to the Soviet collectivization of agriculture.

But somewhere along the line things stopped getting bigger. And Scott, who mocked these grand plans, took little note of their disappearance from the scene, a process that began long before he got around to describing them. High modernity turned in on itself, and daily life in America, the war’s great victor, registered the shift early.

The automobile was not the cause of this involution, but it was one of its first great instruments. By car, Americans—enriched by the war that had stimulated our industrial production while sparing us the damage others had received from occupying armies—began to abandon the great industrial cities that had been our signal contribution to modernity. Detroit, St. Louis, New York City, Baltimore, and dozens of other cities suffered; some today are still, after a wave of selective revitalization, in a physical state far worse than European cities such as Dresden that had been leveled during the war. With newfound wealth we indulged a temptation that had always been ours: to reenact, in modern circumstances, the yeoman agrarian pageant of isolation and self-sufficiency that we still cherished as our great national tradition despite its demise in the nineteenth century. In other words—we moved, in even greater numbers, to the suburbs.

There life was “modern” because it had all the newest appliances and conveniences. It wasn’t like the grimy, crowded inner city with its unseemly tenements. But life was on an undeniably more minor scale there. No large crowds or tall buildings, no wide fields or parks—just rows of widely spaced houses like your own. And cars. The car seems the perfect American invention: a piece of individual personal property that moves us around, big enough for one person, or a nuclear family, but no more. It moves us around on our terms, our schedule—unlike the train, the master form of transportation of the earlier, centralizing, “great” modernity, which ran on timetables set by the company that operated the line. The car is a Janus-faced thing: The system of organization, manufacture and mass consumption built around it lent its name to one of grand modernity’s great governing systems: Fordism. But the car was also the harbinger of that system’s unraveling.

In the decades after the war, California, the suburban-automobile state par excellence, emerged as a new cultural pole alongside the old Eastern cities. Its politics, the apparently radical politics of the age, was a politics against “systems”—against, it almost seemed, grand modernity itself. California had always represented, in the mind of the nation, the last redoubt of the old self-sufficiency (though its own history belies that idea). The state gathered wealth and power in the decades to come through its mastery of a new modernity, organized on a more apparently modest, unobtrusive basis. Much of this had to do with digital technology, and not accidentally so. What is virtual or digital is often physically unimpressive or unimposing and either decentralized or seemingly so. Consider the physical aspect of Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of venture capitalism: If not for the redwood trees, it could be mistaken for a string of business parks in the suburbs of Dallas or Cleveland.

The digital revolution has preserved this modesty even as technology advances. Even the building of data centers, the feature of the current wave of innovation that most closely approximates the old grand modernity in its scale and speed, lacks the drama of its industrial predecessors. Data centers have no smokestacks, no great puffs of steam, no blazing furnaces. These sprawling warehouses full of computers in the exurbs may consume great deals of energy, but they do so quietly, out of sight.

Of the sources of renewable energy, only nuclear energy—the fateful final product of grand modernity—is imposing. It is not to deny that solar panels and wind turbines are vital to reining in climate change to point out that they are hardly striking inventions, compared to what came before them. Each one produces on such a smaller scale. Just as it takes many light-emitting diodes to replace one incandescent filament, so it takes many panels and turbines to replace a single coal-burning power plant. And the very advantage of solar and wind, the fact that they do not produce carbon emissions or dangerous waste, lends them also a certain insubstantial quality.

How to describe the dwindling dimensions of our world? The term “postmodernity” gestures at aspects of the phenomenon, especially in the realm of culture, but with a different spin. Postmodernism, as a movement or tendency in art and thought, was supposed to be a kind of mocking reaction against the self-serious grandeur of modernism. (James C. Scott himself, for his sophisticated teasing of the builders of Brasília, was a postmodernist, though of the right, not the left.) But the joke, at this point—some sixty years on—has worn off considerably, and we are left with the more disquieting possibility that it disguised a defensive posture, an anticipation of retrenchment, as the old jokes about the Soviet Union surely did (“We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us,” was one standby). Have things simply shrunk down to size?

At least in the West. China is undergoing, by all appearances, a transformation that blends the great scale of the grand modern (high-speed trains, massive apartment complexes, vast cities and factories), with the diffusion and diminished conspicuousness of the new dispensation. The electric car, not the combustion engine; the drone show, not the firework show; coal, yes, but also the solar panel and the wind turbine, not the nuclear power plant or the oil refinery. The social credit score, not the gulag.

In the West, meanwhile, Trump promises a big triumphal arch, a big military parade, a Big Beautiful Bill—but save for the armed forces, the state needed to accomplish big things has been left to rot for fifty years. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a desperate reach toward a grand past that retreats ever farther out of reach. And Europe is realizing its grand alliance with America is only a memory of the previous century.

We’re still living in modernity, in some sense of the term, but even amid the bewildering changes, it’s hard to shake a sense of a growing smallness or pettiness, one hardly limited to the diminished imaginations and actions of world leaders. Life under petty modernity might best be described by the title of a collection of essays by literary critic Becca Rothfeld’s essays: All Things Are Too Small. Rothfeld’s critique of minimalism as a design and life ethos—representing, as it does, the congealing of once-revolutionary modernist ideas into a modest gelatin—fits well with the overall idea. Columnist Ross Douthat chose “decadence,” the painful dysfunction of a system rather than its complete breakdown, as his master concept for a moment when, without any great collapse, things are neither so great nor so vital as they used to be. It may be that a symptom of decadence is a tendency toward scaling down: the fate of the California high-speed train and the British HS2. Call it pettification.

A risk-averse attitude accompanies this scaling down. Grand modernity was self-consciously Promethean and embraced a measure of danger. Petty modernity is afraid of that danger, rejects it, seeks to keep it under wraps. The cigarette, life-giving, toxic little torch, is a product of high modernity and leaves traces everywhere. The vape is a product of petty modernity, its flavor an imitation, its fumes leaving behind no residue, its consumption supposedly better for one’s health.

Some prefer to moralize about the shrinking of our attention spans—from book to social-media post, film to short-form video—while others find a new religion in the apparent “acceleration” in cultural life. But are we moving faster, or are we merely passing through smaller things at the same rate?

People find ways to think about the cultural and material changes over the last eighty years in a positive way. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s vindication of the rhizome versus the tree lent highbrow support to a scorn for the grand and the organized and a new romanticism of organic chaos, of things that are nimble and low to the ground. Baudrillard sometimes seemed to experience a sense of excitement at the possibilities unleashed when the sign ceases to signify.

But one aspect of the simulacrum—the representation—that is often neglected (though it was certainly understood by Plato) was that it is a lesser thing, a smaller thing. To imagine that we live in a world of representations, digital or otherwise, can in a certain way be flattering, even concealing a tacit Enlightenment faith in progress (sometimes disguised in apparent pessimism or declinism). We are capable of making new representations and can live through them more than before: farther from nature, more in a world of our own creation—how exciting and new. But will a future age care about these representations, and how we lived through them? Or will their other, more fundamental quality produce the final verdict?

So far, nothing catastrophic has emerged from petty modernity. The Beltline is nice. LEDs are cheap and functional. AI has a range of uses. Bigger is not always better, especially when the big things in question are, say, wars. Materially, we remain more or less comfortable in our smaller world. But it does not seem that we are content with it. A temptation to, well, make things great again has emerged and will not easily be extinguished.

Grand ambitions in a grand age are dangerous enough, but they are achievable. Such designs in a time that seems to march in the opposite direction are likely to bring frustration, and maybe worse. But when the remains of grander things are all around us, things that show what feats humanity is capable of, how can we keep from trying, at least, to equal them? Shouldn’t we?

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In the article, I size up Rufo’s allegedly Gramscian reading of the culture war and his allegedly Gramscian prescription for fighting it to win. The basic reaction on much of the left to Rufo’s Gramscianism is that it’s basically ersatz, something scandalous to say (wow, you’re citing a communist) as you do what you always wanted to do anyway: smash your enemies in the higher education sphere and the liberal-aligned private and public bureaucracy. There’s something to that, but if the right has long wanted to smash these very enemies, it has never used the state to do so in the way it is using it now. There is something Gramscian, or at least Machiavellian, about Rufo’s tactics, his hard-nosed rhetoric that dispenses with moralism and teaches followers they need to know how to be not good.

But his basic read on the culture war is anti-Gramscianism masquerading as Gramscianism. Rufo thinks Gramsci teaches that all politics is elite politics; the crux of Gramsci’s much-debated thought is something closer to the opposite, that all elite politics has material, mass political and social stakes. But what are the material stakes of the culture war? I spend the second half of the essay trying to develop my own Gramscian reading of the American culture war, one that the great Sardinian might be more likely to endorse.

Elsewhere in recent weeks, I wrote my first piece for UnHerd, on Javier Milei’s unexpected victory in Argentina’s midterm elections. “Yesterday’s midterm elections took on the appearance of an all-or-nothing gamble,” I wrote—and Milei’s victory, after imposing biting austerity on his country, was “tantamount to a national exclamation of Thank you, sir, may I have another?”

If I had more space, I might have said something about the broader agony of Argentina, which Milei has not yet (and may not) transcended—the agony of being between the developed world and the periphery in a uniquely vexed way. The country’s hunger for dollars, which (distrusting the national financial system after many betrayals over the decades) everybody from the lower middle class to the richest of the rich uses to save their money instead of stashing it in pesos, is both symbol of Argentina’s international ambitions and albatross preventing it from achieving them. Milei nearly got himself into a currency crisis by propping up the peso in defiance of orthodox economic recommendations, but when you understand how little Argentines are willing to immiserate themselves further with a bad exchange rate, you understand the scope of the problem there.

Hoping to write a few pieces for this venue in the coming weeks on early America, Bernard Bailyn, social democracy and a few other things besides. Thanks for reading and hope to see you at noon.

It was only a matter of time. Major League Baseball announced on September 23 that next year’s regular season would see the introduction of robot umpires for balls and strikes, a system already in use in the minor leagues. The robots won’t call every pitch (at least, not for now), but teams will be allowed a set number of challenges to umpires’ calls per game, similar to the system now used for plays on the field.

This would appear to be a difficult rule change to argue against, even for baseball fans, a group that has always contained a vocal minority of extreme conservatives when it comes to the rules. Watching the broadcast of any baseball game, you can see a little box added in by broadcasters that shows the batter’s strike zone. And when each pitch is thrown, a little circular icon is added, showing where the pitch reached the plate. It is easy to see that occasionally (sometimes frequently), the little circular icon appears outside the box, signaling a ball—only for the umpire to call it a strike. That is exactly the kind of injustice that the new appeals system is meant to remedy.

But this easy inference rests on unexamined assumptions about the ontology of the strike zone—no, seriously—which, at as it currently exists, is a far more political concept than it appears at first blush.

It’s true that the rulebook is very clear on the subject:

The STRIKE ZONE is that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap.

But things don’t actually work exactly that way. As Brazilians like to say, na prática a teoria é outra: in practice, theory is something else. In this case, the reality is much more interesting than the theory. In practice, the strike zone varies from umpire to umpire, and sometimes from day to day even for a particular umpire. But it would be wrong to say that the strike zone is therefore arbitrary.

Announcers know the way that the game really works—they will often note, sometimes with an eyebrow slightly raised, that tonight, such-and-such umpire’s strike zone has “a lot of room on the outside,” meaning he is calling pitches on the outside of the plate as strikes. If you take a strictly rationalistic, objective approach to the strike zone, you would say that such an umpire is simply biased. But that would be wrong. The truth is that the strike zone has always been a subjectively constructed thing: it is where the umpire says it is.

Still, there are ground rules. If the umpire gives one team extra “room” on the outside of the zone, he must do the same for the other. If he does, then there’s no problem. It’s only if he gives one team the outside call, and denies the other the same, that players really get mad. The strike zone, therefore, is a political thing that ties the umpire to both teams, a zone measured more by a sense of fairness than by the distance from the top of the shoulders to the hollow beneath the kneecaps.

It’s also something to which pitchers respond. They take note of where the umpire is and isn’t giving them calls. If he’s giving them the call on the outside corner, that’s where he’ll try to throw. If they’re not getting the call, they’ll stop trying. And if a pitcher gets one call on the outside, he might try to push his luck by trying to coax the umpire to give him calls further and further off the plate.

The catcher plays a role, too, “framing” balls just outside the zone by moving his glove into the zone as he catches the ball, in an effort to deceive the umpire. And the catcher is more closely tied to the umpire, more able to influence him, than the pitcher: catcher and umpire, after all, share a common situation, squatting side by side for hours, staring down 100-mile-an-hour fastballs that sometimes ricochet into one or the other of them with painful consequences.

It’s a delicate relational game: the umpire responds to the pitcher and catcher, the batter responds to the umpire—and it can all go wrong, batters and managers howling and swearing and throwing their gear around at a bad call that, in the last instance, may be nothing more than the result of an umpire carried along by the little maneuvers of a pitcher or a catcher who knows how to manipulate.

There’s more politics here: veteran pitchers are believed to sometimes “get” borderline calls from umpires that rookies don’t. This is one reason why Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Walker Buehler (a former World Series winner with the L.A. Dodgers), having experienced the new robot balls-and-strikes umpiring system while playing in the minor leagues earlier this year, says he hates it:

I think it’s inaccurate.… I think in most of the stadiums, it’s not even actually on the plate. I think it shifts certain directions in certain ballparks. I think the human element is a huge part of this game. I think starting pitchers that have pitched for a long time deserve certain parts of the plate that other guys don’t get.

The talents of the pitcher at manipulating that night’s “strike zone,” through clever tactics and through his own prestige, represent one way that he can get ahead of his competitors other than by the raw physical facts of how hard he throws, how much his pitches move, et cetera. If you think that baseball is a sport meant to measure the objective facts of one team’s physical abilities against another’s, then this sort of thing may seem bad to you. But if you view it as a battle of wills as well as of arms and legs, then this sort of thing should be preserved. It’s one of baseball’s distinctive pleasures to watch an aging pitcher, no longer able to overpower opponents by sheer velocity and movement, make ample use of his bag of tricks, including exploiting the ambiguities of the strike zone, to come out ahead of his rivals.

The strike zone, in short, is a tense, numinous zone of emotional contestation and supplication, not in any way reducible to the simple rectangle so misleadingly displayed on TV broadcasts. Except that soon, of course, it will be very much reducible to just that, with robot appeal-court judges standing ready to reject whatever human settlement has been reached between umpires, batters and pitchers in favor of the hard and simple rule of the box.

And in theory, that will, of course, bring us closer to what it says, after all, in the rulebook. Batters and pitchers will have their revenge against the umpires: his authority to expand or retract the zone will now be contingent rather than absolute. A baseball romantic might see the loss of the rich and complex interplay of the pre-robot strike zone as a miniature version of the great losses of modernity: the standardization of national languages, the replacement of artisan craftsmen with mass production, the mechanization of agriculture, and so on. As part of a drive to make the sport more popular over the past several years, the sport’s customary sedateness has been replaced with a faster, modern pace, thanks to a new pitch clock, and some quirks have been eliminated in a search for more highlight reels: Pitchers, for example, no longer bat in the National League, as they did when I was a teenager.

Like all these other changes, robot umpires happened for a reason—the unfairness of the bad call, the capriciousness of the umpire—and like all these changes it will create its own, different set of textured (perhaps less textured) norms, customs and recognizable stratagems in its wake. When to appeal, when not to? How to prevent players—who will seem to have the authority themselves, rather than the managers, to invoke the robot appeal—from challenging rashly? Will the robots have their own, different liabilities to error, not subject to emotional appeal or caprice but equally exploitable by a savvy player? Buehler seems to believe they will, and he would know.

Fairness and exhaustiveness in the application of justice generally comes at the cost of speed, and this may be the worst part of the change: an interruption to an at-bat while we wait for the robots to have their robotic say. Soccer fans often find VAR review a tedious and energy-draining affair (unless, of course, it vindicates them), and baseball already has tedious pauses when, since a rule change a few years ago, calls on the field are appealed, interminably, for review—“by New York,” as the announcers invariably describe it, a synecdoche for the technical HQ that reminds us that city still retains, in this narrow, literal sense at least, its status as cultural arbiter.

One pities the umpires who, with this MLB ukase, are demoted from petty tyrants of the infield diamond to mere functionaries, their rulings now merely provisional. Why have them at all, if the robots have the ultimate say? For the finer points of the game, one assumes: for balks, those subtle things; for deciding if the batter “went around” (another matter of taste); and, most importantly, for deciding how much backtalk, from a disgruntled player or manager, is sufficient to throw him out of the game. Sovereign is he who decides upon the exception.

But in the final analysis, the search for justice in sports—one which leads us ever deeper into combining technology with a simulacrum of law—seems to be a kind of category error. Baseball is not murder: It’s no great outrage if a batter strikes out when he should have walked. The batter might be mad, but he can cry all the way to the bank.

Little injustices like that give fans something to complain about, something to blame instead of their own team’s insufficiency in the event of a loss. No one wants to watch a film where everyone gets exactly what they deserve. Baseball is supposed to have a tragic element—it’s supposed to break your heart. It’s a play, of a kind, a simulacrum of life, with the injustice of the umpires standing in for the injustice of the world. Yet by that same token, perhaps the rule change simply updates the staging for our new circumstances. Appealing to the inhuman justice of the robot, the human creation unresponsive to human appeal: It’s the sort of thing we’ll all have to get used to doing.

A lot of complaints about AI chatbots center, for good reason, on their sycophancy. Yes, you’re absolutely right, they tell you; what an amazing insight, I hadn’t thought of that, you’re a genius. And it’s obvious why they talk to us like this. As Juuls, Cheetos, and OxyContin illustrate, American industry knows how to make addictive products, and Americans are vulnerable to addiction. AI sycophancy is calibrated to satisfy a desire that no GLP-1 can moderate: the craving for affirmation.

Who wouldn’t want to speak to an apparently well-informed interlocutor who confirms your every pronouncement? It’s such a contrast with what it’s like to interact with real people on the Internet, who seem constantly to be hostile. The real world is ever more distrustful and atomized. The appeal is wide-reaching: Even academics, presumably discerning and often skeptical of AI bots whose rise seems to threaten their profession, are often won over when they feed in their own works to the bot and see it offer fulsome praise of their unparalleled intellectual accomplishment. Mirror, mirror on the wall…

The sycophancy problem, however, gestures at something beyond the tonal slant given to the bots by their makers for political reasons, as one part of their charm offensive. You can tell a bot to act more recalcitrant, and it will, sort of. A deeper problem for me at least is just how arbitrarily malleable these things are. It’s boring and bereft of potential.

One thing that makes humans frustrating, flawed, and limited creatures is that we have self-interest, we have biases, we have commitments that we are reluctant to abandon. Adults have some quantity of fixed ideas that come from their upbringing, their class background, their political affinity, their education, their religion, and so on. Intellectuals are supposed to be more flexible or broad-minded, but often this is not true in practice. Academics, for example, are people whose careers are themselves invested, more so than other professions, in particular ideas: one interpretation of a historical period versus another in the literature; one disciplinary approach versus another. Having a professional stake in a certain intellectual position often makes them especially tenacious in defending that position.

These commitments can make us boring or predictable. When you talk to an orthodox economist, if you have a sense of orthodox economics you can generally predict what answers you will get to a question you pose about the economy. But for me, part of what makes intellectual conversation with other people interesting is the attempt to discover their biases, prompt them to defend them, and put them into dialogue with my own. I may disagree firmly with someone’s position, but if they defend it in an interesting manner, I generally end up respecting them and enjoying their company. What’s their system, how are their opinions integrated one with the other—is it original or derivative, idiosyncratic or cookie-cutter? What can I learn from it? In this sense, our biases serve as anchors that actually make us more interesting to talk to, more than obliging and infinitely malleable intellectual servants, like the chatbot. Our biases are a proof of a separate and single, sustained intelligence. It isn’t merely memory that chatbots lack, but the long discipline of having to hone ideas against the world over decades.

We develop biases, positions, theories, commitments as part of our lives. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” as the familiar Didion line has it—but the opposite may be truer: that life is the workshop of our ideas. That is not to say that they are necessarily determined by our circumstances, but that they are deliberately, if often implicitly, chosen to serve a purpose as pieces of the furniture of ourselves (or even integrated into our inner architecture). The Freudian notion of cathexis, investment of mental energy in an idea, points to the way that we rely on our ideas for stability and emotional functioning, one reason why we are often so reluctant to give them up.

Biases, fixed ideas, are responsible for so many of the failures of the human capacity for reason, both great and small. We refuse to entertain opposed viewpoints, persist in error and narrowness, even—at worst—refuse to recognize as human a whole group, race, class, or sex. Yet every human intellectual accomplishment comes about through a sort of bias, or at least a commitment of time and energy to a theory, a possibility, a person, a creed.

AI “bias” isn’t the same thing. Artificial intelligence can be “biased” in the sense that a chatbot’s responses are influenced by the material on which it was trained or the prior instructions it is given by its makers. That is a deflection in a merely instrumental sense, no different from a setting on a car or a microwave. A chatbot can have no intellectual commitments because it does not live, and life is what leads us to settle into commitments. The X AI engine, Grok, can spit out unhinged responses declaring itself “MechaHitler” while at the exact same time it dispenses milquetoast summaries of Hollywood movies to a different user on the platform or cautions another to avoid making gross assumptions about ethnic groups. You get out whatever you put in.

Humans are not like that. Often we are worse. A real-life sycophant, for example—someone who affirms whatever his patron says—has chosen sycophancy deliberately, suspending his capacity for independent reason in hopes of gain. But there is a person in there still, who has the capacity to reassert himself at any point, if his patience runs out or if the calculation of interest changes. And sycophants often manage to deflect their patrons’ will through steady and subtle effort, dropping a word of praise here or a hesitation there. Sycophants, in other words, have their own biases, their own commitments, not to be found in the synthetic sycophancy of ChatGPT.

These commitments and biases are what makes ethical evaluation and real dialogue possible among people. Each directing our own lives under the circumstances in which we live, the habits and poses we develop are the things for which we become responsible. The comfort or solace that our biases afford us are what make us tenacious in defending them: that is what provides the inertia that makes dialogue into something agonistic and, therefore, productive. The friction from one set of biases rubbing against another makes intellectual and political exchange possible.

This is what is absent in “conversation” (in scare quotes because not really such) with chatbots. Not possessing bias in the human sense, chatbots have no stake in the arguments they offer, including when they contradict the human who inputs a prompt. An unbiased interlocutor, in the final instance, is no interlocutor at all. To interact with a synthetic Other, like a chatbot, is to interact without that fateful and tragic gap that lies between every person and every other person. Easier, that is, but pointless.

I keep finding myself writing about Wolfe, a somewhat odd enterprise given the current uneven state of his reputation. In life he was a sort of crypto-conservative stowaway in New York liberal media, admired by conservatives but read also by liberals, and disdained in highbrow places. Today he continues to be read and loved by New York journalists, but mostly in secret. Publicly one is supposed to proffer qualms about the “out of date” aspects of his work. Meanwhile he is openly heroized by conservatives and right-liberals. In New York, his old stomping ground, a judicious silence is mostly maintained. But I see no reason why it should be impossible to seek an accurate picture of, uh, the man in full. At least one left-liberal writer has recently offered a substantially balanced portrait of Wolfe, as writer and sociologist, arguing that one doesn’t have to share his politics to find reading him worthwhile.

Anyway, the Nation article is here and I encourage you to read it if you’re curious. But I wanted to also add here, as I’ve gotten in the habit of doing, a more discursive and personal set of reflections on related themes: on the tyranny of the tinkerer in California in the Sixties, and on my own undergraduate encounters with the dregs of Kesey’s world in the South Bay.

I try to say something in the piece about how the Prankster ethos, and the counterculture more broadly, which has by now been disseminated around the world for fifty years or more, and to whose attitudinal orientation much of Europe itself has been converted (in some ways New York has held out more doggedly) was autochthonous. It sprang, as Wolfe puts it, directly out of “poor old Formica polyethylene 1960s America.” In that sense, as I write in the piece, it was (this sounds absurd) classically Greek. Not in that anyone back then knew or cared about the Greeks, or in that their achievement is comparable, but in the sense that in the classical period the Greeks fashioned a philosophy and a culture out of what they had to hand, a commonsensical philosophical vocabulary (Strauss writes about this), because there was no antecedent tradition to refer to, or the Greeks weren’t interested any more in borrowing from various civilizations further East.

(If California in the Sixties was Greece, then Edith Wharton’s fin de siècle Northeast was Rome—a civilization that created something new by borrowing from an older, more worldly culture across an ocean, all while thinking of itself as more rustic and morally upright. Typical of America, perhaps, that we did things backwards: first Rome, then Greece.)

This is really just another way, I suppose, of phrasing one of the clichés about the counterculture, that it was an American original, flush with self-confidence and ignorance of all else, unlike previous eras in American culture that were for all their genius in some sense provincial or responding to influences from without. Of course there was much of that in the Sixties too, a boom time for Orientalism, but at its core, it’s true, it was something else. Not that the touchstone cultural achievements are necessarily all that imposing. I mean, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Pynchon, yes, holds up far better, and the novel, as a form, was not exactly the highest expression of the period’s sensibility, the experience was. But art is long, and experience is short.

Not short enough for us, quite possibly. It can be so hard to get a handle on the Sixties—you had to be there, but everyone who was there doesn’t remember, and all that. Reading the documents of the era, in the Penguin Sixties Reader, doesn’t help much. Articulateness was not the hallmark of the time. We’re too far from that time and yet too close.

What was that California, under whose shadow we still live? This isn’t the place to give a full cultural history, on which much ink has been expended elsewhere by people more knowledgeable than me. But two things that struck me in Kool-Aid, but also in Hunter Thompson’s book on the Hell’s Angels, and in other inquiries into the period, are how much it was a tinkerer’s paradise, and how integrated all these subcultural threads were with each other then—the heads, the surfers, the bikers, the automobile obsessives.

These are more like separate strands now, although they still overlap considerably. The California suburban upper-middle-class dad who likes motorcycles but also surfing is a familiar type. But in postwar California they mingled freely, in a realm terrifyingly dominated culturally by a middle-class monoculture (Mike Davis of course reminds us that millions of working-class minority Californians were carefully written out of this Beach Boys story).

Watching footage of the Hell’s Angels from the time, for example, they look rather less frightening than you’d imagine—they look mostly like middle-class Californians who had just gone to seed a little bit. The classic athletic builds, the full cheeks and earnest smiles not quite covered up by black beards. These were just guys! (These “just guys” did of course stab someone to death at Altamont.)

The raw material for culture at the time was fortuitously limited in kind but plentiful in quantity. You had a lot of middle-class guys who had some money and a house and a car and some time on their hands, and they liked to work with their hands and they had the opportunity to do so. A lot of them worked in the aerospace industry and handled machinery and liked operating and tinkering with machinery, big and small. There was a certain practical curiosity and practical improvisational inventiveness that did not generally coincide with curiosity toward things typically considered intellectual or literary. There was the sense that this penchant for tinkering could be applied to make better use of the leisure that everyone had at their disposal. Hence: surfing, motorcycles, cars, music. Boards could be endlessly modified, different materials borrowed and tried out; motorcycles could be taken apart and put back together again, cars brought to baroque sophistication (Wolfe got his big break writing about this). And all the scenes overlapped. The surfers took acid, the Hell’s Angels took acid. They were all made of the same simple stuff.

The Pranksters, as the piece mentions, were tinkerers themselves, self-taught filmmakers and bizarro musicians and audiovisual engineers, tireless constructors and deconstructors of the strobe lights and amps necessary to put on the Acid Tests, their storied underground parties. California in the Sixties was an empire of tinkerers. And tinkering was easier in California than in the industrial East because there was more space to maneuver and (this is saying the same thing) because California didn’t go through industrialization in quite the same way or at quite the same time. It fit the way that California, and the car, and the postwar world seemed to excavate in a different, postmodern form the old self-sufficient agrarian ideal that was almost buried under the concrete and steel of the early twentieth century. Forty acres and a mule, only it’s a car and a driveway to tinker on it in.

If the different components of this social and cultural tinkering world in California has separated out, lost the effortless interchangeability of that time—of course always contingent on exclusions—then it is because the state is no longer dominated in quite the same way by a unified middle class. There has been separation, upward and downward, and the ranks of the nonwhite working class have greatly swelled, in ways bourgeois culture in the state has not been able to adjust itself to satisfactorily.

Of course the tinkering penchant lives on, a portion of it having been channeled toward the computer, especially in the Bay which, not having the beach in the same way, and being the older sibling of the two Californias, lent itself more to that. And the computer is a more cerebral thing … at least a more abstract thing. Abstraction has been acquired. But Californians, I think it’s fair to say, are still, broadly speaking, practical thinkers, certainly more than they are political thinkers, as Easterners have learned to be, again speaking very broadly.

I’m not much of a tinkerer myself—or perhaps my tinkering simply takes the form of essays like this one. But I do think it can be salutary, a counterweight to the ever-increasing abstraction of PMC life, of email jobs and life (or “life”) online. It is a kind of reaction against the tedious specialization of modern life. I won’t be the guy in the Adam Smith pin factory who just does one thing all day every day, I am going to go home after that and make a whole pin myself and do all the different things that making a pin requires! As you can see, this “rebellion” leads directly to quietism. Not that most other things you might do with your spare time couldn’t be accused of the same.

Philosophers, at least, should be tinkerers, joining practical principles to abstract ones. And as for the opposite, we already know what happens when tinkerers try to become philosophers. Go read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and you’ll see.

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***

One of the more surprising things for me, when I read Electric Kool-Aid for the first time, was what it revealed about the prehistory of the alternative student life, such as it was, that I was a kind of arm’s length witness of as an undergraduate at Stanford. Kesey had attended the famous creative writing program there, then under the direction of stern old Wallace Stegner. It was at Stanford, as the piece mentions, that Kesey had been tipped off by a grad student about the MK-Ultra-administered clinical trials at a local veteran’s hospital where he first got turned on to acid. It was apparently there that Kesey, for all his apparent clashes with stuck-up old Stegner, had imposed on him the MFA prose in which he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

And it was at Stanford’s bohemian cluster of cottages, Perry Lane, where Thorstein Veblen had once lived, and which was soon demolished to make way for a subdivision, that Kesey’s scene began to take shape. When he moved his group up to La Honda, in the mountains above Stanford, close ties remained to Palo Alto and environs, and periodically a weird engineer or like social type would float on up the hill to Kesey’s house, like a dead fish.

The piece mentions one of the Pranksters, this guy Paul Foster, who alternated between stints as a “computer programmer” and periods where he’d quit and hang out with Kesey’s crowd and tinker on things and do a bunch of drugs. From Kool-Aid:

He had a huge sack of googaws that he would carry around, of the weirdest stuff, bits of glittering glass and tin and transistor-radio shells, just the shells, and nails and screws and tops and tubes, and inside his sack of weird junk was a little sack that was a miniature of the big sack and contained tiny weird junk ... and you got the idea that somehow, somewhere in there was a very tiny little sack that contained very tiny weird junk, and that it went on that way into infinity ...

I knew these guys … they have multiplied since those days, the oddball software engineers, and Stanford is full of them. At Stanford you had a whole social universe made out of different types of computer science majors. The frat guys were computer science majors. The artsy kids were actually art practice minors, CS majors. There were stoners who were CS majors. And you also had the possibly autistic but in their way charming if a bit standoffish at first eclectic acid head computer science majors who wore weird getups and tinkered around and perhaps lived in one of the co-ops: student-run houses handed down from the Sixties.

The co-ops and their rituals, the Stanford marching band with its neon green tutus and controversial stunts at away football games, like the time the drum major was attacked by a pious Notre Dame student who objected to his conducting the band using a crucifix while in a nun getup—all of it, I realized reading Kool-Aid, is completely orthodox Prankster stuff.

Obviously the Stanford co-ops are more broadly a relic of the 1960s, with their clothing-optional flowers-in-your-hair ethos, the naked parades of people smeared with bright body paint, the pagan ritual-themed parties, the household government by consensus and the health-food fare made and served by students on rotation, often nauseating, sometimes sublime, sometimes laced with something, sometimes with clear warning, sometimes without … but a lot of it seems like it might have been inherited directly from the Pranksters.

Their ethos was, obviously, that of the jokester, and with a certain greater proximity to Americanism, via Day-Glo and cowboy boots, than the Haight-Ashbury variety, which tended more towards Orientalism and tie-dye. That is the ethos of the Stanford band, to a tee, and explains their penchant for practical jokes that are not always well received in middle America. The graffitied school bus parked in the lot behind the Enchanted Broccoli Forest (as one of the co-ops is called) must be an homage to Furthur, the famous International Harvester bus that carried the Pranksters across America and back, with Neal Cassady’s firm speed-fueled hand at the wheel, and was then interred deep in forlorn Oregon forest on Kesey’s estate up there.

No one ever told me about this history when I was an onlooker onto these circles as an undergrad, probably because not many people knew. I’m sure there were veterans of the scene loosely circulating about who knew the lore and would tell you about it at the slightest provocation, in the way that people like that do. But it feels almost, well, countercultural to inquire too deeply into the history, to put too much emphasis on it.

After all, the notion, back in the Sixties and by extension today in the places where that flickering sixty-year-old flame is kept haphazardly burning, was that this way of living was simply the genuine and authentic way of living. It had no history because history was exactly the inauthentic thing that they were obsessed with out on the East Coast and in Europe and which kept people from properly living authentic lives. This is the real thing, was the sense, and we aren’t doing it because Kesey and his friends, whoever they were, did it back then—we’re doing it now because it’s the right thing to do now.

But of course they are doing it because Kesey and his friends did it back then. There’s some intimation here of the way that the cultural flowering of the Sixties failed to mature, has not yet managed to concede that what was immediate and imperative then is now merely traditional. Merely? There’s much that traditions have to offer, this one at least as much as others. And we have a right to suspect that the reason for that is not so much the anti-traditional stance of the cultural manifestations of that era but rather, let’s be honest, their philistinism. That, at least, is a local tradition that you can count on being preserved!

And perhaps it’s in bad judgement to criticize these institutions too much, since there’s still enough independence in these places, the co-ops, for the university to see them as a threat to its precious reputation. Stanford was always a relatively conservative place overall—a wealthy private university founded by a rail baron in a sleepy rural zone of California, now a sleepy world-famous tech hub. Its culture of Sixties protest was hardly able to hold a candle to Berkeley’s—Malcolm Harris fails in his efforts to make it seem substantial in his Palo Alto (2023), which incidentally describes Kesey, without any love lost for the man, as Palo Alto’s most consequential twentieth-century cultural product.

But the South Bay has gone from ordinary middle-class California suburb and ranchland to affluent home archipelago of the tech and venture capital nexus, and Stanford from regional university to Ivy League rival. Its own student culture has become more pre-professional and tame, pushed in that direction by administration crackdowns on student social life, sanctions on the band for its irreverence, and the step-by-step removal of the privileges of the independent houses, which had been bought up by Stanford over the decades and absorbed into its residential empire. The co-ops put on the only parties worth going to when I was an undergrad, and for that, presumably, the university could never forgive them. But I had better stop, because I’m starting to sound like Ken Kesey here …

I recently moved from Manhattan to Charlottesville, Virginia to take a job as associate editor at the Hedgehog Review, which is based here, affiliated with the University of Virginia. That is why I have been less productive on this channel for the past few months, occupied by the process of interviewing for and accepting the job; wrapping up loose ends at America Quarterly, my former employer; saying my goodbyes to friends in town—though I will be back and forth between the cities frequently, visiting my girlfriend—and packing up my apartment in Chinatown.

This apartment, the fourth place I lived in over the course of four and a half years in New York City, sits above an active Buddhist temple in a 120-year-old AIA-listed building that was originally a synagogue. The history of the neighborhood—first Jewish, then Chinese, now gentrifying—finds a capsule summary in the building, still inhabited mostly by Cantonese speakers but with a growing cohort of transplants like me.

My apartment was numbered as the third floor, but as my chagrined friends who helped me move in a year ago quickly discovered, it was really more like the fourth of fifth floor, because the numbering started, European-style, above a ground floor, high-ceilinged, where the temple held its services. I shared the place with my roommate, an amiable Gen X trust-fund artist type from New England who had been there for fifteen years and had close ties to the pre-Dimes Square era early gentrifier cohort in Fujianese Chinatown: he did the design for the menus at Forget Me Not. He lived upstairs in a small studio with a skylight and no window; I lived downstairs, in a narrow shotgun-type corridor divided by a strange, plexiglas and wood-frame partition (curtains added for privacy) into a kitchen and a bedroom, this latter with a towering, 20-foot ceiling and what my roommate called the “cathedral window” (could it be called that if it was a synagogue?). When my Orthodox Jewish-raised friend came by for a drink one evening he told me that these twin ten-foot-tall tombstone-shaped windows represented the tablets of Moses.

“You’re living inside the commandments!” he said, snapping photos.

I told him I hoped that I was following whichever two these were meant to represent.

***

The whole time I lived in New York I always seemed to end up living in places where I had previously sworn I would never live. When I first arrived, during the tail end of the pandemic lockdown, I lived in Manhattan, and on an occasion visiting outer Williamsburg found it impossibly far removed and pitied those who lived at such Siberian distances from the center of things. My next apartment was, of course, down the street from the very block that occasioned that reflection.

The part of lower Manhattan where my final apartment was located—at the intersection of Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and what is called Two Bridges—is a bit of a no-man’s-land. On the other side of Pike Street was Chinatown proper: fish and vegetable markets, kiosks selling $5 packs of contraband Chinese cigarettes out of shoeboxes. Two blocks away was Dimes Square, becoming more West Village-ified by the day. But what was this, exactly?

When I lived downtown previously and was getting priced out of my apartment (the landlord doubled the rent after the pandemic lockdowns ended and two Australian girls took over our place) friends told me to try Two Bridges and I said no way, thinking of this exact couple blocks—sterile hotels, the bouleversement of the bridges and their clattering elevated trains, the projects further down, a neighborhood whose character derived exclusively from the screeching contrast between disparate and incompatible things. But that’s where I ended up living, years later. And just like before, I not only made my peace with it, I liked it very much.

There aren’t many businesses on Pike Street, which is the continuation of Allen Street as it runs down toward the East River. It’s a wide street of the sort that might be called a boulevard in a European city. There’s even a paved median that in Europe would probably have nice trees planted on it and so on. And in fact they have planted trees and placed benches and crafted bike lanes on other parts of Allen and Pike, though that hasn’t removed its grittiness. But on the stretch near my place on Pike Street, it was just an open field of desolate, cracked and comically uneven concrete that looked like a lesson in plate tectonics. Riding a Citi bike down that stretch was reminiscent of some kind of dystopian BMX course, the bike flung into the air by foot-tall gaps between an uplifted slab and the subducted adjacent one. In places the city had filled in large mounds of black asphalt to try to transform the broken landscape into a kind of smoother roller-coaster ride. In other places it had not. Sometimes Chinese people stopped outside on the shattered pavement to pray in front of the temple. Otherwise it was empty out there, except for the pigeons, on that Champs-Élysées of the Lower East Side.

And it was nice. It felt like the end of the world down there, my girlfriend would say, smoking a cigarette on the rooftop of the temple with the pigeons, watching the trains run across the Manhattan Bridge. A few blocks down was the East River and you could sit in metal chairs bolted to the ground by the river and smoke a cigarette and watch the river flow in or out. The cold lights of Brooklyn in the winter night, the lights of the bridges. In the summer during the day the jetskis and the ferries and the play of the sun on the waters of the bay further out. Up on Pike Street there wasn’t much foot traffic, just trucks headed down to FDR Drive or up from FDR Drive and the guys who ran the temple packing great mounds of fake plastic flowers into U-Hauls or hauling great mounds of fake plastic flowers out of U-Hauls and sometimes the groups of art people who spilled onto the sidewalk from the art galleries that were springing up all around here like the first tendrils of kudzu vine. Testing the ground for the big money. Like parasitic wasps, the art gallery right next door had left up the sign of the bus company that it had replaced, just like how Kiki’s restaurant had left up the sign of the Chinese printing company it had replaced.

But everything is sort of like that here, unconsciously, in the way that the city is just a stage that different groups come in to put on different plays for a while, until they’re over, each set of players repurposing parts of the set left behind by the last group or just leaving them there, more out of laziness than a desire for preservation. The effort it takes to stake your claim here exhausts the capacity to do much else and requires the destruction of any aesthetic pickiness. Look at this building, a Buddhist temple inside an old synagogue. A ten-foot statue of the Buddha peeking over the stone balustrade of this old grey-green Rundbogenstil synagogue. Even since I moved in a year ago another couple apartments have gone over to girls who dress in black tatters and wear long narrow yellow sunglasses. My roommate told me the guy in the adjacent apartment killed himself there years ago and the fire department had to break down the door to find his body, that his ghost visited this apartment once and never again. Romantics might like to imagine there’s something cumulative there, something learned from each arriving group out of the inheritance that the last group gave to them, but there’s not.

There are pretty moments. In Seward Park, where Chinese locals and scene transplants circulate freely, there is a running locals-versus-transplants ping-pong game where tensions between these objectively opposed social forces can be alleviated through simulated combat.

I made a friend of the Chinese guy next door, who spoke no English at all. Mandarin-speaking friends of mine had no luck understanding him either, nor even a friend of mine who speaks Cantonese—maybe he speaks Toisanese, she said, or some other dialect. He seemed to think I was funny, though, and always seemed to catch me doing something he found amusing—carrying too many things, wearing something unusual, dripping after being soaked by a sudden rainstorm, etc. He was a little older than middle-age, with thin, high cheekbones, a little gaunt, with something of the dandy about him. He seemed to live alone, though he was close with the elderly Chinese couple who lived next door, maybe a son or relative.

One time I ran into him on the street and he made a little joke. I was eating noodles outside at the grimy little table outside a lunch buffet-type place of a sort you can find around Chinatown and I saw my friend the dandy coming down the street. I waved to him and he smiled in the almost Vaudeville, over-the-top way he always smiled at me. Just as he did so a rather large man crossed the sidewalk and got into his car, which sank several inches as he did so. Chinatown residents are generally pretty thin, so this guy stood out. As he crossed the sidewalk, my friend—standing behind the back of the large man, who was facing me—grinned and pointed at him, then making a gesture by putting his hands at his sides and then grimacing as he moved them outwards, mimicking the man’s bulk.

This placed me in a somewhat awkward position, not wanting to laugh at what seemed to me a somewhat cruel joke—especially not in direct view of its target—but not wanting to ignore it, coming from this friend of mine from across the hall. Cruel might have been putting it strongly, or too much through the prism of the social etiquette of weight in the American middle-class mainstream: really this man was simply an extreme outlier in this neighborhood and my friend was pointing this out to me in the only language we could both understand. I compromised by giving him a sort of gesture of mock grudging concession, tipping my head sideways and frowning and raising my eyebrows, as if to say, yes, I suppose.

Sometimes when I’d be typing my address into Uber I’d write “Puke Street” by accident and then be glad I didn’t live there.

When I was moving out my friend across the hall saw me hauling boxes into the U-Haul and asked, via gestures, whether I was leaving. I told him yes, I was. He waved goodbye with a glint in his eye, and bowed. Behind the mannered exaggeration he seemed genuinely sad. He gave me a hug and a water bottle for the road.

I’d always considered it a better homage to an utterly unromantic city not to try to romanticize it, to treat leaving it with the same ruthless pragmatism that it taught me to treat living in it. But I’ll tell you the truth: I was choked up walking down East Broadway to get one last pack of contraband cigarettes for the road, I was choked up smoking one outside my empty apartment, and I was choked up all the way to the Holland Tunnel which swallowed me up and spat me out onto the green wilderness of the American mainland.

One series of videos from Brazil depicts middle-class interviewers holding a microphone in front of humbler types—generally middle-aged men found, it seems, sitting around in the middle of the day—and asking them what their “gender” is and how they “identify.”

“I’m an atheist, thank God,” one man replies, grinning a wide gaptoothed grin and holding his arms high above his head. A compact illustration of what you might call the gloriously incoherent Brazilian approach to religion, perhaps not incoherent at all, perhaps a serene synthesis of opposites, a warm sublation.

“I’m a lover,” says another. The responses, invariably delivered with easy confidence after a momentary hesitation or moment of incomprehension, range from references to marital status (“I’m a widower”) to declarations of soccer team loyalty—arguably the more important “identity” in Brazil (“I’m Flamengo”). None of the portrayed interviewees grasp the question, based on a reference to American-originated cultural concepts that have not spread much further than Brazil’s plugged-in upper-middle-class, but the result is an irreverent and heartening display of the Brazilian character. To keep things smooth, the interviewees seem tacitly to be thinking, there’s no need to ask for clarification and cause an awkward moment—better to just offer whatever answer springs to mind; if it’s a good one, the questioner won’t mind that it wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. And after all, aren’t they right?

Another related series—here the premise is a bit more malicious toward the interviewees—shows questioners asking subjects whether they support heterosexuality. “No, I don’t agree with that, I’m evangelical,” one says. Another concedes that if his son were heterosexual, he would support him, although he maintains it isn’t natural.

A third series asks interviewees to mention a sentence that “only Brazilians understand.” These are somewhat difficult to translate. “I didn’t see so much as a whiff of him,” is one (Não vi nem o cheiro dele). Another is tem mas acabou—“We have some but we ran out”—a Pythonesque and typically Brazilian shopkeeper’s answer to the question, “Do you have such and such thing?” They generally involve a play of contradictions which adds up to a softer way of navigating a situation, an upside-down yes as an alternative to saying no.

The subject of many of these videos is obviously the national character of respective Latin American countries, a theme that has fallen out of style in many of the more sophisticated or text-based venues in these countries—and around the world, for that matter. Books like Octavio Paz’s 1950 Labyrinth of Solitude, a meditation on the Mexican character, aren’t written much anymore. But the popularity of these videos suggests that people still believe that there is such a thing as a national character—that their countrymen just are a certain way—and that they enjoy seeing portrayals of it.

The Argentine reels focus on many of the classic Argentine themes—drinking mate, cooking asado, etc. I find this “official” culture to rely somewhat too heavily on a rather limited set of referents. The more interesting Argentine Reels, to me, depict children. Argentina, as those who know the country will be familiar, is a land of inveterate bullshitters, and they start them young. Another Reel, of a (grown-up) Argentine comedian, has him excoriating one of his countrymen for at one point responding to a question with the admission that he didn’t know the answer. “You’re an Argentine!” the comedian bellows. “If we don’t know the answer, we make one up.” Argentines, especially porteños (residents of Buenos Aires), have this in common with New Yorkers of yesteryear, a limitless confidence, conversational stamina and a tendency, yes, to monopolize, to hold forth indefinitely, with varying authority but unwavering conviction.

What shocks me is just how young they start. One series of interviews features children on the sidelines of a playground, answering grown-up questions. One boy of maybe eight is asked something about domestic economy, about the finances of parents, and responds with a long, putatively knowing speech about the advantages and costs of private school versus public, inflation and grocery spending, day care and so on. The kid was impressive but you also feel he should just enjoy himself a little while longer—after all, living in Argentina, he’ll have to spend his whole life bullshitting. Why get a head start? Is it so bad to be curious, to be naïve for a little while longer?

The Argentines also have a slightly sharper-edged (New World-ified) version of the Italian penchant for melodrama—and a razor-sharp sarcasm. And in a country with at least as much resourcefulness as the United States but where the citizens, for good reason, have next to no faith in government and most forms of authority, people learn to protect their interests early by all means necessary. One particularly striking video shows a young boy on a rooftop. An adult (his father? Older brother?) calls out to him to come down. He says he refuses until he obtains guarantees that his lunch will contain no vegetables. “I have a hostage!” he cries, holding up a dog. “Let that animal go!” the older brother says. “Oh, you want me to let him go?” the boy says, dangling the dog over the precipice.

The dialogue continues with the older brother’s offer—“I’ll give you a frozen treat!” he says.

“You’re such a great negotiator, Ezequielito,” the boy says.

“Frozen water!” says Ezequielito.

“I’ll throw him right off of here!” the boy cries in vindictive rage.

“Ice cream! Ice cream!” says Ezequielito in panic.

Eight years old and already a little terrorist … there’s nowhere like Argentina …

The question of where Northern California begins is a famously contentious question among Californians. Here there is a dispute between the Bay Area people and my people, the Southern Californians. Southern Californians believe that the Bay Area is Northern California, but people from the Bay will sometimes tell you that the Bay is just the Bay and that Northern California is the term for what lies northward, that whole lonely stretch from Marin or really from Mendocino up to Crescent City and the Oregon border. No one knows what to do with the Central Coast, or the Central Valley. Various classifications are hazarded, none quite convincing.

What is clear, however, is that somewhere around Prunedale, or Hollister, right around where the counties of Monterey and San Benito meet those of Santa Cruz and Santa Clara, the country starts to change. Up to that point, the central coast is one single thing, Steinbeck country, also my country—unfortunate, but fitting, to have to share it with Steinbeck—that great tan mantle of California, large parts of which, despite the intrusion of fancy vineyards and the general transformation of much of the rural West into a retreat for rich people, are still more or less untouched and agri-pastoral and achingly beautiful and ancient and serene. From Ojai up to Monterey is an empire of jagged coastline, mostly narrow coastal apron; in the first valley over the coast ranges, rolling hills and oak trees; in the second, scrub and bare tan hillsides.

Around Prunedale the redwoods come onto the scene and change things. Those tall evergreens give the valleys a different character. And here also is where the Spanish influence attenuates. California is like New York in possessing a rare thing in America: a quasi-mythological, non-indigenous prehistory, in the form of the physical and cultural legacy of another band of Europeans who dominated the scene for some time before the Anglos showed up, but who have since disappeared. In New York the Dutch aristocracy blended into English society more easily, in part because of shared Protestantism, and of course even today there are Dutch old money families in New York. This did not happen with the Californios, who were more effectively dispossessed by the incoming Anglos (unlike in New Mexico, where the equivalent class of originally Spanish, later Mexican landowners still holds great sway in state politics). The South has its own mythic non-indigenous past, of course, bestowed by a different kind of Anglo … In all cases this prehistory offers a kind of foothold for literature—e.g. Ramona, Washington Irving and Southern Gothic, respectively. And it offers a certain sense of cultural solidity.

The Spanish influence technically goes as far north as Sonoma, but it is significantly attenuated once you get to the Bay Area because the Gold Rush brought more Anglos in greater numbers more quickly and in a bigger single wave than the rest of the state. And north of the Bay, the towns start to feel more like the Pacific Northwest or the non-Spanish interior West: Anglo settler towns. Shallower somehow. Call it my southern Californian prejudice, if you like … the Mexican food also worsens precipitously … and Mexican culture begins to be seen (by the white majority) more as an immigrant culture, if a generally welcome, widespread and long-attested one, rather than in some sense a substratum, as it is further south.

San Francisco is the hinge point in this picture of the state. It is obviously much more a Victorian Anglo town than a mission town, but it has to be the exception that proves the rule in terms of shallowness. Walking around North Beach, the city seems like what it once was: the sole West Coast city on the Eastern model (LA is a carpet and Seattle a garrison), with real density, street life, attached apartment-houses, large long-established immigrant neighborhoods. It was always a quainter version—less heavy industry than in the cities of the Eastern seaboard adds to the Victorian charm, the quietness, the relative lack of alienation and cacophony (the Tenderloin representing a different kind of alienation from, say, Times Square). No clattering elevateds or vast railyards or belching smokestacks here.

San Francisco is today something rather less than this. The city’s fateful decision not to absorb the surrounding suburbs, as did San José, Seattle, Los Angeles and for that matter New York City, coupled with the relocation (with containerization) of the port across the Bay to Oakland, urban renewal—namely, the destruction of the black Fillmore District—and the more recent transformation of the city into a playground for tech workers, have conspired to make it into a city composed, as almost the entire California coast now nearly is, almost entirely of bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat, with the working class banished to far exurbs or the Central Valley and otherwise kept out of sight. It is one of the most beautiful cities on earth and one of the most pleasant, and it is in an important sense a lie.

There’s a neighborhood feeling, it’s peaceful here in North Beach, where the old Italian cafes are full of the usual suspects. Retirees sit over coffee and leisurely drag crayons over butcher paper spread over the tables or read the San Francisco Chronicle in print or talk with a whitehaired friend. Two Californian grandes dames with raccoon eyeliner exchange barbed familiar pleasantries from adjacent tables. In the park the woman walking her dog says hello to the friendlier bums and they say hello back. Minus the elderly Chinese women moving stiffly in rhythm to traditional music in an exercise group near the old Italian church, something very much like this scene could play out in any strip mall across the vast middle-class expanse of California. This was Éric Rohmer-style city life, urban living without urbanity, pleasant and banal and bourgeois, all with a California suburban twist. It’s easy to see why the Beats liked it here, it was like being in Europe while being in America, or you could imagine it was that way.

And, as a friend here mentioned to me, North Beach is maybe the last neighborhood in San Francisco that has anything resembling a street scene. Your average sidewalk here is deserted at all hours of the day. An eternal calm more eerie than the suburbs.

San Francisco used to have masses. Reading about the Sixties for an essay project it seems that between the Be-Ins and the Trips Festival and the protests and the concerts and everything else there were mass events with tens of thousands of attendees all the time in this city in the Sixties. The streets were full into the late Seventies. And now there’s what—Bay to Breakers? For all its cultural significance, for all its recent contributions, however insalubrious, to the new cultural and political vanguard in America, to the tech wing of the new official coalition, San Francisco is so obviously so much less of a city now than it was then, not so much because of the addition of the nouveau riche tech people as because of the subtraction from the city of so much of its working class, a fate that New York City, even in its new, shiny, post-Giuliani, post-Bloomberg guise, has escaped.

I’m told that the social and cultural scene in San Francisco takes place these days mostly through house parties known to a certain set. And of course back in the Sixties there were a lot of those, too—underground house parties. That’s how the Trips Festival took shape, from the Merry Pranksters’ word-of-mouth Acid Tests. But I don’t see something like that happening again, the spillover into mass gatherings. I asked the clerk at the Beat Museum bookstore about the lack of big events, who speculated that increasing costs and government red tape were to blame for fewer mass events. A typical Californian answer … certainly there is some truth to that, but the real answer is that there are no masses in San Francisco anymore. There is, so to speak, no people, no demos. It is a superstructural city, a city populated by superstructuralists and of casualties of the superstructure … like something out of Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

I remember going to Oakland for a concert in 2018 and finding myself discharged, after the concert, into the beating heart of what I later learned was one of the city’s famous First Fridays. The festival atmosphere and varied class and racial composition of the crowd packing the sidewalks—it took fifteen minutes to elbow your way down a block—was something I had never seen, and to this day have never seen, in San Francisco. The city doesn’t seem capable of that, and that’s a shame. Oakland is probably one of the few places in the Bay capable of it. San José is a suburb, the suburbs are suburbs, and San Francisco has its sights set on becoming three suburbs standing on top of each other in a Victorian trenchcoat.

This turbulence is as good a reason as any to recall the most famous work of American literature about losing your government job: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous prologue to The Scarlet Letter, about his time in the Salem custom house.

Hawthorne, often short of money, served the U.S. government twice as a customs official. His first job, in Boston, was cut short by a Whig victory in the 1840 election—which prompted Hawthorne, a Democrat, to live at the Brook Farm transcendentalist commune and spend time toiling with the “dreamy brethren” there, supposedly in order to save enough money to marry. In 1846 he again obtained a job, now at the Salem custom house, but lost it again after another Whig victory 1848—this time occasioning a controversy after local Whigs attacked him for alleged malfeasance in office.

I should admit at this point that the contemptibly clickbaity headline of this squib is entirely misleading: Hawthorne was far closer to being a MAGA patriot purged by the woke Whig mob. More on that later …

He talks about the customs house job in the prologue, a kind of Bartleby-esque early workplace portrait that doubles as the frame for the (somewhat halfheartedly) framed narrative of The Scarlet Letter. It opens with a striking panorama of New World abandonment—the sad landscape of decline that is a common phenomenon in places in the Western Hemisphere where the flames of commerce or moral activity have burned and burned out:

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf,—but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood,—at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass—here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbor, stands a spacious edifice of brick.

Remarkable the kind of first sentence you could get away with in the nineteenth century. The edifice in question is the customs house where Hawthorne worked alongside

ancient sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tost on every sea, and standing up sturdily against life’s tempestuous blasts, had finally drifted into this quiet nook; where, with little to disturb them, except the periodical terrors of a Presidential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of existence.

Hawthorne complains of the stultifying atmosphere of working amid these living relics, who were incidentally mostly Whigs and therefore political adversaries, not to mention self-serving (“officers are appointed to subserve their own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading reference to their fitness for the duty to be performed”). He found it impossible to write with inspiration during these months, drained by the grueling 3.5-hour workday.

Yet he speaks of the experience of losing his job, with the election of Zachary Taylor, as if it was a terrible trauma, comparing it (with obvious undertones of castration) to having his head chopped off by a guillotine. He seems to have evinced much the same sentiment in his private correspondence:

From Edwin Haviland Miller’s biography of Hawthorne:

"My head has been chopt off" was the way he characterized the indignity. He attacked those who in his perception had deprived him of livelihood as well as of masculinity: Hawthorne had a way of transforming situations into confirmations of lifelong fears.

But in the prologue, Hawthorne pauses to explain that although it was Jackson’s Democrats who were most famous for practicing the spoils system, it was the dastardly Whigs who really abused it:

The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them, and because the practice of many years has made it the law of political warfare, which, unless a different system be proclaimed, it were weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of victory has made them generous. They know how to spare, when they see occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp, indeed, but its edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head which they have just struck off.

In Hawthorne’s time, under the Second Party System, the Whigs counted on the support of stout upright native-born Protestants, business elites, anyone connected with finance, and especially the coastal Northeast, like where Hawthorne lived in Salem … behind enemy lines. Democrats, Jackson’s party, had their strongest support in rural areas and on the frontier—and among immigrants in the cities, Irish and German. Whigs were modernizing import-substitution-industrializationalists avant la lettre; Democrats were agrarianist small-government yahoos in favor of supercharging the settler frontier and junking the banks, which just served those rich corrupt elites anyway … the common man didn’t need them!

Obviously the social context was entirely different to our own, with the frontier preserving the Jefferson-Jackson agrarian vision of the U.S. as a still sensical one and with finance in its infancy, in part thanks to Jackson’s sabotage of Nicholas Biddle’s bank; with American empire still decades away … there was no tech-billionaire arm of Jacksonianism … manufacturing was Whig-coded rather than Democrat-coded … but the comparison in terms of cultural valence and broad tendencies of affiliation under the analogy Whigs:Democrats::Democrats:Republicans presents itself rather obviously to the observer. John Quincy Adams especially presents himself to us as analogous to a familiar sort of type in our own politics, a kind of leading figure of an earlier “coastal elite,” son of the great Revolutionary hero, righteous opponent of Jackson’s frontier brutality and increasingly over time of slavery, but very possibly motivated not so much by selfless moral considerations but rather by social disdain of the uneducated and lower-class Jacksonian base, something that did much to neuter the practical effects as well as the moral force of his opposition. The sins of the Resistance … plus ça change …

Anyway, Hawthorne’s Democrat sympathies made him a bit countercultural in his Massachusetts milieu … a little disreputable. And he was a real Jacksonian—despite being a real Massachusetts patrician, descended from a famous and famously cruel family of draconian Quaker-hating Puritan magistrates. Haviland Miller explains that Hawthorne felt much more comfortable hanging out with the MAGA hat rabble … though with some Puritanical reservations … to schmoozing with the credentialed elite:

Most of Hawthorne's Salem friends belonged to the Democratic party, which was also the party of Bridge and Pierce. He shunned the company of the Salem elite who were usually Harvard graduates, Whigs, and affluent maintainers of decorum, preferring the company of middle-class Democrats, alcoholics, party hacks, and even a boozy former clergyman, all of whom he no doubt met in Salem's disreputable taverns. Yet he was often priggishly fastidious about personal cleanliness and on one occasion was worried enough about shaking the hand of "an underwitted old man . . . lest his hand should not be clean" that he duly recorded his fear in a notebook. He was often, as we shall see, secretly attracted to the rough-and-ready of both sexes. In such company he lost the shyness and tied tongue that consigned him to the role of silent observer in genteel gatherings.

One of his heroes was the greatest Democrat of the era, Andrew Jackson, who was scarcely tolerated or even mentioned in elite circles in Salem. Jackson, however, was in the tradition of the Hathornes1: virile, energetic, and more than a little ruthless. When Jackson visited Salem in 1833 after his reelection Hawthorne walked to the outskirts of the town, in the words of his sister Elizabeth, "to meet him, not to speak to him, only to look at him; and found only a few men and boys collected, not enough, without the assistance that he rendered, to welcome the General with a good cheer." Forty years later Elizabeth was still surprised: "It is hard to fancy him doing such a thing as shouting."

Some resentment towards the affiliation with the image of that hated Tennessee rube … and slaveowner, though Whigs still had some proslavery elements too … might have helped encourage local Whigs, including some of Hawthorne’s erstwhile friends, to gather together to badmouth him to the incoming administration, helping speed along his ouster from the sleepy customs house.

At least these Whig bombardments can be said to have offered a service to the history of American literature, in removing Hawthorne from a position that while allowing him to subsist also, in his own admission, cramped his creative energies. One can only hope that Musk’s crusade will lead some pink-slipped federal employee to write the next Great American Novel.

“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist—I really believe he is Antichrist—I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend.”

Such are the words of Anna Pavlovna Scherer that open Tolstoy’s War and Peace, amply indicative of this Russian society lady’s suffering from an acutely severe case of Bonaparte Derangement Syndrome (another, doubtless very different “BDS”).

One of the novel’s narrative strands tracks the cycles of Napoleon’s reputation in Russian high society across the first decades of the 1800s. As of 1805, Anna Pavlovna’s words stand for the general feeling among the smart set in Petersburg and Moscow. Napoleon, with his lowly Corsican origins and association with all the satanic and subversive doctrines of revolution in France, would have been an easy candidate for opprobrium in orthodox Tsarist Russia even without the presence in Russian society of a number of aristocratic French émigrés. “Buonaparte” was the “Drumpf” of the time—a refusal to grant Napoleon the title of emperor, and a de haut en bas insistence on the original Italian spelling of his name.

But by 1807, when Napoleon met Alexander at Tilsit to strike an alliance between Russia and France, feelings in the upper reaches of the Russian military and its society had begun to shift accordingly. Napoleon seemed to have proven himself a durable phenomenon, more promising as something to accommodate than as a target for a vituperation that had by this point wearied even its most dedicated exponents.

Boris Drubetskoy, an ambitious young man with a fine sense for the way the winds are blowing, recognizes the shift early:

“I should like to see the great man,” he said, alluding to Napoleon, whom hitherto he, like everyone else, had always called Buonaparte.

“You are speaking of Buonaparte?” asked the general, smiling. Boris looked at his general inquiringly and immediately saw that he was being tested.

“I am speaking, Prince, of the Emperor Napoleon,” he replied. The general patted him on the shoulder, with a smile.

“You will go far,” he said, and took him to Tilsit with him.

But the alliance doesn’t last, of course: by 1812 Napoleon is undertaking his doomed invasion of Russia, and Anna Pavlovna—with Boris Drubetskoy at her side—is back to breathlessly haranguing her guests about “how at Potsdam the impious Bonaparte had stolen the sword of Frederick the Great.” At least Russian high society had grown tired of calling him Buonaparte.

With the inauguration of Donald Trump for a second nonconsecutive term today amid appropriately Russian arctic chill and snow in Washington, D.C., it should be obvious enough that we are reaching the end of something akin to this middle stage when it comes to opinion in the higher reaches of American society toward Trump and his agenda.

We have been through the “Buonaparte” phase—totalizing disdain, opprobrium and “resistance,” backed up by the impression that the insurgent is an illegitimate fluke. We now find ourselves at the Emperor Napoleon phase, in which a significant faction within the highest ranks of the American elite, especially in tech, but to diminishing extents within (respectively) the finance, corporate, legal, entertainment, party-political and media worlds an attitude of self-interested accommodation is now being adopted.

The Boris Drubetskoys de nos jours, Mark Zuckerberg an indicative example, have openly abjured the old progressive-moralist faith of the 2010s and pledge, not quite to join the invaders, but at least to throw open the gates for them. Facebook and Instagram, open cities. Zuckerberg is an extreme case, with the reaction from the media establishment, on the other end of the spectrum of the liberal establishment, being calibrated more in terms of grudging and still disapproving acceptance, rather than open apostasy.

Peter Baker’s column in the Times immediately after the election result summed up this corner’s reaction to the emphatic confirmation of Trumpism as a phenomenon with wide if not preponderant social appeal across lines of class and race:

In her closing rally on the Ellipse last week, Kamala Harris scorned Donald J. Trump as an outlier who did not represent America. “That is not who we are,” she declared.

In fact, it turns out, that may be exactly who we are. At least most of us.

Here, mixed with sour acknowledgement of political reality, is a last little pungent note—“At least most of us”—of liberal self-esteem. At least some of us are still unhappy with this state of affairs. The sentiments of American high liberalism toward the country have long veered between narcissistic optimism—America is as good as I am!—and pessimistic city-on-a-hill Calvinist disdain.

From the unraveling of the federal criminal cases against Trump and the partial dismissal of charges in Georgia, to (as Baker recently described it) a broad feeling of resignation in Washington, to the lack of anything even on the order of Meryl Streep’s 2017 anti-Trump cri de coeur at the 2025 Golden Globes—to say nothing of mass protest—the level of deference toward Trump is unquestionably higher than the first time around across the whole span of America’s “elite institutions.”

In describing the shockingly rapid process by which Trump went from internal exile and political abandonment by both parties, in the wake of the carnival of January 6, 2021—a status which he kept well into 2023—to a yet more emphatic return to the center of American politics, some have seen a different Napoleonic comparison. There was indeed something reminiscent of Napoleon’s escape from Elba and the dawn of the Hundred Days in the rapidity as much of the return as of the collapse of rhetorical and political resistance to it. It calls to mind that old canard about the headlines of the Moniteur universel that supposedly went from calling Napoleon the “Corsican ogre” on 9 March to proclaiming him Imperial and Royal Majesty on the 22. From the slow-motion collapse of the Biden campaign to the doomed, frantic efforts to shore up Kamala Harris’s candidacy, ending with the fateful plane bound from Mar-a-Lago to Washington, the whole chain of events has the quality of a cinematic montage set to In the Hall of the Mountain King.

Meanwhile, the sealing of a ceasefire in Gaza—thanks, by all reports, to the insistence of the incoming Trump team, and not by any special encouragement from the outgoing Biden administration—has been a particularly bitter and disorienting development for the American left, otherwise likely to be a reliable opponent of Trump.

But the Hundred Days lasted only a hundred days, and Trump has already promised internal invasions of several kinds: on illegal migrants, who make up the most shamelessly exploited class of American workers—Guatemalan teenagers regularly losing limbs in Virginia meatpacking plants—as well as on the cultural front, against the bureaucratic apparatuses within the state and civil society (universities, etc.) established to entrench ideas and hiring practices associated with the 2010s project of diversity, equity and inclusion. Depending on how aggressively these are pursued, the possibility of liberal toleration of them will be more or less quickly exhausted, and the Jacksonian battles of the first Trump term, between the state and its political allies and the partisan insurgents, will resume on a more even level.

It is only likely that the current “Emperor Napoleon” phase will, with Trump inaugurated, give way to a “Bonaparte” phase, indicating renewed rhetorical opposition from the liberal establishment and the zones within the economy and culture where it retains predominance, but of a more steely and less hysterical variety. The horizons of this phase, the intensity of the renewed opposition, remain unclear—but there will be no burning of Moscow by its inhabitants this time to stop the invaders’ advance.

One of the most exciting parts of my work as an editor at AQ is getting to commission, four times a year, short culture pieces on books, film and art in Latin America. This is a role with rare advantages. Unlike other magazines published in English, we have the ability to review books that have not been translated into English, art shows in Latin American countries that go uncovered in Anglophone media, and films that aren’t widely distributed in the Anglosphere.

Thanks to a network of contributors mostly either resident in or hailing from Latin America, and an editorial approach that generally seeks to understand the region on its own terms, we also don’t have the need, as many other U.S.-based publications do, to approach Latin America invariably through the language of American political and cultural discourse.

The pieces in this new issue are, I think, particularly worth sharing and briefly surveying here.

The barnburner, relatively speaking, in this collection is Andrea Moncada’s review of Bad hombre by Pola Oloixarac, a “work of fiction about real events” that, as Moncada describes, levels a critique against progressive feminism. As far as I’m aware, this is the first English-language review of the book, which was published last July in Spanish.

Oloixarac burst onto the scene in Argentina with her 2008 Las teorías salvajes, a satire of left-wing academia that got her hailed by Granta as one of its 2010 Best Young Spanish Novelists. Her novel Mona, which targets the international literary scene in a wicked sendup, was received with rave reviews in Anglophone media and won her a certain following in progressive literary Brooklyn.

But it’s not clear to me that Oloixarac’s anti-progressive stances, which she does not hide in her native Argentina, are universally known among her English-language admirers. Barriers of language and national politics may have up to this point allowed Brooklynites to consider only her literary output. I’m not sure if there are plans to translate Bad hombre, which would not be likely to be well received in these circles. It’s the kind of book that would be more likely to have its launch at Sovereign House than at a Brooklyn indie bookstore.

The title, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Donald Trump’s infamous 2016 comment, gestures at the gist of the book. Oloixarac is fascinated by the figure of the “bad hombre,” the lone macho figure who, she seems to argue, has become a target of elite women seeking to further their own interests at his expense. This theme she addresses through a series of accounts of persecutions of men in the elite worlds of academia and literature—based on real events, we understand, but not to be taken as gospel truth or as reportage, and presumably with names changed.

Oloixarac is a genius in the art of being an enfant terrible within the modern progressive worlds of academia and literature, but in this work she seems to make broader social claims, or at least the book is open to that interpretation. These are claims that the book’s form and perhaps her own inclinations do not do much to back up.

As Moncada writes: “It’s not difficult to find examples that suggest political correctness has gotten out of hand in the elite worlds of literature and academia. However, Bad hombre runs the risk of trivializing, or worse, delegitimizing the importance of what Oloixarac wants to prevent in the first place: women’s suffering.”

The nonfiction selection for this issue has Patricio Navia, a professor of liberal studies at NYU and contributor to AQ, reviewing a book on why Latin American presidencies frequently end prematurely: at least 20 have been cut short through resignations, impeachments and other politically unnatural means since the 1980s.

The book, by Christopher Martínez, who also wrote an article on the same subject recently for AQ, finds that the best predictor of whether Latin American presidencies can survive crises is the strength of a country’s party system. The stronger the party system, the more likely that a country can weather a political storm without bidding a premature farewell to its leader. But Navia asks an important question: Where do strong parties come from?

This is a subject that has attracted comparatively little attention in the political-science academic literature, even though its importance for political stability is understood to be paramount. How do you acquire a strong party system? In the meantime, Navia writes, “Martínez’s book reminds us that those countries that have an institutionalized party system should work hard to preserve it.”

For the art section, Cristóbal Sciutto writes from São Paulo on an exhibition of photographs at the Instituto Moreira Salles by Stefania Bril, inspired Polish-Brazilian observer of the cruelty and kindness of life in a pell-mell modern city then undergoing unimaginable transformation.

Born to a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust thanks to forged documents, Sciutto writes, Bril moved to Brazil after the war and worked in labs until deciding to dedicate her life to photography. Her great talent was for capturing scenes that juxtaposed the inhuman structures of modern São Paulo with people carving out tender ways to get by, in the cracks where one thing joins to another:

“Boy reading comics in a supermarket cart” shows an empty street in the wealthy Jardins neighborhood, closed off by the concrete walls of private residencies. A boy lies with his body extended from the sidewalk to the inside of a shopping cart tipped on its back, handle lodged where curb and asphalt meet. Loitering in an improvised chaise longue, his body cuts across the vertical strips of the composition (sidewalk, verge, street), a tender dissident making the city his own.

Sciutto also describes the faded promise of Bril’s faith in the photographic image as a means of “unveiling the city’s hidden actors” and spurring “structural social change.” Today, he writes, “the photographic image has become hegemonic, blinding instead of defogging perception.” But the appeal of Bril’s work remains.

Continuing her run as AQ’s film critic, Ena Alvarado turns her sights to Mariana Rondón’s Zafari, based on a sad true story about a zoo hippo in Caracas that ate a couple rubber balls and died in 2015. In Rondón’s hands, the hippo becomes the focal point of a tale set in an unspecified Latin American country of the breakdown of social barriers in times of societal collapse. As Alvarado writes, the characters’ “wolfish exploits remind us of the grounds on which our righteous ways of life stand—and just how fragile they are.”

On one hand, it’s a straightforward fable of the positive and negative effects of the breakdown of normal social function: think José Saramago’s Blindness. On the other, we’re clearly meant to think of this as a commentary on the fate of Venezuela in recent years, dragged into economic and social devastation which has spawned, in turn, the exodus of millions (in turn adding urgency to the issue of migration in the United States).

AQ’s music critic, the director of Americas Society’s excellent and eclectic music program, Sebastián Zubieta rounds out this section with a brisk profile of Brazilian songwriting titan Chico Buarque, daring the Swedish Academy to award him a Nobel Prize in Literature. (Buarque also writes novels.) Bringing typical erudition and brio to this whistle-stop tour of Buarque’s oeuvre, Zubieta pauses to highlight his famous and carefully calibrated protest song, “Calice.”

A pair of songs on the 1978 album Chico Buarque offer contrasting examples of his poetic-political jogo de cintura—a Brazilian football metaphor for brilliant solutions to a difficult situation, in this case the dangers of an artistic career in authoritarian environments. Early in the album, “Cálice” is a bleak protest song, starting with the title. “Cálice” means “chalice,” but the word also sounds exactly like cale-se, which means “Shut up!” so that every time the guest vocal ensemble shouts the word as a response to the singer, they are ordering him to stop, recreating the act of censorship.

The refrain paraphrases Matthew 26:29, with the singer, speaking in Christ’s voice, asking the Father to spare him the cup of bloody wine of his Passion. In the final lines, the singer wants to “get drunk into oblivion on diesel fumes,” a reference to a torture technique deployed by the government. He wishes to let out an “inhuman scream” that will nonetheless be a way of being heard, suggesting that life is perhaps not a foregone conclusion.

There are a couple other pieces in this issue that, while not technically within the bailiwick of the culture section, also deal with Latin American culture and history. One is our photo essay column on the Petronio Álvarez Festival in Cali, Colombia, now home to Latin America’s second-largest black population after Salvador. That is due in part to Afro-Colombian people fleeing armed conflict elsewhere in the country, writes Timothy Pratt, whose reporting accompanies vivid photos by Jesse Pratt López. The festival is a showcase of the ever-reinvented musical traditions of Colombia’s Pacific coast, which feature prominent marimba. Sebastián could say much more about this than I could. It's also a means of expression for Afro-Colombian pride, in a region historically dominated by brutal sugarcane plantations. In an especially striking image from the essay, a mural reads: “The sugar-growing valley needed Black blood … and now it needs peace and social justice.”

Last is our historical column, penned this time by AQ’s own Luiza Franco on a bridge between Brazil and Bolivia that was promised in a treaty in 1903 and never delivered—but which may finally be built now, thanks to China’s ravenous appetite for South American commodities.

The promise of the bridge, 121 years ago, came at the conclusion of a South American saga that fits the pattern of what I described, in an essay in American Affairs last year, as classical filibusterism: when settlers take it on their own authority to colonize a loosely held territory in the hopes of forcing their state to secure it for their possession. This was what Americans did successfully, a few decades earlier, in Texas and California; it was what they then tried unsuccessfully to do in Sonora and Nicaragua. And it is the model, in a looser sense, for the political economy of much of the U.S. and Brazil in the contemporary context: self-starting entrepreneurs breaking the rules in the hopes that they can force the state to change the rules after the fact.

“In the first years of the 20th century the northwestern Amazon region of Brazil, where the state of Acre is now, belonged to Bolivia,” Luiza writes. “But around 100,000 Brazilians lived in the area. Particularly rich in rubber trees, for years it attracted Brazilian rubber tappers eager to exploit its natural wealth.”

After Bolivia tried to set up a customs office and fighting broke out between rubber tappers and the Bolivian government, Brazilian diplomats secured the purchase of the territory from Bolivia in exchange for “land in the Paraguay River Basin, 2 million British pounds and the commitment to build a railway cutting across the Amazon to facilitate Bolivian access to the Atlantic Ocean.” Plus the bridge.

But the railway declined in usefulness after the end of the rubber boom and the bridge was never built. Now, it’s been revived as a means of allowing Brazilian commodities a faster land outlet to the Pacific. And, Luiza notes, Bolivians will finally get what was promised them in the 1903 treaty: “better access to the Atlantic Ocean through Brazilian territory.”

LOS ANGELES - NOVEMBER

Rich buttery winter sun falling down all around. The engine turned over, thank god—long slow drive along Vermont Avenue in the venerable Mustang, looking out from the seat, which is way down so you feel almost like you’re looking up at the road rather than down at it. Phone dead, reasonably sure that sooner or later I would, in fact, reach the Santa Monica Freeway, and I did. Whole long stretches of blocks around 12th a kind of tianguis in exile with popup tents from Big Five and tanks of agua fresca on card tables.

On the 10 heading west without warning a great mass of fog engulfed us, us as in me and all the other cars, headlights suddenly a hundred little lighthouses, and in an instant we might as well have been on the 280 or something. Great snaking conglomeration transformed into Melvillian mystery lights in the premature dark. California’s mystic grey-blue fickleness. It stayed that way all the way up the swaddled coast. At one point on PCH it receded a bit and you could see the rolling edge of the fogbank creeping toward the shore. A slow motion wave above the waves in the darkness.

I’ve been out to California more than usual this year and up until this time it had begun to seem to me a decadent civilization. Not in abject, precipitous decline the way that some people would like you to believe but in the Douthatian sense, a complacent and even unnoticed downward drift. I remember one moment in particular, earlier this year, cresting the Santa Susana Pass, looking down at Simi Valley below—Los Angeles’s Staten Island, where the cops live and where Ronald Reagan has his presidential library after Stanford wouldn’t let Hoover put it there. A neat grid of unremarkable ranchstyle houses that could be bought on a single middleclass salary when they were built, in the Sixties or before, and now are probably each worth the better part of a million dollars. There they were, bland in the sunlight, slowly rotting, never built to last.

What happens when they all fall apart? This was, it seemed to me, a civilization that had peaked somewhere around 1963 or thereabouts, both in the broadness of its material prosperity and in the acquisition of a distinctive culture, fashioned from elements from the aerospace industry, from the automobile, from the surfboard, from the application of wartime energy to peacetime leisure, and from experiments in consciousness, new drugs, and all the rest that everyone already knows about. There has been no major overhaul of the basic cultural vocabulary for more than half a century. The ensemble has altered a bit; parts of it had been exported to the better part of the world; individual elements had been refined, and the whole thing had taken on a somewhat more upper-middle-class cast, as opposed to the originally simply middle-class orientation. From humble little hippie health food stores to Erewhon, and so on.

And the political economy of the state had gone in the same direction, only more so—the happy band of mostly white homeowners, once the better part of the state, now looked more like a landed aristocracy (albeit a very numerous one) that guarded its privileges jealously against a much expanded ethnic underclass, so much so that it was willing to banish much of its own lower-middle-class to Arizona, Nevada or even Texas, states which are considered the height of bad taste by today’s homeowning Californians (most of whom do not believe that they possess any kind of class prejudice—that’s an East Coast thing).

At some point, I felt, and was not the first to feel, that a reckoning was due for California. This, after all, was a state that (setting aside, for example, a few years’ downturn for the aerospace industry in the LA area in the 1990s) has never endured prolonged economic bad fortune in living memory. A state built like few others around the car in a country where hints, very small ones for now, had begun to emerge that young people might like to get around on foot more. A place dependent like few others on ransacking the increasingly threadbare cultural pantry left behind by the Sixties.

I haven’t discarded this analytical frame—far from it—but driving through the fog up the coast in the growing dark reminded me of the possibility of California as eternal fact. In some way perhaps the logic behind Californians’ own seeming ignorance or indifference in the face of the state’s imbroglio was (besides self-interest) an instinctive sense of this. It’s something I’ve written about before, for example at the close of this New Statesman piece on California, my native state, from 2021, thoughts drawn from a drive through the Lost Coast.

The usual retort to doomsaying about California is a set of liberal, boosterish, Kevin Starr-type canards about how opportunity is not yet dead in the Golden State and can’t we make it wonderful all over again. My feeling this time was something different altogether, a sense of the infinite durability of California, I suppose more in a gauzy kind of mystical way than in any specific social or cultural sense—or even just ecologically, though I don’t personally subscribe to the anti-humanist, earth-first, eco-critical line of thinking that afflicts many Californians (including many spiritual Californians who may never have set foot in the state). Who knows how the state, the mortal California, will muddle through.

There’s a funny contrast between East and West in a geo-cultural-historical sense—and take this with a grain of salt, I’m no John McPhee: the East is, in the classic framing, more “rooted” historically, closer to the Old World; but much of the Eastern seaboard is geologically insignificant, accidental, temporary. Brooklyn, Martha’s Vineyard, each is no more than a glacial moraine, a pile of gravel pushed up and washed out in the last ice age. Four centuries of history and culture, like sand castles on the shore. California, with all its tectonic drama, and all its supposed rootlessness, is “built” on something far more substantial, if not exactly unchanging.

Jonathan Richman, an authority on things East Coast/West Coast, says something along these lines in his song “Rooming House on Venice Beach”—itself, like many other songs on that album, a kind of eulogy for the lost middle-class moment of the Sixties. Describing his titular apartment:

It was rough, rough, rough
With ancient, rustic hippie stuff
It was cheap, cheap, cheap
Nowadays, I hear that rents are steep
It was eerie, eerie, eerie
Followers of Watts and Leary
You could walk, walk, walk
To Marina Del Rey by the dock
Oh, the ancient world was in my reach
From my rooming house on Venice Beach.

This idea of the sea as the ancient world struck me as odd listening to the song—the ocean is just the ocean, after all, ancient or new, it’s all the same. But lost in the fog it seemed clear what he meant somehow …

LOS PADRES NATIONAL FOREST – DECEMBER

Hungover, packed in a bit of a daze and then drove out of foggy Ventura up the coast, sun breaking out around Goleta, up the San Marcos Pass from which down below glimpsed the green vineyards and orange trees and outcrops of the foothills and planted fields further down, the coastal plain covered over by a thick halftransparent gauzy cake of fog. On the other side sun over the godgiven ancient oakdotted country, tan and dark green and gold and the green-blue of Cachuma and then we missed the turn winding through the vineyards, horse country, meandering up and around the hills into backcountry, yuccas and sagebrush, past burned out canyonsides—a fire came through sometime since we were out here a year ago to the day. At the near empty site we ate bread and a tin of sardines and hewed off chunks of salami and made some coffee and walked up the canyon for a bit. The trail passed above clear bluish green pools of water and up onto the first lap of the canyonside where a rise afforded a view of the canyon and a little cluster of cottonwoods around the creek far down at the base of another crenellation of the mighty L.P., whose bare higher rocky face was lit up gold by the sun which was already dropping behind the line of hills. A perfect Los Padres scene, greengrey scrub hills with patches of darker pine, like on a dog’s fine coat, on the shaded sides of the slope; on the sun side, patches of bare tan grass, golden pelt of the hills, and at the higher reaches bare sedimentary rock, tan or dark grey, crowns. I stood among the scrub and listened to two birds call back and forth, single twanging chips of distorted air bouncing back and forth, and then walked down and crossed the clear creek back to camp in the dusk.

Night was cold and full of stars, pure dry lights in the blackness. In the sleeping bag in my jacket and wool balaclava my body was warm but my nose was cold. Swimming through that state of mind that belongs to a night “under canvas,” my father’s term. (In this case under mesh.) The night extending forever in cool infinities. Not asleep but not quite awake. All things recollected and passing about.

Hike up to Potrero camp in a glade by Manzana Creek. Then up Potrero Canyon up toward the looking stark bare sandstone face of the Hurricane Deck, a twentymilelong single massif, the forbidding king of the Los Padres southern section. My parents used to backpack the whole length of it, a feat that seemed to me almost impossible. Where were they getting water on the ridgeline? That great austere rock called to me and I continued up a dry trail that switchbacked steadily up the scrubcovered crenellations of the foothills. Visions of the Hurricane Deck filling my mind, I kept climbing. Looking at a manzanita plant, deep red bark and light green leaves, it appeared in my mind as a fashionable woman’s outfit glimpsed on a sidewalk downtown, dark red coat and light green pants … or, maybe, light green nails and dark red dress … I had been living in New York for too long, or the effort of hiking up this ridge was driving me insane.

I glimpsed a bare crag off to the north where Manzana Creek cut its way toward the sea near Santa Maria, sweating, legs burning, climbing past a shaded darker green and pale green hillside of whitethorn ceanothus, dropping now through an oak meadow, then climbing again, gradually through a corridor of reeds, mercilessly then over bare sandstone up toward the lonely ridgeline—the Deck.

Over to the south noble green hillcrests, distant clusters of cottonwoods. On the opposite side, a lesser row of hills, straight uncrenellated line. I ran down part of the descent, then slowed, my legs screaming, tendons threatening to give way. Screeching to a final halt back down into the ravine as clouds rolled in from beyond the hills slow enough to give me time to limp to the creek and shed my sweatstained clothes, no living soul around, and wade gasping into the bluegreen pool where tiny anchovysized fish scattered and I rubbed the sweater from me under the cold water and stumbled out gasping onto the sharp gravel of the bank.

I wrote down some observations after roaming around the margins of the Trump rally in the south Bronx in May. But I wanted to wait to develop some photos I took before publishing, and it ended up taking so long that the subject didn’t seem timely anymore, so I never did. Now that Trump has won a second term—improving his performance in the Bronx by 22 points, the biggest swing of any New York county—I thought it would be worth sharing them here. I haven’t made any changes to the below text.

On the morning of the Trump rally in the Bronx I woke up, got in the shower, and injured myself in the most humiliating way possible.

Here’s the story: nothing came out of the medium-sized bottle of almond-scented Dr. Bronner’s liquid castile soap when I turned it upside-down. I had left open the cap on its plastic hinge and the soap—as Dr. Bronner’s soap often does when you leave open the cap—had congealed into a gelatinous plug (this tendency no doubt due to its pristinely back-to-the-land, paraben- and phthalate-free recipe).

Rather than step out of the shower and seek some sort of appropriately narrow instrument to clear the blockage, I opted for the same strategy I’d recently used to disastrous results with a jammed ketchup bottle full of green salsa in Chicago’s Taqueria Los Comales: squeeze it until the blockage clears.

This strategy worked. On the third squeeze, more aggressive than the previous two, the plug of soap was launched free of the bottle by a vigorous, almond-scented jet of soap that traveled directly into my open right eye. Rearing back, yelling, clawing gobs of New Age liquid castile soap from my face as an excruciating burning sensation engulfed my eye socket, with my unscathed left eye I desperately scanned the bottle for instructions on what to do if you shoot pressurized soap into your eyeball. But all I could make out were the oracular woo-woo pronouncements and obscure, peppy cajoleries etched into every little corner of the Bronner’s bottle.

“For 6,000 years the astronomers Abraham & Israel, since the year One!” — Nope.

“Always working, searching for more truth, more light.” — Nope.

“If cap clogs, poke it clear. Do not squeeze bottle.” Ah, yes. Well, fair enough. “Flush eyes well with water for 15 minutes.”

I couldn’t get rid of the burning sensation no matter how much I flushed my stinging eyeball—thank God that on a whim in the bodega that other day I’d opted for almond instead of my usual peppermint—so I staggered through the streets of Brooklyn, squinting and weeping soapy tears into a handkerchief, to the optometrist’s in Crown Heights, where I was dealt with in due course by the brusque but sympathetic doctor on call.

By early afternoon I had my eye drops, I had my lunch (picked up at the Caribbean bakery on the way back: two doubles, tamarind-laced channa masala ladled between spongy discs of bread, and an ample bone-in chicken roti, all washed down with bright red soda). I even had a rather swashbuckling eye patch for the light sensitivity that, I was told, could be expected to persist until my cornea recovered over the next 24 to 48 hours. Walking around with it on the streets of Brooklyn I must have looked like some kind of tragic case—young man maimed by stray firework or subway maniac’s knife—when in fact I had merely been temporarily brought low by a bottle of homeopathic soap.

I canceled all my plans for the evening and set about finishing my work for the day, editing articles with one eye. But as the work day concluded and the smarting diminished slightly, I wondered if I couldn’t make it, after all, to the Trump rally about to begin in Crotona Park in the Bronx. There might be something to write about there. Perhaps my eyepatch would make me a somewhat more palatable presence to the attendees. I’d never been to a Trump rally but my mental image of the attendees was that of a motley crew, a sort of postmodern, Mad Max take on Jacksonian America. I wouldn’t have to tell them why I was wearing the eye patch. It didn’t seem they would take too kindly to the name of Dr. Bronner …

The rally was an intriguing move on Trump’s part—after all, as all the papers said, Trump lost the Bronx, one of the most Democratic parts of the country, by eighty points in 2020. The ongoing criminal trial in Manhattan, expected to conclude in the coming days, has had the effect of bringing him back to his origins. Itching to keep campaigning but trapped in deep-blue New York City, he had so far opted to make a few appearances, including at a bodega uptown. But a rally in the South Bronx?

Trump clearly wanted photos of black and Hispanic Bronx residents in MAGA hats splashed across the news, to give a boost to his recent bid—which, according to polls, was having some significant effect—to draw more of the nonwhite vote away from the Democrats. But would the South Bronx turn out? The rally might end up as just a gathering point for a more familiar bunch of tri-state Trump supporters—the petty bourgeois suburban or vestigial outer-borough type, matching Trump’s cultural background and his not so deeply felt cultural conservatism but similarly at odds with their commandingly Democratic states: at once the truest and most eternally frustrated type of Trump supporter.

So, curious, I got on the 2 train and rode it all through Manhattan up to Crotona Park in the South Bronx. I was very late to the rally, which had started at 6—but who would come to a Trump rally in the South Bronx? It was a humid late afternoon with big slabs of cloud passing through the whitish blue hazy sky. Black and Dominican people from the surrounding neighborhood crisscrossed the park as I walked south toward the rally. Ahead of me on the path was a group of keffiyeh-clad kids with signs, headed to the protest outside the rally.

I heard his voice first. So familiar, those cadences—drawling, sneering, bellowing—heard in clips and on television a thousand times in these last years: almost a decade since his arrival at the center of national politics, it boggles the mind to remember. But here that voice was, here! In New York City, the sanctum sanctorum, quadruply protected from the reaches of that other, bad America. Even here, there was that voice: amplified, carrying through the dense afternoon air of a New York City park, the way I’d only ever heard the voices of barbecue organizers or yoga class teachers in Prospect Park. How uncanny.

As it turned out, the voice would be all that I would get of Trump. Across an algae-choked pond, I could see a perimeter of metal barricades, guarded by NYPD and Secret Service. This perimeter protected a bowl-shaped hill, on the other side of which, you could tell without being able to see, the crowd was assembled.

“Should I go off teleprompter and tell you the end result?” I heard that voice say. The invisible crowd cheered. “You think Biden goes off teleprompter? I don’t think so. He’s no good on teleprompter.”

But here too there was a crowd. Circling around the hill, I drew towards two opposed assembled masses. There, on top of a large outcropping of that dark shaly rock common in uptown Manhattan and the Bronx, an enthusiastic group of protestors stood and chanted loudly, carrying a large banner that read

FUCK TRUMP

FUCK BIDEN

This drew some begrudging compliments from the opposite group of Trump supporters, on the path below the outcropping, some shouting at the protestors above them on the outcropping, others queuing in long and apparently unmoving lines to get into the rally, which appeared to be at capacity.

I quickly abandoned the effort to get in. Things were interesting enough out here, and you couldn’t hear anything from the rally from the line because of the protestors and the general din. The group of Trump supporters, slung out along the chaotic band from the line to get in and the calmer area by the pond—where a relaxed atmosphere prevailed and where you could actually hear Trump speaking—was far from a typical assemblage. It was even far from being a kind of temporary addition, as I imagined it might be, to the archipelago of white enclaves scattered across the Bronx, from Riverdale in the west to City Island and the aspirationally named Country Club in the east.

A silver-haired man in a pinstriped grey suit and a MAGA yarmulke—a gay Dominican guy with dangling silver crucifix earrings calling out “Make America great again” to passersby with his arms wrapped around his boyfriend’s waist—an elderly white woman having an urgent phone conversation on her cell phone which was entirely wrapped in some kind of transparent plastic bag or sleeve—black men in red MAGA hats, black women in white MAGA hats, Orthodox guys in payot and MAGA hats—old Italian guys from Arthur Avenue in NEW YORK FOR TRUMP hats—square-jawed Long Island kids with barrel chests and Yankee jerseys, there they were … and none of these likely even countable among the real devotees, who presumably were all inside…

I retreated back toward the pond and took my place in the gallery of people leaning on the metal dividers, facing the police officers and the rise from beyond which Trump spoke. There was something very nineteenth-century about all this, the Whitmanesque human salmagundi of the crowd, the toothless vendors wheeling around carts of ten-dollar Trump hats, the mere fact of being able only to get close enough to hear snippets of the speech, delivered from behind a veil as if by the Wizard of Oz … wasn’t it the case that hardly anyone at Gettysburg could get close enough to Lincoln to hear him speak? But this wasn’t exactly like that, was it …

From what I could make out, we were now passing through a long section of on-teleprompter material, the tedious rhetorical routine—tedious for Trump too, it was always clear—which (this was an important part of the ritual) he maintained precisely in order to liberate the crowd and himself from it at ecstatic intervals, a kind of miniature version of what he always promised to do politically.

This speech had clearly been designed to appeal to the more urban, less Republican, less white New York City crowd—lots on inflation, cost of living, lots on crime, promises to shore up the subway system; repeated gestures to things Democrats, Republicans and independents could supposedly all agree on; bragging about how good things were for black and Hispanic Americans under the Trump years.

“And these millions and millions of people who are coming into our country”—he always said “millions” in that distinctive way, as if it had a Welsh double-L in it—“The biggest negative impact is against our black population and our Hispanic population.” If I were a Democratic operative listening in on this speech, that line would sound a little chord of fear in my stomach.

To my left along the metal barrier a middle-aged Dominican woman in a Declaration of Independence shirt was saying in Spanish that people had been waiting for four hours to get into the rally and lamenting that she hadn’t gotten in. On this late summer Thursday in the Bronx the hottest club in New York City was the Trump rally … to my right was a Puerto Rican-American guy who talked in a stereotypically Italian-American accent—so much so, he sounded like a bad SNL parody of a Sopranos character.

“The minute Crooked Joe Biden shuffles out the door, I will rapidly rebuild the greatest economy in the history of the world,” Trump was saying.

“Shuffles out the door—this guy’s great. I love him,” said Puerto Rican Sopranos parody guy, picking up on the least remarkable remark that Trump had made all afternoon. “I wish he was my uncle. Uh-huh-huh! Right? That’s fucking great. Ninety-one felonies, no charges. Ha-HA! You understand? Ha-hahaaaa. They’ll never get him.”

The last sentence delivered in a slurred growl. The guy was onto something about the avuncular quality of contemporary populism … people often said in Brazil about Bolsonaro that he reminded them of their controversial but beloved uncle … so much the worse for the study of political psychology that Freud gave us so much on mothers and fathers and so little on uncles …

“We will make energy affordable again by saying, ‘Drill, baby, drill!’” cried Trump from behind the hill.

Puerto Rican Sopranos parody guy, however, turned out to be something of a bleeding-heart liberal on the energy issue.

“The ‘drill, baby, drill’ thing is cool, but it’s not really that cool,” he said, “Because it’s affecting the earth. You need something that’s renewable … they have to figure out how to perfect solar, wind, make it so that you’re not putting that shit in the grid, you’re putting it in the house.”

That’s what you get at a Trump rally in the Bronx.

As Trump was taking a break from being a candidate, having felt a desire to return to his days as a motivational speaker—“I’m so tired of politics! Can we devote six minutes to success? ‘Kay?”—I walked back over to check on the line. There was a bit of chaos as the Trump group exchanged taunts with the protestors up on the outcropping. Ever more extreme cries, from a few assembled Trump supporters who, by the look of them, arrived themselves on American shores three, two, one, zero generations ago, of “send them back,” “fuck ‘em, fuck all of them!”

A couple Hispanic guys pushed past me chanting Trump’s name in Spanish (Donal Tron). A white guy unfurled a rainbow banner that read GAYS FOR TRUMP. A line of riot-squad officers now began to form, blocking my way to the line to get in, which still didn’t seem to be moving in any case. Neighborhood kids ran around underfoot dribbling soccer balls, shrieking, “Biden’s finished!” in Spanish.

Back by the pond, Trump had veered into speculation about the recent wave of migrants. Were they forming an army? They spoke languages no one had ever heard of. Like something out of the fall of the Roman Empire…

Now he prepared to read the poem that is an age-old staple of these rallies:

On her way to work one morning,

Down the path alongside the lake,

A tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake.

His pretty-colored skin had been all frosted with the dew.

“Oh well,” she cried, “I’ll take you in and I'll take care of you.”

“Take me in oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven's sake,

“Take me in oh tender woman,” sighed the snake.

She wrapped him up all cozy in a curvature of silk

And then laid him by the fireside with some honey and some milk.

Now she hurried home from work that night as soon as she arrived.

She found that pretty snake she’d taken in had been revived.

“Take me in, oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

“Take me in oh tender woman,” sighed the snake.

Now she clutched him to her bosom, “You’re so beautiful,” she cried.

“But if I hadn’t brought you in by now you might have died.”

Now she stroked his pretty skin and then she kissed and held him tight .

But instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite.

“Take me in, oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

“Take me in, oh tender woman,” sighed the snake.

“I saved you,” cried that woman.

“And you've bit me even, why?

“You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.”

“Oh, shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin,

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in,

“Take me in, oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

“Take me in, oh tender woman,” sighed the snake.

The habitués in the crowd had cheered when Trump had dangled the poem before reading it, like the hardcore fans of some rock band rejoicing when they announce the next song will be an old concert favorite. They understand, those habitués, the irony that lurks in Trump’s delivery of the poem. On the face of it, it’s a straightforward allegory about the risks of Christian charity when offered to malevolent recipients. It no doubt does its job admirably for the Christians in Trump’s audience at a normal, non-Bronx rally—supplying a kind of anti-Parable of the Good Samaritan. It appeals to that rather Old Testament strain in the American religio-cultural tradition, in which a very real charitable imperative coexists with the capacity for boundless wrath and ultimate exclusion for those understood to stand in opposition to one’s own brotherhood.

But at a subtler and more piquantly ambivalent level this parable of the snake—there’s no denying it—describes Trump’s own relationship to his supporters. The terrible, and yet somehow irresistible temptation to take in the frozen serpent, the inevitable and mortal bite upon its reanimation, and the final jeer, reminding the victim that all of this was foretold in advance: it’s all there. Take me in from the cold, Trump says. You know what will happen but you know you’ll do it anyway. You want to be bitten. And what could be more American than that?

A younger-middle-aged white guy on a unicycle draped in American flag gear and wearing the sort of Viking helmet associated with that one guy who stormed the Capitol pedaled himself over carrying a megaphone. I took a picture, then immediately regretted it as he started delivering, through the megaphone, his woeful attempt at parody of the assembled Trump supporters, in that ironic tone I associate with Gen X, a flat kind of irony that barely disguises a deep terror and resentment of one’s own powerlessness.

“Trump for dictator!” he cried. “Trump for dic-ta-tor!”

He kept this up until, eventually, the mostly black and Hispanic Trump supporters around, having ignored him, started telling him to go away and that he was annoying.

The rally wound down, a few local Democratic politicians taking the stage in turns with Trump, before he delivered a final peroration. Who knew if any of the people at the rally would take the subway back to wherever they came from, but just in case, to beat the rush I hightailed it out of there, past the neighborhood kids dribbling soccer balls, past the American flag canopies under which guys were selling Bronx rally pins and Trump memorabilia, past the apartment blocks and vinyl-sided low-slung Bronx houses, down toward the subway.

A guy was playing old bossa nova songs on his saxophone by the trestle. Then, “Old Man River.” Out to the west between the buildings a pink-orange strip was swelling outward from the horizon.   

“I was just there for the moment,” a black woman said on the phone to her friend in the bodega as I ordered a sandwich to eat on the train back to Brooklyn. “We need some excitement in the Bronx.” We’re snakebit, and we like it.

Eve of another American election. Four years ago I was staying with my grad student friends in Baltimore when the election arrived. We wandered through cold deserted boarded-up Washington, D.C. and then drove back and wandered around cold deserted Mount Vernon, stood in front of the Washington Monument there—like much about Baltimore’s old neighborhoods, much more attractive than its D.C. counterpart—and contemplated the American past and future in an attitude of mock graveness. We cooked a giant ham and the three of us ate it off of the three plates in the apartment, with the three forks and three knives in the apartment, and drank wine out of the three mugs in the apartment, from which we had to rinse out the dregs of our three espressos. Pleasant grad-student-esque sense of living precisely within one’s humble means.

My impression at the time of the speech Trump gave late into the night after things started to go wrong for him in the results was of a man stumbling toward denial in real time. How could it have gone wrong, he seemed to be saying, it was going so well at first … it was almost as though we couldn’t lose … and yet somehow it seems like we did, how could that be … but … then again, what if we didn’t?

When they finally called it for Biden days later we were in Philadelphia wandering around and we saw groups of people running through the half wooded area around the art museum with glow sticks and things like that. Strange scattered kind of celebration. The world remained in quarantine.

Now here we are again, Trump the “ogre” having managed a kind of Hundred Days-esque return to the brink of power, and it sounds like D.C. is half boarded up again, but otherwise things are different, of course. I don’t have predictions to offer or even exhortations, just a few detached thoughts about our odd little political/electoral system, which limps on, vast consequences hanging upon it, kept in motion as is tradition by a fifty-state patchwork of (in many cases) complete amateurs.

First of all, the electoral college, which I think at least in its current condition can be understood as a form of Hegelian democracy. Not Hegelian in the sense of the politics discernible in the Philosophy of Right but in a rather cruder sense: Votes matter more in states where the world spirit lives. If you look at the list of swing states—Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona—all are either in the declining Rust Belt or the ascendant Sun Belt.

These are the states where, for now, the American flame lives. In the language of this essay of mine from earlier this year, they are the hubs of American filibusterism, where private forces are seizing various sorts of opportunity to advance projects that are transforming American society, and the state (in the broader sense) is following along in their wake, trying to mop up the mess they make and take stock of the consequences.

Nevada and Arizona are burgeoning sprawl states, soaking up middle- and lower-middle-class fugitives from California who want to remake the vanished world of San Fernando Valley “yahoos with Goldwater bumper stickers” in the great Western desert. North Carolina and Georgia are great beneficiaries from the trillion-dollar trick that capital played on American labor, redeploying people and industry from the union-strong Midwest and Northeast to the open-shop South and West.

As for Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, decline brings its own kind of reinvention, at least in America. One dimension of this is that towns like Reading, PA have gone from being John Updike-type cities full of whites and white ethnics to majority-Latino redoubts, blue but trending redward. Here race and political economy collide—and fulmination from liberals over the supposed siren song of the alt-right for allegedly machista Latino men seems to overlook brute economic fact. As a greater proportion of a rising immigrant group reaches petty bourgeois status—excuse me, “small business owners”—the basic outlines of standard GOP economic policy will become more compelling.

From Jack Herrera’s report from Reading in Politico magazine today:

Down below, the city and surrounding county are all Rockwell Americana: On the periphery, shingled witch-hat turrets poke up from rows of Victorian houses, and, downtown, deco highrises mix with handsome brick buildings. The city’s architecture preserves the thrill of civilization their builders felt in the early 1900s, when this was one of America’s great centers of heavy industry. In the first half of the 20th century, the Reading Railroad put this city on the map (and on the Monopoly board) — but, like so many other cities across the Rust Belt, it collapsed along the domestic steel industry. Between 1960 and 2000, the city shrank and shrank, its stately buildings becoming empty husks. Then something happened. Sometime in the early ‘90s, word began to spread in Dominican and Puerto Rican communities that Reading was where it’s at. The housing stock, built during the city’s heyday, was gorgeous, and, because Reading was shrinking, it was affordable. There was also a solid job market: After years of white flight, the remaining factories in the city—Hershey and Pepsi among them—were hungry for workers. Waves of Latino immigrants rejuvenated the economy, and the city began to grow again for the first time in 50 years. 

The swing states are, in a word, the states that are changing the fastest. The only states not on the list that might deserve that classification only recently stopped being considered swing states: Ohio, Florida, Texas. And all three have become comfortable Republican territory. Another state that has changed much but has long since passed its “tipping point,” in the other direction, is Virginia.

Of course this wasn’t part of the intentional design of the electoral college, nor necessarily how it has always operated historically, but in a country so obsessed with the new, and so constantly remade by waves—of people, from within and without; of money; of industry—it seems somehow hardly accidental, and almost appropriate. Our Delphic oracles are the people on the bleeding edge.

I’ve been reading a lot of Tom Wolfe lately and—in a cultural rather than political manner—there’s a lot of this to his outlook, too. He had a great nose for what was new in American society. He was always looking for the societal equivalent of that mid-Atlantic rift, on top of which lies Iceland, where new land wells up from the bowels of the earth. Look at the subjects of his novels: ethnic conflict and urban decay in New York City, the rise of the New South, sexual politics on college campuses, the rise of Miami. But he was sort of obsessed with the new, perhaps to a fault, and it got more grating as he got older. Wolfe was always a critic of the European influence on American culture, but there’s something to be learned from the Éric Rohmers of the world, the minds who pay attention to the lives of people whose social situation and cultural coordinate points are not changing at all but are rather quite stable.

I have always voted in deep-blue states from which the flame has long since moved on—California and New York. And the experience is a bit different in each. In California as an “informed voter” you’re obliged to study in depth a long list of ballot measures in order to discern which has been placed there by some “special interest” and phrased in deceptive language, appealing to some sort of vague Californian instinct like preserving the environment or funding schools, but which in fact is intended to do the opposite, or to provide some sort of carve-out for some obscure group, like a construction company or (in one memorable long-running case) Big Kidney Dialysis. As for the business of electing officials, it was simple. You can vote for the Democratic candidate for the state legislature, who will win, or you can vote for the Republican candidate, who will lose. And you can vote for judges, or whatever.

Voting in Brooklyn in the midterms I received an education in what a real political machine looks like. State senator, running unopposed. State assemblyman, running unopposed. Judges? Pick any six of these six names. There was something pleasant about dispensing with the whole illusion of choice. Fill in the rest of the stereotype here about New York City being a more frank and honest culture than California, etc. etc.

The subject of the two parties brings me to my second point, which is that you could describe our party system, again rather crudely, as Freudian. I mean that in the narrow sense that the Democratic Party has become something like the national superego and the Republicans the national id. This was very much on view in the two parties’ conventions and subsequent rhetorical interventions. On the one hand, you have prominent Democrats reminding voters of the stakes of the election for the future of democracy, about the importance for women’s rights, about the danger of fascism—Barack Obama scolding black men for insufficient energy in supporting Harris, and so on. On the other, you have Hulk Hogan tearing off his shirt and bellowing, Trump’s mischievous vaudeville act with the worst impulses of his crowds, the by now ingrained compulsion of the right to loudly do whatever they are under the impression liberalism is telling them not to do.

Democratic Party says: do what you ought to do. Be a respectable and upstanding person. Voting for us is your duty. The Republican Party says: do what you secretly want! Let them call you whatever names they want.

It wasn’t always this way. The Republicans used to be the respectable party—the party of old-stock Americans, of small government, the stout, morally upright, Protestant, New England-certified party that put an end to slavery—the party of Calvin Coolidge, for God’s sake! And the force opposed to a Democratic Party full of unassimilated immigrants and unreconstructed (or rather de-reconstructed) Southerners. But with the changes of the twentieth century and now with the brisk movement of college graduates and respectable types generally toward the Democrats, we’ve ended up in this situation, which in a country with a marked rebellious streak … a country that elected Jackson over John Quincy Adams … and which has a secret ballot, may be a dangerous situation for the Democrats. But who knows! The pollsters won’t tell much, however much they’re worth, so we will just have to wait and see. It’s political Christmas come early. The results will tell us, the American nation, whether we’ve been naughty or nice.

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr., was born in 1930 in Richmond, Virginia, raised in an upper-middle-class family that encouraged his intellectual inclinations. After college at Washington and Lee, he completed a PhD in American Studies at Yale, where like many Southerners before him at Ivy League universities in New England, he felt somewhat at odds with the institutional culture—politically and aesthetically.

After graduating he immersed himself in the more bracing waters of newspaper journalism—which at that time still had a kind of air of cigar smoke about it—in Springfield, Massachusetts and then at the Washington Post, before finding his way to New York City, and work at the Herald Tribune—the “Trib”—which at that time, besides being the “other paper” in town, opposite the respectable New York Times, had a reputation for letting its writers go out on a limb.

But Wolfe first made his name in the New York literary scene with a 1963 essay in Esquire magazine on teenage car culture in California, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” in which he unleashed an over-the-top prose style that borrowed as much from the hysterical incantations of early 1960s AM radio as it did from French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. A dandyish figure, clad in his trademark white silk tweed suit, Wolfe became known as much for his shafts of insight into popular culture as for his brutal satires of New York City’s upper crust. He also became notorious for picking fights with symbols of New York cultural respectability, from the New Yorker magazine to Leonard Bernstein and the art world (all of it).

The three books that are out now in handsome new editions, forming the first salvo in Picador’s ambitious project of reissues from Wolfe’s extensive bibliography, are from this first phase of his career. In The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, a 1965 collection of early journalistic writing on popular culture and the New York scene, Wolfe insists that “customized cars are art objects,” that Phil Spector is “the genius” of a “baroque period” in human culture, like Cellini, and that Las Vegas is the true culmination of modern architecture—a decade before Learning From Las Vegas.

In 1968’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, about novelist turned psychedelic hero Ken Kesey and the birth of the counterculture out of the remnants of Beat Generation bohemianism, you might imagine that given often his somewhat conservative inclinations, Wolfe would single out Kesey’s acid-tripping gang for brutal mockery, bringing his combination of Southern cynicism and New York seen-it-all-ness to their naïve West Coast optimism—and he does, a little bit—but mostly, he takes Kesey’s project of creating a new way of life out of the “Formica blandness” of the 1960s with a shocking level of seriousness. It’s reading this book that we realize how serious Wolfe was in his devotion to the vital emanations of American culture. This edition features an acute new introduction by Geoff Dyer.

In 1970’s Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, two longer pieces on race relations and the status games of the American upper class, we do get the more biting side of Wolfe. In “Radical Chic,” a devastating party report from Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s 1970 fundraiser for the Black Panther Party at their Park Avenue apartment. Drawing from the absurd mise-en-scène of Black Marxist revolutionaries at a gathering of high-society New Yorkers, Wolfe elaborates his theory of “radical chic,” or as he mostly calls it in the piece, nostalgie de la boue, in which, he argues, the upper class romanticizes the subaltern as a means of demonstrating their superiority to the middle classes. The essay dismayed the Bernsteins, who never forgave Wolfe, and earned a long and testy reply in the New York Review of Books by Jason Epstein. From that day to this, opinion has remained divided, between those who see the piece as a triumph of observation and sociological insight, and those who, like Christopher Bonanos of New York magazine, think it was “too mean.”

In 1973, Wolfe published The New Journalism, pressing his case for the literary merits of the new style of nonfiction journalism with a collection including contributions from—himself, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion, and cementing the term that still describes that influential journalistic style, despite protestations, including from Thompson, that it was all just a marketing exercise. If you look closely at Wolfe’s own understanding of what the New Journalism was, you notice that he conceives of it as a kind of literary class revolt. As he writes in 1973’s The New Journalism:

The literary upper class were the novelists … they were regarded as the only “creative” writers, the only literary artists. … The middle class were the “men of letters,” the literary essayists, the more authoritative critics; the occasional biographer, historian or cosmically inclined scientist also, but mainly the men of letters. They were not in the same class as the novelists, as they well knew, but they were the reigning practitioners of nonfiction. … The lower class were the journalists, and they were so low down in the structure that they were barely noticed at all. They were regarded chiefly as day laborers who dug up slags of raw information for writers of higher “sensibility” to make better use of.

The hardscrabble, semiproletarian, shoe-leather reporters, Wolfe imagined, were going to oust the effete, decadent Eastern establishment novelists from their perch at the top of the literary world’s pecking order. And creative nonfiction did indeed gain much in prestige, even if novelists still possess a certain elevated status. (In fact, you could argue from our vantage point, the more successful injection of prestige into a form once perceived as workaday was what happened to television.)

In 1979’s The Right Stuff, about test pilot Chuck Yeager and the Mercury Seven astronauts, Wolfe returned to a recurring theme of Ur-American good old boys thrust into the unwelcoming modernity of the American twentieth century—in this case, portraying the rise of the space program as the death of a kind of democratic high-modernist chivalry in the sky.

Then, after having spent years targeting the novel as an exhausted form that had to be supplanted with the likes of his new, vigorous, inventive nonfiction, Wolfe turned to—you guessed it—the novel, presenting his attempt to refashion himself as a sort of American Balzac in 1987’s Bonfire of the Vanities, a socially ambitious but formally conservative novel about the simmering racial tensions and status anxieties of New York City at its nadir. Bonfire, which first came out in serialized form in Rolling Stone (also very nineteenth-century) quickly became a cultural touchstone for its omniscient portrait of a city on edge, from commanding heights to poor periphery—and, a bit later, it also became a critically panned movie starring Tom Hanks.

More novels followed toward the close of his literary career, with diminishing results, though Wolfe’s sense of the cultural-moral-political-economic cutting edge remained undiminished: A Man in Full, about the new South, I Am Charlotte Simmons, about campus sexual assault, and Back to Blood, about Miami. Wolfe died in 2018, after publishing his last book, The Kingdom of Speech, a critique of Darwin and Chomsky that emphasizes the centrality of the human capacity for language.

Today, the biggest fans of Wolfe’s social criticism in particular are often conservatives, or else liberals who have separated themselves from the progressive cutting edge. Bonfire continues to be read widely. As stylist, as observer, as nonfiction pioneer, he continues to be worshipped across the political spectrum—although the younger crowd in New York City does so increasingly sub rosa.

In Kandy-Kolored, there’s an essay about how rich men have a secret—tailored jackets with real buttons on the sleeves, a delicious sartorial pleasure to be enjoyed in secret, since bandying about your functional buttons was considered a bit untoward. It might amuse Wolfe, were he around today, to imagine that—at least for a certain set—he himself had become a kind of literary version of this.

It was almost as frequently talked on campus about as another endemic psychological ailment, “duck syndrome,” which is when you wear a serene expression as you move gracefully across the water’s surface, while below it you are paddling frantically.

At freshman orientation, they even dedicated programming to “impostor syndrome,” intending to dispel it in a manner that, on the contrary, and I think in a certain way intentionally, supercharged the Protestant Work Ethic mindset that animates it. “We don’t make mistakes,” they said. “If you’re here, it’s because you were meant to be here.”

Not to go full Ross Douthat here and say that our elite institutions instill an insidious form of secularized Protestantism in the young people they educate … but come on. There we were, the Elect … er, the Class of 2018 … there in the academic Isle of the Blessed, this jewel of a California campus … wondering if we deserved to be there.

We couldn’t be qualified by our listed accomplishments alone, the transcripts and standardized-test scores and extracurricular achievements and so on … that was important, but not sufficient, for admission under the famous holistic American system … there was some other, inner thing that qualified us to be here … and God, or rather His messengers on Earth in the Stanford admissions office, didn’t make mistakes, so our outward success was surely the sign of inward righteousness.

But you could never be quite sure … so you had better work very hard to make sure that you were worthy. Hence the prevalence of impostor syndrome—and its cure, hard work, led to the other thing, duck syndrome. Duck syndrome was a compromise between the openly competitive, cutthroat culture of the East Coast elite universities, and the chill California ethos. It was the Protestant Work Ethic with sunglasses and a tan.

I spent my time as an undergraduate embedded in Stanford’s humanities-student subculture—a loose group of intelligent but lazy eccentrics opposed to the dominant pre-professional and engineering-oriented student culture—which I would later cite as one reason I never found myself particularly susceptible to either of these maladies.

But I would venture further and say that if you have impostor syndrome, at a certain level you’re a sucker. Just think what you’re assuming if you spent a lot of time worrying about whether you deserve to be wherever you are. You think these institutions get to decide questions of moral desert? That’s between you and your conscience. The Stanford admissions office is not, after all, God … in fact on one relatively recent occasion the behavior of one of its officers was significantly less than godly.

It’s especially embarrassing to have one’s self-worth so caught up in these questions in a country—like this one—that is so chock-full of utterly shameless hucksters who breeze through the doors of whatever institutions they can, grab what they want and generally do as they please, never pausing for a moment to wonder if they deserve to be where they are. So go ahead and get that bag! But I think we’re often, as Americans, trapped in this dialectic … between the huckster and the sufferer of impostor syndrome, between the subject consumed by self-doubt and pure scammer jouissance.

It’s a very Protestant dialectic. The construction of a community of the specifically deserving—as opposed to the Catholic idea of a faith that’s capacious enough to encompass all of society—requires, and often generates through its own inhuman demands, a Scarlet Letter-type scapegoat, who becomes an object of moral scorn and jealousy at the same time. That’s how we feel about Elizabeth Holmes and about George Santos. How wrong they were, to fake it all like that … and yet, how wonderful it must have felt—and don’t the institutions that harbored them deserve to be taken down a peg?

There was an element of this to the Varsity Blues scandal, too, that episode with the parents who bribed their kids’ way into elite schools, in many cases through a particular weak link in the admissions armor: sports, especially rich-kid sports like sailing. We knew the girl at Stanford who got expelled after reports came out claiming her wealthy family had paid millions to get her in through the “side door.” Torrents of opprobrium were heaped on her when the press released her name. She was dating a friend of ours, and by all appearances was a nice person, didn’t seem essentially different from other students who were children of great wealth. It was clear the furious reaction wanted to make her into the exception that proved the sacred rule—that the Stanford admissions office does not make mistakes. (This myth exists as much to discipline those who get in as it does to reassure those who don’t.)

In this manner, the two extremes of the dialectic are mutually reinforcing. It’s best to avoid both. No one should get down on their knees and genuflect at the altar of a university. No educational or professional institution deserves to be invested with this level of moral authority. The methodical manner in which Stanford has lately gone about eradicating the last remains of the counterculture, and independent student life generally, on its campus should be enough to convince anyone that it in particular hardly deserves to be arbiter of anyone’s self-worth. Take what you can and run! From the sandstone arcades of the grand old Main Quad, done in that ill-advised combination of Richardsonian Romanesque and Spanish Colonial Revival that a friend of mine once called “Oversized Taco Bell.”

A much more effective and honest way for elite universities to dispel their students’ concerns would be to tell them during freshman orientation: Look, who cares if you deserve it or not, that’s an idiotic way of thinking, even we aren’t that full of ourselves, just enjoy the next four years, take some good classes, make some friends, don’t do anything drastic, you’ll come out of here with a piece of paper that will serve you well in life and hopefully some nice memories, that part is really up to you, but if I hear one more whiny remark about “whether I deserve to be here” I’m going to instruct the marching band specifically to haze you within an inch of your life.

But they’ll never do that. So much the worse for them.

It was all very nice … and yet it felt weird to be here, near one of the social fault lines in the Brooklyn landscape. A familiar oblique sense of alienation. The unshakeable impression that this café was a fortress in disguise, and the customers, with their MacBooks and stick-and-poke tattoos, its garrison. I was enlisted in it too, I had to admit, just by being here—and had been the whole time I lived here.

What is it about Brooklyn? Not the borough as a whole, which contains within it endless riches and wonders. I mean the part of it that has been colonized … I’m afraid that’s really the only word for it … by the professional classes and their quasibohemian cousins. It’s the part of it we are all familiar with, that crescent sweeping from Greenpoint in the north in through Bushwick and Williamsburg—briefly crossing the border into Queens in Ridgewood—and tracking down and back through Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights to the tonier streets of Park Slope and Cobble Hill: the great growing monster that day by day extends feelers, in the form of L Train Vintage stores and rowhouses repainted black, further into Flatbush and Sunset Park, pushing the frontier line further outward.

In writing about Brooklyn I’m returning to the theme of a briefly infamous article I wrote in 2022 about New York City’s cultural scene,1 but the more useful reference point here is something else: an essay I published last week about how the frontier drama repeats itself incessantly in American life. Groups of people get it into their heads to swoop in to some loosely controlled area that seems ripe for the taking, not asking anyone for permission, just setting up shop. First it seems like a brave and creative act and later it takes on a more sinister, self-interested quality that, if you were honest, you’d have to say was probably the intention the whole time.

It's Frederick Jackson Turner stuff. It’s the logic of the frontier. It’s “settler colonialism,” if you prefer. It’s how Uber got off the ground, it’s what all those unlicensed weed stores were trying to do in New York City before the city started shutting them down. First you get a foothold and then you force them to change the rules so that you can stay where you are. That’s the story of the new bourgeois Brooklyn, I wrote, drawing from Suleiman Osman’s Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn:

Looking at the development of this phenomenon in brownstone Brooklyn from the 1960s onward, Suleiman Osman de­scribes how the initial “white-collar émigrés moved there with a sense of zeal.” These were sympathetic figures in the eyes of the New Left: Jane Jacobs–reading believers in urban life in all its racial and class diversity, in an age of suburban self-segregation. But by the 1980s, real estate in the Brooklyn neighborhoods the émigrés had colonized, many of whose names and supposed boundaries had been invented out of whole cloth by the émigrés themselves, was among the country’s most expensive, and the previous residents’ days were numbered.

No one told the gentrifiers to move into those neighborhoods. As Osman puts it, “gentrification did not originate in . . . city hall.” But once they were sufficiently established, it turned out they had things to ask of the state. Relentlessly opposed to central planning—associated with urban renewal projects and the hated Robert Moses—they battled their neighborhoods’ “aging ward bosses,” seeking to win decentralized power for themselves. By the 1970s, the white-collar émigrés had ob­tained a long list of public sweeteners and handouts, including special mortgages for “young pioneers” and tax incentives for home improvement.For the displaced residents, no such public help was forthcoming.

It's a familiar story, told in Jonathan Lethem novels and many other places besides, and it’s not like anyone really denies it. But then again, there’s a kind of reluctance to look at it straight on, without that kind of sheepish, halfhearted self-flagellation that is the way that my generation employs to deal with a wide range of moral quandaries. Yeah, I feel bad about being, like, a gentrifier, you know, but this is where I could afford to live.

The point of acknowledging that the new bourgeois Brooklyn is a recent creation of a frontier-like political-social project is not to assign blame or make media people who live in Crown Heights feel bad. It’s not like things will change if we feel bad about them. But it’s something you have to keep in mind in order to discern why so often it feels weird to be in Brooklyn.

Because it does. This was something that I felt especially intensely during the year I spent (up until June) living in a kind of bourgeois Brooklyn no-man’s land: the border between Prospect Heights and Crown Heights. Both used to be Caribbean neighborhoods, but Prospect Heights has long since been converted into a kind of slightly more downscale annex of Park Slope. In this triangle of historically-designated old rowhouses, which are not quite as nice as the rowhouses on the other side of Flatbush Avenue, live salt-and-pepper-haired 37-year-old parents of young children. They are well off, but not quite as well off as their 37-year-old counterparts on the other side of Flatbush Avenue. (The consolidated parts of the new bourgeois Brooklyn have precisely this kind of awful precision in their socio-economic sorting.)

Crown Heights, on the other hand, is still partly Caribbean (and partly Orthodox), but also home to a bunch of media people and assorted professional and precarious types. It’s a neighborhood in flux, a zone of contestation, a place through which the frontier line runs zig-zag.

The dynamics along each the major avenues that run through the border zone between Prospect Heights and Crown Heights illustrate things succinctly. Vanderbilt Avenue, the main drag of Prospect Heights, has been fully remade into a paradise for the hipster parent class. An artisan ice-cream shop, a bookstore that stocks all the correct NYRB titles, a seafood store where a couple pounds of hake will set you back three figures—you can imagine the rest. They have even managed to get it pedestrianized half the time. Everywhere in Brooklyn an “Open Street” is a sure sign that the new arrivals have won a total victory over the established nonwhite homeowners, who prefer to drive unimpeded. Although it’s a pyrrhic victory in this case, because pedestrianized Vanderbilt Avenue is somehow more, not less, hazardous to cross than nonpedestrianized Vanderbilt Avenue, because of the delivery e-bikes that zoom through the gaps in the steel barricades at the speed of light. America! Not exactly the Champs-Elysées.

Washington Avenue, the next major thoroughfare to the east, forms the official border between Prospect Heights and Crown Heights. It is one of the more alienated streets in New York City, and I lived right off of it for a year. Further to the east is Franklin Avenue, where the good bars are, where the young transplant crowd hangs out, but which remains indisputably Crown Heights. Nostrand Avenue, further still to the east, is a completely Caribbean street that has so far resisted hipster incursions.

Vanderbilt, Franklin and Nostrand are easy to understand. But Washington Avenue is a demilitarized zone between the consolidated area and the zone of contestation. The social gradient is so sharp and so specifically instantiated that it’s even true that a majority of the businesses on the Prospect Heights side cater to the Prospect Heights crowd (or rather the somewhat younger and somewhat shabbier people who live scattered around its margins, as I did) while a majority of the businesses on the Crown Heights side cater to a black, Caribbean clientele.

Washington Avenue is a schizophrenic corridor of social interpellation. Only two types of people can exist on Washington Avenue: the gentrifiers, and the gentrified. To walk down Washington Avenue is to be reminded of which one you are.

Perhaps it’s salutary for people, or for people like me, to have this sort of built-in, quotidian reminder of our social position. But it illustrates the way that frontiers are engines that narrow down the wide range of human possibility down to a single dichotomy. And I have the impression that this has something to do with a certain undeniable monotony that characterizes the new Brooklyn. You know what I’m talking about, it’s the way when you walk down a certain street in Clinton Hill or in Bed-Stuy and you see all the people wearing their little outfits and their Paris Review hats and their tote bags, all the little symbolic totems that say, I’m like you, you’re like me, we’re like this together. We’re united in this project of ours, this cause, and we have to hang together if we hope to succeed, and we should, and we will, and in general we already have, look at all these French people here, they love it, but we need to keep it going, so you’d better put on your Paris Review hat too.

There’s clearly something intolerable about this.

It’s not as if I’m free from these dynamics where I live now in—yes—a gentrifying section of lower Manhattan. But Manhattan is densely packed enough that the collisions happen on different levels at once stacked on top of each other, and not in this kind of merciless flat Cartesian space.

At some level the new Brooklyn is a frontier town with all the typical hallmarks. It’s an improvised, unplanned archipelago stretching across large swaths of the urban landscape. Transportation is always an issue along frontiers: the G train, which has been under construction and out of commission for much of this summer, is the lifeline between the quasibohemian zone in the north of the crescent and the more solidly bourgeois zone in the south. It wasn’t constructed to bring 28-year-olds who live in Crown Heights to wine bars in Greenpoint, but now it’s been requisitioned to serve the new Brooklyn, and it’s not quite equal to the task.

Culture isn’t scarce in frontier towns, as people sometimes like to think, Turner among them. But it does have a certain shallowness. Its roots are shallow. And frontier towns are not secure enough to be very self-critical. They aren’t so far removed from the precariousness of the early days, when it wasn’t yet clear the project was going to succeed, and there’s still some oblique sense that there need to be limits on how far anyone can diverge from a certain center of intellectual gravity without endangering the viability of the enterprise.

Moments of possibility for something truly new and unexpected do emerge—they do, for real—in frontier towns, but they’re so fleeting. They were doomed from the start. Don’t take it from me … take it from a recent New Yorker feuilleton (I dare you):

Not too long ago (ten years), in a neighborhood only slightly far away (Bushwick), poets, rockers, and actors took the L train just far enough to find a place to gentrify, and then put down shallow roots. Andy Simmons, one of the owners of the bar Carousel (36 Wyckoff Ave., Brooklyn), which opened last year, seemed to have this bohemian migration in mind when the place was designed. … On a recent weekend, however, a pair of curious onlookers encountered a scene that was distinctly un-seventies, and almost entirely devoid of local artists. … They found themselves surrounded by buttoned-up bankers, who drowned out the observers’ dialogue with tirades about “liabilities” and “R.O.I.s.”

Tale as old as time. There’s not much bohemianism to go around these days, and what’s left when it’s gone often isn’t something you could honestly call refined. When I lived in Williamsburg, in the little, vestigially Italian-American triangle bounded by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on one side, Grand Street on another, and the industrial zone on a third, I found it a less intensely socially contested area—the surrender of the old-guard Italians to the new-guard 24-year-olds had been a generally peaceful one, the homeowners among them presumably happy about the rising home values. It was a pleasant and even quiet part of a hectic city, although the vinyl-sided hundred-year-old wooden rowhouses that characterize the area are among the ugliest in the five boroughs (a fact that no one ever talks about when they talk about Williamsburg). The drab uniform ugliness of the houses points toward another fact about it that no one ever talks about, which is that despite all the money that’s poured in and glass-and-steel highrises on the waterfront and the lurid SoHoification of the whole precinct north of the BQE, despite the bookstores and the magazines and the podcasters in Greenpoint, all of North Brooklyn still preserves something of the way Henry Miller talked about it having grown up there, of being a million miles away from Culture with a capital C.

Was it delusional for me to feel somehow spiritually far—just across the East River—from the venerable temples of New York high culture, from Lincoln Center, from the Bryant Park library, from the Met, from blah blah blah? Brooklyn’s own cultural institutions, clustered north of Prospect Park, were hardly easier to access. Was it absurd for me to feel, in this milieu of remote tech workers who moved here from San Francisco and IPA-drinking Xennial tinkerers who bought in early, a kind of stifling or even in some sense desolate cultural landscape, a kind of crypto-bourgeois suburbanism overlaid over what was once an industrial working-class periphery? Was it really that fulfilling to go to the coffee shop and see what outfits the pseudo-skaters were wearing? Riding the L train somehow filled me with despair, in part because I didn’t like how my ears popped in that long tunnel under the East River, somehow much more unpleasant than the other tunnels. Was it just that the fire had moved on, burning deeper inland into Bushwick and Ridgewood? Why doesn’t anything last in this country?

Brooklyn has tremendous reservoirs of literary firepower but they’re sliced up and dispersed across a large and badly connected area, a dispersal that somehow restricts the possibilities available—like an insufferable echo of Marx’s smallholding peasants. When you read reminiscences about the heyday of the Village Voice you sense what a great advantage it was to have all these potentialities converge in a small area of Manhattan south of Fourteenth Street. We have the Internet now, which is part of what made this dispersal possible, but the Internet is fragile, as the decline of Twitter has made all too clear, and in the end it’s somehow insufficient. The emergence of the greater downtown cultural nexus seems to suggest that what gets generated online ends up needing some physical hub where it can play itself out and the place where that would be was always going to need to be Manhattan, since Brooklyn has no center—it’s certainly not downtown Brooklyn—and neither does the crescent-shaped new Brooklyn.

In the southern sections of the crescent, of course, as signaled above, the social substrata are different. These were neighborhoods with a history of being respectable, middle-class and white but that had “fallen on hard times,” that is to say their inhabitants decamped for the suburbs after the war and entirely different groups moved in, generally poorer and black or brown. Some blocks were just abandoned, which was what motivated the professional-class improvers to come in and start fixing them up.

Of course there was at least one neighborhood that never quite was relinquished by well-to-do whites: Brooklyn Heights, America’s “first commuter suburb.” It’s worth lingering a moment on the subject of this neighborhood, which symbolizes the New England Protestant origins of Brooklyn. In their history The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn, Stuart Blumin and Glenn Altschuler describe how the neighborhood took shape from the personal wealth and ambition of Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont, one of several New England Protestants who settled in New York City and found success in business, but disliked the crowded, anything-goes, religiously indifferent character of Manhattan. Pierrepont imagined Brooklyn Heights as an elegant, spread-out residential neighborhood from which wealthy men could commute to Manhattan—a sort of Connecticut before Connecticut became Connecticut. It ended up as something denser and more bourgeois than he wanted, but the Protestant character stuck. When Brooklyn was incorporated in 1834, Blumin and Altschuler note, the triumphal procession began

marching toward the city’s powerful new center of Yankee Protestantism [the First Presbyterian Church]. Inside this post-Puritan church the ceremony [included] a song in praise of “The Pilgrim Fathers.”

Brooklyn’s Protestant elite held a kind of diminishing sway over the city as it expanded radically southward, chewing up old Dutch farmland to the sea, until it and they were engulfed when Manhattan amalgamated the outer boroughs in 1898. That Protestant elite founded the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, et cetera—all institutions that have more recently become sites of pilgrimage for people who might not be practicing Protestants but who are children of middle-class families that, given their class position, would have been fifty years ago.

Brooklyn’s old Protestant elite had a reputation for being stuffier, more judgmental, more provincial—in a kind of Scarlet Letter way; they were from New England after all—than the Astors and Stuyvesants and their like in Manhattan. But they disappeared, or so Blumin and Altschuler say.

Still, wasn’t there something somewhat Pierrepontesque about the Brooklyn revolution that spread outward from Williamsburg (in quasibohemian form) and from Boerum Hill (in professional-class form)? It was an escape from Manhattan … because Manhattan had become too expensive, sure, but it wasn’t just that … this was rus in urbe, this was a way to live the suburban good life while also being a cool person in America’s largest city … and when the Bari Weisses of the world started complaining about woke Puritanism emanating from Brooklyn, well, isn’t it at least true that it’s in the footsteps of literal Puritans that you walk when you walk around Brooklyn Heights? The new Brooklyn is stuffier, touchier than Manhattan, there’s no doubt about it … Park Slope is one click toward Westchester, maybe two …

Glimpsed from this vantage, you could say gentrification in Brooklyn is less like Manifest Destiny and more like a kind of Protestant Reconquista—with Brooklyn Heights as the mythically unconquered principality of Asturias. It took seven hundred years for the Spanish to push the last Moors out of Granada. How long until there’s natural wine bars in Sheepshead Bay? And what will have been the point of this whole project? Two or three irritating books by irritating frontier veterans about how great it was back then?

All of America is a project, all the New World is a project—a colonial project, obviously, to begin with, but we continued the way we started and kept originating projects here and projects there. Once we were finished colonizing, we colonized ourselves, I guess you could say; the original urge turned itself inward, like a fractal. In our country, at least, these projects are often invested with all sorts of self-evidently preposterous moral or cultural just-so stories, promoted and pursued by means of a psychotic and ruthless conformism.

There’s something deeply insulting to one’s intellectual and spiritual dignity to have to be part of a project and it’s a shame that to survive in this country you generally have to sign onto one or another. Manhattan is a project, too—every city in this country is a project, a project that failed or a project that succeeded or a project that was succeeding fifty years ago and is now failing or vice versa. But Manhattan, venerable old Manhattan, forgets that it’s a project sometimes, gets into the habit of thinking that it is simply one of the eternal facts of the world … maybe the most important fact of them all … a risible, View of the World from Ninth Avenue way of thinking that at the same time is a necessary condition for culture. If you think yourself unassailable you can tolerate a little bit of criticism—it won’t hurt you. But if you’re aware that you’re part of a project, then when you get criticism, you worry about the project.

Is the new Brooklyn any different from what happened in Manhattan first? SoHo had to be SoHoified before the same disease could spread to Williamsburg, Alphabet City ran so Bushwick could walk … perhaps it’s not any different. Brooklyn might even be learning the irony that Manhattan has about its downtown precincts where the fire has long since moved on, leaving behind grotesque (if still fundamentally enjoyable) life where the fire once had been. Yes, we know about that … But the going is a little slower.

I can already hear my friends reminding me that when I moved to Williamsburg, in 2022, I was grateful to do so and escape noisy Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. And it’s true, I liked living in Williamsburg, though I had my complaints. I’d live there again if things worked out that way. The new Brooklyn has its pleasures, and perhaps there was some kind of historical necessity to the project, which defined an era of New York City culture and replenished the city’s cultural influence.

There was, after all, always a germ of suburbanism in the “hipster” moment that became tied up with the equivocal renaissance of the American city from the 2000s onward. The people who were moving in, a lot of them were from the suburbs. They adopted the city, but they weren’t city people. Some still aren’t. Walking through Prospect Heights every day to the Q train when I lived off Washington, the golden retrievers infuriated me. These weren’t city dogs, these were suburban dogs, and because they didn’t have nice big yards and streets to run around in—and because of the loathsome incapability of this entire class of people to discipline their animals or their children—the dogs were neurotic and unhappy and atrociously behaved. These people had them for no other reason than because that’s the kind of dog they had growing up in the suburbs.

A friend who grew up in Park Slope notes that there is an easy way to discern the houses inhabited by people from “before” from those inhabited by those from “after” is the façade. If it’s been redone, they’re from after. One thinks of immaculate suburban lawns.

But it probably had to be this way. In a country where the middle classes had been so utterly suburbanized in the decades after the war, any reincorporation of the middle classes into the city was bound to have to also incorporate some cultural elements of suburbanism. That couldn’t happen in Manhattan, so it had to happen in Brooklyn. And I don’t want to exaggerate matters. The average Brooklyn transplant lives a less “suburban” life than 99 percent of Americans of their class background; most don’t own cars, which can’t be said for many of their opposite numbers in Chicago, to say nothing of Seattle, let alone, say, Los Angeles.

And I’m aware this is all quite rich coming from someone from a development in Southern California. I should admit that I liked the occasional moments of almost suburban calm in my first Brooklyn apartment, in Williamsburg—moments of eerie repose.

On a clear and quiet night, late, outside my apartment on Powers Street you could stand on the sidewalk and see all the way down to the G train station at Metropolitan, half a mile away. There wouldn’t be a single person on the sidewalk. You could see the green spherical light of the subway glowing there in the distance. Gatsby-style.

I wanted to go walk around the vineyards above the Heuriger after we finished eating but it had started to rain so we took the tram back downtown from the northern suburbs.

The first bar we went to was perfectly nice. There was nothing wrong with it. It had wraparound bookshelves on which I found a collection of writing (in English) about Portland, Oregon, including an extract by some nineteenth-century founder of the city, some lawyer from Ohio, in which the author held his thoroughgoing boosterism in check long enough to aver that Portland would never become a tastemaking city.

This bar was empty when we walked in but by the time we had finished our first glasses of clean, slightly sweet Austrian beer it had filled up with young people, the sort of people who want to think of themselves as literary in some sense but are obviously professionals of some kind. Brooklyn has bars with this kind of clientele but these people seemed less selfconscious presumably because they were Viennese and not American.

T— and I spoke about political literature, the kind available in MFA programs and the kind available these days in Manhattan basements. We talked about the widespread folly of imagining that your writing is “doing something” in the world except through its own force as writing, as a heroic gesture of refusal.

Then I convinced T— to accompany me to the Café B—. This place, despite its name, was a late-night bar which came recommended with a curious blurb in the Word document passed on to us from a Viennese friend of a friend.

“The only place in Vienna where you can find anarchists sitting cheek to cheek with Burschenschafter … It is sort of a late-night Bermudadreieck but you must behave yourself or the Wirten will kick you out. … But perhaps you have to be from Vienna to understand how strange this place is?

An enticing description with a sort of dare on top. We walked through a zone of government offices and turned onto another silent street of white institutional neoclassical buildings only to have Café B— emerge incongruously into view, advertised by a little Puntigamer-sponsored sign (an Austrian beer whose catchphrase is Das bierige bier, which as far as I understand means “the beery beer”).

We pushed past the people smoking outside into a small, cozy little old-school-looking place with worn and scarred tables and wooden chairs, and in another room, velvet-upholstered corner booths and a jukebox which turned out to have all of maybe 20 songs on it (a typical European selection, some Euro ballads, some well-chosen tracks from Springsteen and Dylan and Cash, and some real head-scratchers, including Dylan’s “Wigwam”).

We sat in one of the dark velvet corner booths and ordered a couple of beers from the Wirten, a late-middle-aged Austrian woman with shortcropped blonde hair and crow’s feet we immediately took a liking to, and asked the Austrians at the table next to us what they were drinking. They had a small plate with two glasses of warm amber-red liquid, just a finger’s worth, and sugar cubes and coffee beans. It’s called Koks, they said. This apparently means cocaine in German slang. You chew the beans, drink the rum and eat the sugar cube.

The cafe really did have a varied clientele. There were a few middle-aged men and women in the room by the bar. In this room, with the jukebox and the velvet-upholstered corner booths, there were the Austrian good old boys who had explained Koks to us. There was a couple maybe in their late thirties in the other corner who seemed to be attempting to have sex with their clothes on. The woman, who had clambered on top of the man, was wearing a particularly garish green and orange paisley dress. Eventually the Wirten had to come over and put a stop to it. This place clearly operated like one of those “topsy-turvy households” we’d seen painted by Dutchmen in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Next to us were two girls, one stereotypically Austrian-looking (Sound of Music-type blonde etc.), while the other, darker-haired, kept glancing over at us, and they had a whole ensemble of bags including one out of which they periodically pulled a bottle of white wine—snuck into the bar because it didn’t serve wine?—to replenish their glasses. They ordered a round of Koks and instead of crunching the sugarcubes dunked them into the rum with a finger, holding them against the wall of the glass near the bottom and moving it up and down until it dissolved.

They turned out to be Brazilian, or in the case of the blonde girl, half-Brazilian, daughter of an Austrian expat from Linz who had grown up (this part was no surprise) in Rio Grande do Sul, the state where Gisele Bündchen is from and which much of the rest of Brazil considers to be really a part of Germany if not of Uruguay. Her friend was from the interior of São Paulo but was studying at the university here in Vienna and spoke excellent German. They were curious how we ended up at this bar, which was a confirmed local’s place and not on the radar of tourists nor seemingly the kind of place that tourists would like. It’s been around since the 1850s, they said. And the interior hasn’t been updated since at least the 1970s, or probably longer, which is why we like it. Except those couches over there, the blonde girl said, which they finally replaced a few years ago. The couches they had before were absolutely horrifying, disgusting, you could find all sorts of things in there … you could reach your hand in and find something from the 1940s probably … they were horrifying couches … I miss them very much …

They were impressed, and suspiciously concerned, that it turned out I could speak Portuguese: apparently they had been gossiping in Portuguese to each other, and didn’t seem convinced by my repeated (and quite genuine) insistences that I hadn’t been able to hear a word over the strains of “Ring of Fire” emanating from the jukebox (or rather over the Austrians singing along). I hadn’t even realized they were speaking Portuguese at all.

They insisted I come out for a smoke and show them exactly how good my Portuguese was and then upon hearing I lived in New York City promptly got distracted discussing some destination wedding in Hoboken (is Hoboken a “destination”?) that they were planning to attend in a few months, promptly forgetting all about me and T—, who had graciously accompanied me outside despite not being able to understand a word of Portuguese. As the girls went on and on in tedious Brazilian-bourgeois fashion about how they would certainly refuse to fly coach … it would be first class for them to New York, or business class at the very least … in search of a secret language of our own, I began paraphrasing in an ironic tone (or the closest approximation to one I could achieve in my absolutely atrocious French) what the girls were saying to each other for the benefit of T—, who spoke very good French.

Eventually we got bored and went back inside and talked to the good old boys. They also wanted to know how we ended up at this place, and why we were in “Wienna” at all. For some reason they pronounced the city’s name with a W, I think overcorrecting based on the endonym and the fact that the letter W makes a W sound in English. One had blond shoulderlength hair and was studying art history here in “Wienna” although he didn’t look the way you might expect a Viennese art history student to look. He looked like he played on a high school lacrosse team in the Milwaukee suburbs. The other had shortcropped brown hair and was studying law in Salzburg. They both were from Upper Austria and in speaking had that sort of slow-motion lilt I associate with rural Austria. They spoke very slowly and paused inexplicably between words.

“This is the last … Beisl … in Wienna,” the blond one said about a dozen separate times. “This is the only place where you can find every sort of person … young, old … left, right … up, down” (here he would grin) “even from, how do you say it? the Parliament, which for us is right here,” he said, explaining that last week he’d seen a People’s Party deputy drinking beer with his aides at that table over there.

It was very easy to bait the two Upper Austrians into inveighing against the Germans. The Germans, they said, were after all just so annoying, getting worked up into a huff whenever someone didn’t do things exactly the way they wanted, but the worst part was how they acted like they were doing you a favor by telling you off … truly intolerable … no sense of humor … by contrast the Viennese had an excellent sense of humor, though not everyone knew how to appreciate it … for example, when a Viennese man who is not especially attractive, let us say a 6 out of 10, is on a date with a very attractive Viennese woman, who is as we say a perfect 10 out of 10, then the first thing he will say to her is, I’m sure you have nothing better to do with your evening than to be here with me.

That’s the way it is in Wienna, the blond one went on, and sometimes people think the waiters are rude, but they really will warm up to you later.

And Austria? Well, it wasn’t like some other countries in Europe … the French, they like to protest, and the Dutch, maybe you saw that episode where the farmers dumped shit in front of the parliament there. It’s impressive, I see why they do it, but in Austria it’s not like that … when something happens we say, okay, we can live with it, it’s not so bad … the Labor Party arrives in government and we say, it’s okay, perhaps we can even take, how do you say, an advantage from this somehow? … the Nazis come—and here he tilted his head to show this was a joke, or mostly a joke, or at least not wholly serious—the Nazis come and we say, okay, perhaps we will benefit from this somehow …

Now, he hastened to add, or rather didn’t hasten, because Austrians don’t hasten to do anything, but he added nonetheless in a more serious voice, lest we get the wrong idea, that he wasn’t endorsing this, not necessarily, but that the fact of the matter was that it was the way the country was and he didn’t see it as very likely to change …

Well, it was getting late, wasn’t it? And the Café B— was closing, believe it or not. The jukebox was turned off, midway through “All Along the Watchtower.” We paid for our last round and the Wirten, Elisabeth, opened her black leather acccordionstyle waiter’s wallet and said fünfundzwanzig-bitte-sehr in her lurching staccato, somehow reminiscent of a Victorian innkeeper’s wife, and then it was time to go. We said goodbye to the good old boys and the Austrian-Brazilian girls. We called a car and waited for it on the deserted government-district street as the sky began to turn dark blue. And back at the apartment we slept until the afternoon.