I need to come up with some names to distinguish the newsletter and website versions of Music Week: I’ve been using “advance” and “long” or “full” or “reference,” but nothing feels right. Since I usually compile the reviews before writing the “advance,” the full set could be available at the same time. However, I usually take a bit more time to work on the introduction: there are more reviews I can reflect on, and over the years I’ve tended to stick personal notes in my Music Week blog posts. Leaving that sort of thing out helps me get the “advance” versions done quicker. And I figure I can take my time with the blog post, since the most urgent news is already out.

Anyhow, after posting (8:4), I found myself in an odd mood: I wasn’t very happy with the intro I had posted, and I had other shit on my mind (some medical stuff, some end-of-summer blahs, a lot of frustrated projects and unresolved work. So rather than just edit what I had posted, I started again from scratch. I wrote all day Saturday, and posted what I came up with on Sunday. I wound up laying out a lot of possible work, in enough detail that I thought it might be interesting here. Plus, this gives me a chance to edit some more, and you a chance to comment.

By the way, I screwed up once again and forgot to include the album covers when I mailed Music Week (8:4) out, so here you go:

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Some time ago, I had the thought that when I give up on the world, I’ll switch from reading nonfiction to fiction. Or maybe just watch movies, which is the source of most of what I know about literature? I understand that fiction is a valid, and in some ways even superior, path to learning about the world. But what reading it lacks for me is a sense of direction and purpose. When I pick up a nonfiction book, it’s usually because I have a specific set of questions, derived from some kind of research project. And I have tons of projects. I worry, though, that none will ever come to fruition, as I’m tempted to turn them over in my head endlessly.

Still, what’s bothering me is less the endlessness of the writing projects than the one project that I’m actually likely to force myself to complete: the 21st Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. While I don’t need to do much on this until November, and that may well be the easy way out, I’ve never been more conscious of how much time it will take, what the demands will be, the wear and tear, and how much more I could have done to prepare in the past. I keep telling myself that this will be my last one, but that just makes the task heavier. The poll is genuinely useful, and much appreciated by people I care about. I wonder, could we turn it into some kind of self-perpetuating institution? I have ideas on that, fewer skills, and no fucking idea how to proceed.

Well, I do have some ideas. I always have ideas — just way too many of them. I’ll start to sketch some of them out in the next few weeks, initially on my jpadmin email list, then as things shape up (assuming they do), on my other lists (jazzpoll is for voters, jpmedia was initially for publicists, but I might as well open it up for anyone who wants updates). One thing that’s fairly urgent is that I need to figure out my email situation. Yahoo still sucks — it was working yesterday when I wrote that, but it broke again today. Beyond that, I need to review the voter list: try to figure out who to add, who to drop, and how to best communicate with them. Then there’s the website. I can always hack another year onto the current framework, where each new year is cloned from the last, and hitched to the end like a freight train. But the very minor facelift I started a month ago is still far from complete, and I still haven’t incorporated the last files Francis Davis sent me before his death, let alone filled in the rest of the holes.

One bit of prep here would be to write a piece on the DownBeat critics poll, which came out in their August issue, just before our own poll got wrapped up in July. I still haven’t looked at it, but I can refer back to my own ballot. The thing I’m most interested in is the list of voting critics — especially who votes for them but not for us? I can’t grasp why would wade through their 51 ballot questions, which takes me 4-8 hours, but think coming up with a list of 10 records they like is too much work? Could it really just be the free promo cap? I’ll try to get that done in the next week or two.

Another newsletter piece I’ve been thinking about is a showcase of albums that made my 2025 non-jazz A-list, excluding those Robert Christgau reviewed that went unreviewed by Robert Christgau. The ones he reviewed are well known, and if the first pass is too long, I could even exclude artists he’s reviewed in the past but missed this round (like Maria Muldaur, the Ex, Dean Wareham, Bryan Ferry). I thought about doing this after his Dean’s List appeared belatedly (May 7), but got delayed. Christgau tries to narrow his focus down to about 150 albums per year, whereas I write about close to ten times that many (although if you weed out the jazz, that drops considerably). He comes up with an EOY list of 60-80, most of which I agree with. My A-list is longer (107 in 2025), but still pretty selective, and well worth checking out. Seems like it was an especially good year for underground hip-hop, but there’s a pretty wide range. Perhaps it seems too late, but most end-of-year lists are way too early. I keep adding to mine all through the following year.

Of course, there are many more things I’d like to write about that don’t involve music. The August 27 Loose Tabs, which has since expanded to more than 22k words, not counting my summary, has lots of ideas that could be developed. I mention one there that I even have a title for: “Is It Possible to Negotiate a Gentler Genocide?” It’s a hideous idea, but Israel’s right-wingers are unlikely to stop until they’ve ground all Palestinians into dust, and no one else is able let alone likely to stop them. I’ve written bits of this before, but I’ve never quite broached the idea that Palestinians might be better off just leaving their homeland. Neither side wants to hear this, and Trump is unable to hear or act — he could even lay claim to the idea, but he’s incapable of grasping the benefits of “gentler.” (His ICE agenda could have gone down easier, but with him cruelty seems to be the point.) But even if Trump is followed by a president who cares (not Biden, and not Obama-Bush-Clinton either), I don’t see any chance to impose a better solution on Israel, or for Israel to change before much more harm is done. And international law is a dead dream until this, practically the UN’s first real crisis, can be handled.

There are other mini-essays there that could easily be expanded. I talk about data centers as a political issue; about what’s wrong with the ICC, and why we need something like it anyway; about Trump’s feint toward North Korea; I point to the drone war in Ukraine, and which could accelerate the move toward autonomous AI weapons; I consider “has America crossed the asshole threshold?”; I puzzle over the notion of “Woke 1.0”); I have two long sections on Democratic Party strategy: whether to campaign for Trump voters (yes), and whether centrists are the answer (no); I talk about why Medicare for All is still the solution; I note an impending student debt crisis; I have a section on the Canada trade war nonsense, among many more Trump stunts, some dumb, some evil, most both; I write about estate taxes; I barely mention the Meta lawsuit settlement, as I have little sense of how much more it’s attempting to cover up; I mention a book on Israel’s Lobby, which I will probably read (although I doubt I have to); I also consider the late critic Dave Marsh, and my relationship to him. I could spend the rest of the year on such things.

One specific piece I’ve been thinking about is an effort to sum up the five worst things Trump has done. The idea started as a top ten, but I want to focus as tightly as possible on the very worst things, at a fairly high level, and not get sucked into collecting list lists: otherwise, one could easily run on to 50, or 500. This is a first pass at such a list. The order isn’t ranked, but it is roughly chronological in terms of impact, if not strictly date.

1. Trump’s power grab during his first days was unprecedented, a blitzkrieg against federal bureaucracy, but also against institutions beyond government, especially law firms and universities. The intent was to destroy the very notion of civil service, replacing it with a ruthless political machine.

2. Trump took ICE and turned them into a paramilitary gang, aiming to commit conspicuous violence with impunity against political targets. Along with his pardons and politicized prosecutions, he established the principle that violence is fine for people on his side, but free speech is criminal for people who oppose him.

3. Trump has created numerous channels for corruption, many quite unprecedented, throughout government and also through his businesses and person, while fostering a culture of corruption in business and around the world. The list of scams he has profited from, or otherwise converted into leverage, is mind-boggling.

4. Trump has fully embraced the notion that foreign policy is purely a contest of power, mostly but not just military, and that its purpose is to extort tribute from other countries. His war against Iran is the prime example, but it’s consistent with his other wars (e.g., against Somalia and Venezuela), and his cynical indifference to Ukraine (which is good for US business, as long as Putin wants to keep fighting). His relationship with the even more power-crazed Netanyahu is perhaps more complex, but the mix of grift and gore suits him perfectly.

5. His unprecedented and unique obsession with naming things after himself goes deeper than his considerable vanity: he seeks what the Israelis call “facts on the ground” (markers that become virtually impossible to erase or dismantle), and he seeks to trivialize the opposition everything he does provokes by making it personal. He seeks to dismiss us all as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), while by any previous understanding of the word, Trump is the one who is deranged.

6. As we attempt to run out the clock, it becomes increasingly clear that much of the long-term damage that America incurred by electing him president will be “opportunity costs”: things that we didn’t do because we were so preoccupied with dealing with this horrendous asshole. Climate change has long been a prime example, at least since the 1990s — why didn’t Clinton let Gore run with this, instead of assigning him to count paper clips (what he called “reinventing government”)? But there are many more examples, like inequality, world conflicts, environment, trade, technology, mostly things that policy doesn’t control but has to cope with. Trump has no comprehension of such matters, which means that as long as he is president, no serious efforts can be made to solve or even to moderate their effect. Where he does wade in, it’s often simply to make matters worse — such as his efforts to undo Biden’s renewable energy focus, and to block vaccination programs.

Sure, that’s six points, but they all fit together, and do a pretty good job of summing up the problem. Although I suppose, if I had to get down to five, the sixth could go “without saying,” reserved for an “as if all that wasn’t bad enough” conclusion. But originally I had slated it first: even before we knew what he would do, we knew for certain that his time would be lost. That’s what makes his presidency so utterly corrosive of hope. It’s not just that people were foolish enough to vote for him. It’s that they’re powerless to correct their mistake.

But the wasteland of the second Trump presidency need not be for nought. I’ve imagined a second piece, more speculative of course, which lists things that Trump has done that will make it easier to respond with measures that finally live up to the real problems we face. For starters, he’s demolished the credibility of the centrist (”pro-business”) camp in the Democratic Party, both as political strategists and as a policy wonks. Much of his pitch has been to characterize Democrats as corrupt and feeble, so it should be easy to turn those tables on him. He’s also discredited the notion of defense through deterrence, although Democrats are slower to point that out, and are often confused in their sense of world order. They need to build up a thorough critique of the abuse of power, and of the greed that drives it. What’s wrong here is amply demonstrated by Trump. What’s needed is an alternative, which gives people the rights and tools to resist this abuse. That’s a work in progress, hotly debated on the left. It’s arguably radical — certainly in the sense of the 1966 Paul Jacobs/Saul Landau book that first caught my political imagination — but that may be the clean break we need.

I’ve developed a theory that a large segment of Americans really wanted some kind of revolution in 2016, but were denied any sort of meaningful change from the left (which appeared as Bernie Sanders) — blame this on the Democratic Party, if you want, but I think the corporate media had much more to do with defining what was allowed and not. On the other hand, Trump tapped into the same spirit of revolution without any risk of offending corporate America (oligarchy), and that drew just enough people in to tilt the vote. Obviously, if you had a left analysis, you didn’t fall for Trump, but how many people really did? I got mine the hard way, reading Genovese, Sweezy, and Adorno, but my orientation came earlier, in reaction to 1960s failure of liberalism to deliver peace, justice, and freedom. But if you didn’t, and weren’t among the people that Trump obviously hated, you might be gullible enough to think that someone like Trump would fight selflessly for you, go to Washington, “drain the swamp,” and vanquish all your imagined and real enemies. Whatever else, Trump promised change.

Even in 2024, clearly out for revenge and redemption, he came off as the revolutionary, while Harris courted the establishment rich. And what he’s done since taking office surely counts as some kind of revolution. While he hasn’t seized power as completely and dramatically as Hitler in 1933, that’s not for scruples, and not for lack of will. It’s harder to do in America, where power is more widely scattered, especially in private institutions. Still, is is disturbing that he’s seized as much power as he has: proof, I think, that America wasn’t built to suffer so much inequality, and was never free from the temptation of bribery.

I grew up admiring revolution: especially the American, and as I increasingly identified with the left, with others like the French, the Russian, and the Chinese: even if they didn’t turn out as well as one had hoped, the old orders clearly needed to be swept away. But as I grew older, I came to see revolution not as heroic striving for a better world, but as proof that the old regimes were both fatally flawed and incompetently managed. Over the last century, real progress toward greater equality and broader wealth has usually been achieved peacefully, without the nasty side-effects. And during that period, leftists have adopted non-violent tactics, while the right has stuck to its brutalist faith in force. I’m not alone in this: very few on the left in America look forward to revolution. (Bernie Sanders’ carefully couched “political revolution” line always bothered me, even though I was pretty sure I understood and approved of what he meant: a radical change of heart, peacefully attained.)

So I’ve largely come around to the idea that the only revolutions that are possible today are ones from the right, and the only thing they can do is to cause pain and destruction. And, indeed, that’s about all you can say for Trump’s revolution. But we’ve often seen violence backfiring, and we’ve seen some of that already with Trump. It’s likely that such violence will be part of his undoing, and that this will lead to a broader rejection of force as a tool of political compliance. I could speculate more, but these things will happen soon enough.

Of course, there is much more I’ve been thinking about. I read a book on Venezuela, and I’m following that up with Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail — Venezuela being a pretty good example, although probably not in the book. I should write a piece on the failures of the Chavez-Maduro regimes, and also what Trump is doing there: why his oil bounty looks to Trump like a massive win, and why it’s really just another chapter in the misery there, and in the Trump’s debacle here. The central point of Why Nations Fail is that success depends on building a central state which distributes power to a broad base of institutions. The US has done this going back to well before Independence, but now we find Trump tearing them down to extract profits and enhance his own power: a formula that has led to ruin everywhere, including in Venezuela — and not just under Chavez and Maduro, as extractive governments have been the rule going back to the Conquistadores.

I’ve also read several more books on Israel, and specifically on Jewish anti-Zionism, so I will have more to say about that. I also have more books on Israel waiting, and still mean to do at least one more post on Agha & Malley’s Tomorrow Is Yesterday.)

I’ve also read a small pile of books on AI, which I’m starting to figure out. One not-too-distant project is to sign up for some tools, and start using them, mostly for research, but also perhaps for organizing my own writings. In fact, I can think of lots of interesting technical projects, enough to dispense with writing (even on music) altogether. Of course, dropping the music is an idle threat. As I noted above, looking at my Substack stats, the music reviews get a good 30% more attention than anything else I write. Especially when I ramble, as I suspect I’m doing here.

Still, at this point, I’d probably be much happier if I could just round up some friends and cook. That seems to be about my size limit on projects, and I has the immediate gratification of telling me whether I did good or not. I’m already thinking about birthday dinner. Seems like it’s finally time to do Italian, but narrowing the menu down is going to be difficult. And while Wichita isn’t bad for many world cuisines, for some reason Italian is a real weak spot. I can’t even really recommend a local restaurant, although perhaps I’m still spoiled from my years in New York City.

Delayed again, but I figured I had more days in August to work with, and I was busy writing up a fairly massive Loose Tabs, then trying to draw the main points out in my newsletter post: Loose Tabs (8:2). Meanwhile, I kept listening to new music. For reasons I explained then, I held back some of the previous week’s reviews, so although the rated count is down this week (38 vs. 53), the number of reviews I have to choose from is up (46 vs. 37). The number of A− grade is up even more. Part of this is that I caught up with unheard albums from Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide. But also, while I often felt like I was grasping at straws, some surprises cropped up.

Trimming this down to my 6-9 album concept, I left some A− albums out, as well as my A Supreme Blue pan, in favor of some of the more interesting B+(***) albums. The whole week’s haul will be available soon, including my deep dive into the Mary Lee’s Corvette catalog — a quality singer-songwriter, although I still can’t stand Blood on the Tracks — and a few early Dolly Parton albums. After Parton died, my wife wanted to hear something, so I dug out The RCA Years (1967-86, 2CD), which was very well grounded at first, then gradually slipped into the background: she was always a terrific performer, and a fascinating and beloved personality, but her later pop concepts rarely captured out attention.

I’ve long agreed with Christgau that her 1975 The Best of Dolly Parton was definitive. So my first thought was to try to go back to her earlier (1970) The Best of Dolly Parton: a Christgau full-A, with 1967–70 songs that predate later compilation’s 1971–75 songs. I couldn’t find the album, but managed to listen to all the songs, and synthesized a review. I’m not including it below, because it isn’t a real album anymore, and the review is built on writing about the background albums. But some bootlegger could slap those two best-ofs together on a single CD, and maybe preface them with a couple songs from her good Monument debut, and blow any later compilation away. A harder compilation task would be to take her post-1980 oeuvre and try to figure out what still works and, most importantly, fits together, even if only as camp. I suspect that could be done, and would be some kind of revelation, but label archivists usually get hung up on charts and licensing.

I’m sure my own grade list has many holes left, as well as a lot of redundant compilations. (I added stars to two previous B+ albums I revisited, but wasn’t quite convinced to raise them further.) I should also note that it omits most of the Porter Wagoner duets, which I have filed under his name. Much of my early grounding in country music came from watching his television show, and while I didn’t think of myself as a country music fan then, a lot of it stuck with me.

Substack’s gallery widget seems to work best with 3 or 6 images, so I left the Emperor X cover out: last on my list, and a revised grade.

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Marshall Allen: 101: An Audio Odyssey (2026, Ropeadope): Alto saxophonist, longtime member and ghost band leader of Sun Ra Arkestra, title possibly for his age, main driver here appears to be producer Jamaaladeen Tacuma (electric bass), started around the Big Ears Festival, which brought in name musicians Nels Cline (electric guitar) and Immanuel Wilkins (alto sax, acoustic upright bass), with extra recording later (including a vocal by Tara Middleton). The funk groove reminds me of Tacuma at his best, but he hasn’t had this much to juggle since Ornette Coleman. A−
[Bandcamp]

Jeff Cosgrove/Jeff Lederer/Mark Lysher/Tom Teasley: Two Jeffs (2026, Grizzley Music): Drummer, from DC, label and dates uncertain, I would normally have parsed the cover as giving him sole credit, but title suggests including Lederer (sax/clarinet), and the bassist and percussionist names are on the same level. Cosgrove is best known for his Motian Sickness group, but also shows up on many free jazz dates, especially with Ivo Perelman. This showed up on the Motian Sickness Bandcamp page, but is mostly standards, from “Cheek to Cheek” to “Summertime” via “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” A−
[Bandcamp]

Jeff Evans Porkestra: Telling the Bees (2026, self-released): Atlanta-based country-rock band, the namesake on guitar and vocals; two previous EPs, this one weighing in at 12 songs, 42:49. The EPs ended before I could really get into them, but this one keeps coming, especially with songs like “Born to Read” and “Big Enough.” A−

Hurray for the Riff Raff: Live Forever: Live at the Old Town School of Folk Music (2025 [2026], Nonesuch): Singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra, born in the Bronx, moved to New Orleans to play folk music, has moved on to Chicago, where this live set was recorded. Fourteen songs, ten from her best-ever 2024 album The Past Is Still Alive. Seems to me like the anti-ICE “Precious Cargo” could be angrier, but “Ogallala”’s “to watch this world burn, with a tear in my eye” seems about right. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

Antony Szmierek: Decoding Birdsong (2026, Mushroom Music): English poet, spoken word artist, and electronica musician. Second album. I love the beats and sound. Words are clear enough: they didn’t especially grab me at first, but eventually the savvy and smarts came through, and how they, along with some chorus, fit into the sound appeal. A−

Henry Threadgill Zooid: Cut You Where You Was (2025 [2026], Pi): Alto saxophonist, also plays flute, started in Air in the 1970s, third group album since 2014, with Liberty Ellman (guitar), Jose Davila (tuba/trombone), Christopher Hoffman (cello), and Elliot Humberto Kavee (drums). Tricky rhythms and shadings, the sort of thing that in an artist of his stature could win a poll, but feels a bit slight to me, although it does have some bright spots. B+(***)

Henry Threadgill/Vijay Iyer/Dafnis Prieto: Fifteen (2025 [2026], Nonesuch): Alto sax/flute, with piano and drums, some sources say the title is how long this trio has been playing together, but this appears to be their first album. Three pieces by Threadgill, two each by the others. Very impressive at speed, interesting always. A−
[Bandcamp]

Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts: As Time Explodes (2025 [2026], Reprise): New group, came up with a pretty good album in 2025, Talkin to the Trees, first A− in my book since Barn (2021), Psychedelic Pill (2012), Fork in the Road (2009), Prairie Wind (2005), Are You Passionate? (2002), more before that, though I haven’t logged any full-A albums since Freedom (1989), or A+ since Rust Never Sleeps (1979, a grade I also gave to 1975’s Tonight’s the Night). Of those, the only albums I’ve replayed in recent years are the ones from the 1970s, but clearly he can evoke his unique legacy whenever he feels the need. This live set is from the album tour, but only repeats one album song (”Silver Eagle”) and offers one new title — the album’s “Big Change“ (”could be bad and it could be great”) having quickly resolved to “Big Crime“ (”got to get the fascists out, got to clean the White House out . . . got big crime in DC at the White House, no more great again”). Beyond that, we get legacy songs, some obscure, most not, a couple (”Cortez the Killer” and “Like a Hurricane”) stretched past 10 minutes, because that’s what he does. This doesn’t strike me as essential, given that these days we get more live Young several times a year, nor is “Big Crime” a big deal (although it’s good to see that he’s gotten over his foolish Reagan infatuation). But reviving “Ohio” is not unlike John Prine’s revival of “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” “Vampire Blues” is an old one I was delighted to hear again, “Be the Rain” is a later one that surprised me, and any time Young wants to stretch out, I’m game. A−

Emperor X: Unified Field (2026, Bar/None): Singer-songwriter Chad Metheny, albums since 1998, first one I really noticed was Western Teleport (2011). First pass through I complained that I didn’t get much, but I had to give it another shot, especially after Michael Tatum raved about it (adding that he had seen them live, which was “transcendent”). Three, maybe four, plays later, and I’m getting if anything too much. I jotted down some lines: “praise Jesus, hail Reagan”; “I’d like to burn it down, but I’m not dumb”; “the market’s not good, the market’s not evil”; “you’re so mad, what are you going to do about it?” Of course, you’ll need more for context. But what I’m left with is a sense of so much anger. Also a songwriter who knows the difference between gallium and lithium. And, since I’m more into sound than words, this only gets sharper. I doubt I’ll ever love this album, but it’s hard to deny. [was B+(**)] A−
[Bandcamp]

I’m going to minimize the number of links here, as they may score against the email. The post has a Table of Contents, which may help you find things, or just use your browser’s “Find” widget.

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Not many New Stories this month. As Bush admin flack Andrew Card once said, “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” (That was in 2002, and the marketing campaign was for invading Iraq.) I note Trump’s trade war with Canada, but only briefly. It certainly wasn’t as well thought out as Bush’s ambitions against Iraq. As I recall, this round of carping about Canada started when smoke from wildfires (most originating in Oregon) drifted into the US northeast. Tariffs have long been Trump’s preferred dueling weapon. What turned this into a story was Canada fighting back. Paul Krugman has some reasons why Trump is bound to lose, but even he barely scratches the surface of Trump’s real obstacle: the massive amount of business investment based on the assumption of free trade between the US and Canada. He faces the same problem going after Mexico, or practically anyone else (especially China).

The second entry under New Stories has been building up all year: the bipartisan backlash against data centers. This has been led on the left by people like Astra Taylor, but has gained considerable currency among Democratic candidates — not just leftists like Francesca Hong in Wisconsin but by moderates like Cindy Holscher here in Kansas. And it’s also gotten some traction from the right. I started with a couple articles I filed under electoral politics, but when they piled up, I decided to give them their own category. Still, what I have is far short of what’s happening. At some point I should write a more comprehensive piece on the issue, once I have a better handle on it.

One problem I’m having trouble coming to grips with that I don’t have a good picture of why the AI companies need such a massive buildout, and indeed why the centers need to consume enough power to have a major environmental impact. For as long as I can remember, the energy consumption of computing power has declined steadily. I suspect that what’s happening is that the companies are seeking “first mover advantage” by using brute force, instead of waiting for technological advances to deliver compute power more efficiently. This is alarming less because it’s wasteful than because it suggests that what’s at stake is huge, and ominous.

What we can be pretty sure of is that the big AI companies are riding on a huge bubble based on the assumption that whoever owns AI technology will effectively run the world, becoming able to extract monopoly rents from all other businesses and virtually every individual consumer. That’s probably bullshit, but until the whole house of cards collapses, data centers have become a tangible token to fight over. And to the extent that the system of politics in America is biased against development — all that red tape and NIMBYism — the fight is fairly evenly matched. Indeed, the easiest solution in the world is simply to slow down development.

My position on AI (which is much more the real issue here than data centers) is that we should do just that. Where I’m further out of the mainstream is that I think the best way to slow down is to deflate the bubble and take most of the economic incentive out of developing AI. I’m saying “most” (not “all”) because there are lots of prospects for AI that I would like to see. But like all software, it should be open source (and, especially important here, open data), so it necessarily operates on limited profit margins, independent of any centralized control. The scenario where all that tech can be owned by a few oligarchs is a bigger threat to democracy than Trump or Vance can imagine.

After my initial post, I’ve added a third New Story: Meta’s $18 billion settlement of a lawsuit over teen addiction. I have very little to say about this so far, other than to note the enormous amount, significant both in that Meta has the money to pay it, and that they have even more they hope to protect from the scrutiny an open trial would produce. While I don’t doubt that Meta (Facebook) has such a reckoning coming, I think the real problem goes much deeper, as does any sort of real solution.

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Moving on to Major Threads, which makes up the bulk of the post, the news is much more of the same. I tried to sum this up in my introduction to the Iran war section:

The war seems to have entered its absurdist, “waiting for Godot” phase. Trump started the war, based on Netanyahu’s assurances and his own legendary “gut” instinct, that Iran had a glass jaw, and one punch would knock them out. He was wrong, as anyone who knew anything about Iran since 1979 could have told him, but evidently one of the qualifications when you only hire “the best people” is that they never talk back. Since then, neither Trump nor Iran particularly want to slug it out, but neither side will surrender, or settle for less, so we’re stuck in this endless cycle where Trump makes insane threats, Iran calls his bluff, and the Gulf States quietly, behind the scenes, ease Trump down. Meanwhile, Netanyahu is happy as a clam, having secured cover for his slow-moving but systematic genocide.

While there’s been very little movement in the Iran war, a lot has been going in and around Israel and its recently expanded occupied territories. While one might argue that the pace of genocide has slowed down since the “ceasefire” and hostage exchanges, the intent and goal remains clear: the effective elimination of Palestinians or other natives from whatever lands they feel entitled to. They’ve embraced the idea of perpetual war, so how quickly and completely they achieve their goals is secondary to their ability to fight on. That they continue to do, on all fronts: in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and (somewhat less formally) the West Bank. They’ve killed over 1,000 Palestinians since the “ceasefire.” They’re moving much faster in Lebanon, where most of the locals have fled their occupied zone, allowing them to burn and loot at will, destroying infrastructure at levels approaching what they did in Gaza. I’ve collected pieces for much of this, but the atrocities are too numerous to enumerate.

I haven’t found much useful on Israel’s October elections. Bush ran his 2004 campaign on a “stay the course” platform, and that’s basically what Netanyahu is doing, although he’s had to work harder to keep Trump engaged in his wars. As best I recall, Kerry’s pitch was something along the lines of “no, let me stay the course!” It doesn’t seem like the Israeli opposition has any better ideas, so he may get away with it. I find it hard to understand how any Israeli, regardless of how chauvinist one could be, can look at Netanyahu’s performance and think nobody else could have done it better. In all this, Netanyahu’s major asset is his orange sock puppet in the White House. I wonder if Israelis have any sense of how unpopular Trump has become? Probably not, given that Netanyahu has done more than anyone else to drag him down.

I wrote much more in the Israel and the World section, although I’m not sure I have much to offer there. I’ve been reading Yakov Rabkin and Benjamin Balthaser on Jewish anti-Zionism, which is interesting to me, although I’m not sure the details matters much. Two things I didn’t get into: AIPAC’s efforts to beat back Democrats who are critical of Israel; and whatever the Hasan Piker quote is that’s being characterized as promoting antisemitism. The former interests me only in that I don’t see how any Democrat can credibly advocate for peace and justice and still support subsidizing Israel’s war machine. But I don’t buy the notion that every primary is or should be viewed as a referendum on Israel and AIPAC — although AIPAC certainly presses the point.

As for antisemitism, it is Israel and their operatives here who are deliberately muddying the waters. They must understand that most decent people will oppose their apartheid and genocidal regime, and that they are deliberately exposing diaspora Jews to reaction by insisting that all Jews are party to their atrocities. If you are familiar with the history of Zionism, you may also recognize that they don’t care if diaspora Jews are assaulted; that’s all the more reason for them to make aliyah to Israel. Diaspora Jews are human shields for Israel’s policies, especially where they can persuade western powers to defend Israel under the guise of combating antisemitism. However, virtually no one who is critical of Israel’s wars, especially on the grounds of opposing racism and violence, and supporting equal rights for all, is likely to fall for their scheme. Perhaps that leaves a few traditional right-wing antisemites, but most of them admire Israel.

While I am naturally sympathetic to people who have been confused by propaganda, I’d rather not spend a lot of time on them. I realize that there are many Jews in America who identify with Israel, who feel some connection to the fears that are endemic there, and who have avoided having to reckon with the reality Israel has imposed on its others, and they may be discomfited by protesters, especially those who express solidarity with Palestinians. Such people may have their feelings hurt by having to face what Israel has done. But, at least in the US, they are extremely unlikely to face any violence, let alone the prospect of having their houses bulldozed, or bombed by F-15s. While I oppose any form of antisemitism, like any other form of bigotry, at some point we have to prioritize our outrages. What Israel is doing is far more malicious, and far more damaging, not just to its Palestinian targets, but to the Israelis, in whose name these atrocities are committed, and even to the soldiers and settlers who commit them. As far as I’m concerned, any American who claims to love Israel but does not oppose what Israel has become is careless and hypocritical. They should join us, not oppose us.

Moving on, I note that the Ukraine war has entered a phase similar to the “rocket war” phase in the Iraq-Iran War. With the battle lines stalemated, both sides are trying to commit mischievous violence across the battle lines. No good can come of this. Both sides will be tempted to escalate, while becoming more intransigent. That this is being done largely with drones may be significant. The US and Iran are also major players in drone warfare, and the same dynamic is likely to increase as long as the war is allowed to proceed. Further down, I cite a Rebecca Gordon piece about “it’s time to rein in lethal AI drones.” Israel is already using AI to pick out bombing targets. The risk here is accelerating as long as these wars are allowed to continue. Moreover, unlike the Cold War era when the US and USSR worked together to keep conflicts from spiraling out of control, today the US and Russia are in the thick of these wars, with no one else willing to limit them.

◆ ◆ ◆

These war issues take up the first third of this Loose Tabs. The next third is hogged by Trump. I don’t have much more to add here, but I should point out that the Trump Administration section has two dozen scattered reports of malign malfeasance, where a more diligent reporter could probably have found two hundred. While Trump, with his “cult (or should I say sinkhole?) of personality,” is patently ridiculous, his main function has been to rubber stamp, then distract from, his apparatchiki, who like termites are relentlessly attacking anything they find that seems solid in the government, while he and his family figure out how to pocket the vig from whatever work they still do.

The following sections deal with electoral politics and our two-party system. I don’t offer any horse race analysis here, and barely mention recent primaries or polls. I did get a bit distracted by more philosophical issues. Carlyn Beccia’s “Has America crossed the asshole threshold?” would be worth expanding on. I delved into the Jared Abbott/Joan Williams piece on “Donald Trump’s coalition is coming apart,” because I see disgruntled Trump voters as possible recruits, if you can treat them with a bit of respect (not as “baskets of deplorables”). But I don’t think that pandering will work, either to get their votes or to keep them. They need to reprioritize their understanding of problems, and to become more tolerant of other people in the same boat as they are.

I also go into the “centrist” delusion, as I take apart a Bill Scher title: “Americans like moderate politicians and progressive policies, but not socialism.” I don’t think I’ve ever gone into this is great detail, even if it seems like I’m writing about it all the time. I’ve paid very little attention to the moderate vs. left scorecard so far. I assume that the better campaigner will in the Democratic nomination, and in the general election, that’s who I want. The short-term goal, after all, is to win. And while there are plenty of Democrats I have little hope and/or respect for, I figure the worst of them are better than Republicans, if only for the better company they keep. But when I vote, I’ll vote for whoever strikes me as the better candidate, not just to win but to serve in office. I don’t see any value in trying to figure out who’s more electable. I’ll leave that to everyone else. But I do think one big problem Democrats have had over the last 30-40 years is that even when they get in power, they — and we’re especially talking Clinton and Obama here — have a very poor track record of solving problems, or even appearing to try. And while they’ve won a few elections, and were clearly better than their opponents, their ineffectiveness has really hurt Democrats over the years. So I don’t see much downside in giving someone on the left a chance to do better. And right now, a leftist like Sanders seems much more credible than a loser like Harris.

One thing about the “mid-terms” is that even if Democrats win big, Trump is still going to be president, the Supreme Court is still going to let him play dictator, and Congress is going to have very little effect. And, even when Trump is gone, big businesses are still going to have almost all of the money, and lobbyists will still outnumber Congress 10-to-1 (or is it 100-to-1?). And the media will still be owned by rich people seeking favors. So it really doesn’t matter whether the Democrats in Congress are left or center or just plain donkeys. They need to resist, and they need to educate, and soon enough you’ll figure out who’s up to the job, and who isn’t. My guess is that it will be the people with smarts and principles, and those people will be on the left.

◆ ◆ ◆

The final third is a little bit of everything. Jeffery St Clair’s “Roaming Charges” pieces are massive collections of micro-posts, but within them he covers ICE and climate change issues better than anyone else. I’ve pulled out a few examples, but there are hundreds more. Eric Levitz’s piece on estate taxes gets an “amen” from me. The Books section includes a number of links on Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick’s Israel’s Lobby, which I’ve bought but haven’t gotten to yet. The Obits section includes Ward Churchill, Dave Marsh, and Dolly Parton (although not nearly as much as has since appeared — for some one famously apolitical, she ticks a lot of boxes on the left; by the way, the piece on Trump’s eulogy is in the Trump section, where it belongs).

I’ve added a few more pieces to the posted file, marked with red change bars. Aside from the Meta lawsuit, these are pieces that relate closely to other matters already in the post. I’ve also opened a draft file for next time, seeding it with an essay on rent control that can certainly last. No schedule on when the next one might appear, but I’ve tended to run 3-4 weeks, with one slipping out a bit longer.

After publishing last week’s Music Week (8:2) on Wednesday, I let this post slip until Saturday. I had the idea of writing a compare-and-contrast piece, between my second-week-of-August post and Robert Christgau’s August Consumer Guide, which I expected the same day, but didn’t appear until Saturday. Two problems followed: it took me several days to get anything started; then I wrote much more than I had planned. Probably to little avail, as for the first time, Yahoo’s algorithm trapped my post in my spam folder (while allowing the “shareable assets” to pass through). (Did I mention that Yahoo Mail Really Sucks yet? It was down again for most of Friday, but up again, so far, today.)

Usually, when a CG appears, I post it on the website (locked up to create some artificial scarcity), and look up everything I hadn’t heard. I held back this week. I wanted to write about how surprised I was by that particular batch of unheards (mostly unheard-ofs), and I didn’t want my second-guessing to get in the way. I follow him (and various others, but none else for so long, or to such variegated effect), and I render my own grades, but I don’t want to be seen as checking his work. So those albums will (mostly) hold until next week.

Besides, I played a lot while I was first waiting on his post, then plodding my way through mine. As it happened, the Paul McCartney album was one I checked out before I saw his review. I initially wrote it down as a B, before adding a note that I liked the last song. Since I hadn’t published the review, I figured I should go ahead and recheck it, resulting in the revised review below. I finally got into the CG albums, but given my surplus, I held them back for next week. (More on that when I post the complete Music Week notes.)

I will note that two albums confused me from the CG: Gurf Morlix is pretty prolific (and good but not all that memorable), so I assumed the new review was a new record I hadn’t heard, but checking showed that Christgau had reviewed it in April, when it came out, and I had heard it shortly thereafter; I also forgot that I had reviewed the R.A.P. Ferreira/Kenny Segal, which came out in late 2025. My checking there failed because I didn’t go back far enough, and I had missed logging the file in my 2025 metacritic charts. I discovered that pretty late. Rather than muck with my arguments, I left it on the unheard list.

Rated count for the week-plus came to 53, but when the full Music Week airs, you’ll find somewhat fewer albums (46, I think). Since I was trimming, I decided to hold back the releases that aren’t out yet. As for the CG albums, I did keep the complete Mary Lee’s Corvette back catalog, including the Dylan cover touted in the CG. I’ve always hated Blood on the Tracks, a view that most of my friends (including my wife) find incomprehensible. That Mary Lee Kortes sings it with even more verve and affect than the original only made it worse. For me, anyhow. Should be out later today, or tomorrow.

Angles 4: Angles 4 (2024 [2026], Relative Pitch): Quartet version of Swedish saxophonist’s Martin Küchen’s Angles project, the 10th since 2007 in my database, ranging from 3 to 9 in size, here with Mattias Ståhl (vibes), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (bass), and Kjell Nordeson (drums). They all sound superb here. A−
[Bandcamp]

Phoebe Bridgers: Lost Weekend (2026, Dead Oceans): Singer-songwriter, third solo album since 2017, with her girl group Boygenius (2023) splitting the break. Huge critical support here (91/25 at AOTY), Spencer Kornhaber calls it “a perfect album for a frustrating decade,” Ann Powers dubs her “the most revered singer-songwriter of the selfie generation.” I’ve listened enough to verify that there’s something here, so I take my indifference as further evidence that I’m over the hill. Love and grief themes have little resonance for me these days. Sonically, the synths sweep away the folk roots (which make “Haunted” so appealing). The shifts convince me of her mastery. B+(***)

Margaret Glaspy: I Am Both (2026, ATO): Folkie singer-songwriter, fourth album since 2016, has a similar number of EPs. Spotify tells me she’s my favorite artist, which makes me wonder about the modern surveillance state (I have her down for 1 A-, 2 ***, and 1 **; based on recent plays in the car, I would have guessed Chuck Berry). Skeletal songs, so direct they demand attention. “Turns out freedom ain’t free,” but at least “they’re allowed to change their minds.” A−
[Bandcamp]

Homeboy Sandman/Jack Splash: Resonance Frequency (2026, Dirty Looks): New York rapper Angel Del Villar III, prolific since 2007, with a Los Angeles-based producer Matthew Kahane, whose work started with Cee Lo Green in 2002. He lifts this with much more than the usual slack beats. Unlike most of Homeboy Sandman’s output, this runs to real LP length: 13 songs, 40:20. A−
[Bandcamp]

Paul McCartney: The Boys of Dungeon Lane (2026, Capitol): Twentieth “solo studio album” (per Wikipedia; 27th if counting Wings) since 1970. I liked the Beatles as much as anyone during their prime, somewhat less for their post-Pepper period. But his solo career has ranged from disappointing to embarrassing: the best record I’ve heard was an oldies set from 1999, but I haven’t heard most (this makes 11). This one promises Liverpool nostalgia, but on first pass, only the final song (”Momma Gets By”) delivered much. A revisit showed considerable songcraft, and more than a few details of interest. B+(**)

Justin Pierce: Sway (2025 [2026], Justin Pierce Music): Tenor saxophonist, based in Dallas, seems to be his first album (Discogs has some credits with UNT lab bands, c. 2012), hype sheet says he’s been playing locally to “delighted audiences,” with wife Ashley Pierce singing. She jumps right in with the title tune, then “Honeysuckle Rose,” sits out for an instrumental (”Jody Grind”). Two more instrumentals, from Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, with her returning on well-chosen standards — “Moon River” and “L-O-V-E” are standouts. As for the sax, imagine Harry Allen playing the Nat King Cole songbook, with a perfectly fine replacement for the late Rebecca Kilgore. A−
[Bandcamp]

PLRLS: Sleeping in a Dress (2026, Si): Baltimore quintet, pronounced “plurals,” post-punk “with a certain operatic/surfy twang and bizarre danceability,” which is to say they sound a lot like the B-52s, or perhaps even more like the Waitresses. Ten songs, 28:23. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

Sweeping Promises: You Say I Romanticize (2026, Sub Pop): Post-punk duo, Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug, met in Arkansas, moved to Boston, then to Lawrence KS (unless I got that backwards). Third album. First one claimed a Liliput influence. They’ve only gotten stronger and more direct. A−
[Bandcamp]

Riverside Jazz Collective: Stomp Off, Let’s Go! (2018, self-released): New Orleans trad jazz group, seems to have been a one-off, as even Bandcamp doesn’t offer more. Benny Amon (drums), Alex Belhaj (guitar), and Kris Tokarski (piano) seem to be the leaders, but the only other player I recall is trombonist Charlie Halloran. Several members take vocals (Belhaj twice). A superb set. A−
[Bandcamp]

I had three less than completely obvious A− records I thought he was likely to weigh in on sooner or later: Rolling Stones, Foreign Tongues; Madonna, Confessions II; and Pussy Riot, Cyka. The first two are major artists from bygone eras. While I like the new albums a lot, they don’t break new ground, and they’re unlikely to ever get more than a tiny fraction of the play that their signature albums got — especially now that I hardly ever find time for old albums that I love. It no doubt helped their grades that they reminded me of those older albums. On the other hand, a more discerning critic — which Christgau certainly is — could focus more on their shortcomings, dismissing them with lesser grades, or possibly ignoring them altogether.[1] I rarely hear from readers, but one did write in to complain about the Madonna grade: “Her voice is weak and there are no bangers. In my book it’s less than a B+.” Not my problem, but could be yours.

I regard all of my grades as provisional: best estimates based on limited exposure, often just a single play. A more precise grading system would qualify the grade with the number of plays, but every play is different, where distractions and mood are obvious factors. As they’re not equivalent, the value of tracking them pales in comparison to the overhead. Even so, as I noted, my Pussy Riot grade was exceptionally uncertain. That uncertainty is part of the reason I’m curious what Christgau thinks: he has championed the group in the past, rating their early EP higher than I did; he has an anti-Putin, pro-Ukraine thing I don’t quite share; on the other hand, I find his reactions to political music tend to diverge from my own in ways that are hard to characterize; and there’s a prog aspect to the music that may rub him the wrong way.

I was less concerned about the fourth non-jazz album I reviewed: Iceage’s For the Love of Grace & the Hereafter. He’s never reviewed anything by them. I only played this one after it got high AOTY ratings. If he did the same, and liked it about as much as I did, I doubt he would write it up: I have 204 albums graded B+(**) so far this year. He has 9. He’s a harder grader than I am — he has 53 A-list grades so far this year, where I have 118 (93 new music, 25 old music, and I’m not counting 2025 or earlier releases I only got to this year) — but below A− my grades look like a bell curve,[2] while his tail off radically. Of course, if he put the time and effort into Iceage (which I played, but probably not twice) he might have come to like the record more than I did. That happens, and fairly often. When it does, I may go back and try it again, and may adjust my grade, but not very often.

There are other non-jazz albums in my full Music Week that I could have included, but didn’t mostly because I didn’t think the reviews were strong enough: Johnny Blue Skies, Kiss Facility, Ravyn Lenae, Arlo Parks, Strokes, Syd, Wiki, Yard Act. Christgau hasn’t reviewed any of those yet, but he has noted most in the past, with fairly recent A− albums from Wiki and Yard Act — the latter resulted in my upgrade for Where’s My Utopia?, but nothing for Parks, whose last two albums were A− in my book.

While I try not to care how my grades line up with his, it’s hard to say they have no effect. When I stick my neck out with a high grade, especially on an an album that’s not really in my wheelhouse, it’s gratifying to find out that he likes it too. And when I’m playing something he’s already recommended, I’m inclined to shade my uncertainty in his direction — especially if my doubts involve lyrics, which I have never had a good ear for. But also I’ve known him for a long time, and I appreciate the breadth of his interests and the depth of his commitment, so it’s almost inevitable that I should gauge my work by referring to his. That said, I’ve always sought my own way, which should be clear by now. That we overlap a lot is largely a function of us both trying to encompass as much music as we can stand. But also we have some background affinities, and shared history.

I should note that my rock & jazz writing career is almost totally due to his patronage and friendship. (Don Malcolm and Michael Tatum also had critical moments, as did Francis Davis; I could mention a couple more who took some interest, but not many, and not much.) I got into this in 1974 by writing what I thought of as a pan of his first book, arguing that anyone could be a rock critic, and volunteering to prove my point by writing several sets of CG-style reviews. Malcolm talked me into sending some of this writing to Christgau, who responded by asking me to review a Bachman-Turner Overdrive album. I was thinking of how much my brother liked their albums, and tried to reflect that in the review. Christgau seemed to have been attracted to the class politics — probably the same thing that drew him to Dave Marsh (more on him later). I wrote a few pieces for him in the late 1970s, and got to know him better when I moved to New York in 1977. Much later, in 2003, he asked me to write some more, including a Jazz Consumer Guide column from 2005-10 (which he generously continued to edit even after the Voice fired him).

Much of what I’ve written since then has been in the Consumer Guide format, although it could be characterized as a mere diary that has been formatted to look like something more substantial. I had done some open source software development in the 1990s, but after 2000 I thought producing content might be more useful. I had taken the early openness of the internet seriously, so I thought that posting my scattered ramblings might be some kind of public service, a way to do some good in the world. Not clear whether I was right, but I’ve stuck at it. Probably the biggest difference between us is that he’s always written/edited for a living, even though he’s maintained considerable leeway in deciding what he wanted to write about, while I have never made any sort of living writing. I can comfort myself with that famous Marx quote about what life without alienation might be like, and the thought that few other people have managed to so totally free themselves from the exigencies of capital.

Christgau finally published his August Consumer Guide on Saturday. My usual first thought was to compare what he reviewed with what I had already reviewed. Then I looked at what he found that I wasn’t aware of, and my sense of inadequacy kicked in. The former list (his grades in bold; my grades in brackets):

1. Emperor X: Unified Field (Bar/None) A [**]

2. Golems of the Red Planet: Surf Masada: The Compositions of John Zorn (Heyday) A− [***]

3. Paul McCartney: The Boys of Dungeon Lane (Capitol) *** [**]

4. Gurf Morlix: Cobwebs & Stardust (Rootball) *** [**]

5. Hemlocke Springs: The Apple Tree Under the Sea (AWAL) B+ [***]

I liked Emperor X’s 2011 album Western Teleport and one more, but I didn’t get much out of this one, or his 2022 The Lakes of Zones B and C (another Christgau full A). Probably worth a revisit, as it seems like everyone I know likes the new one. I’ve already bumped my McCartney review up a bit. I found myself turning against him even before the Beatles were done, and I’ve heard less than half of his solo albums, liking very few of them. But I liked his Stephen Colbert finale appearance, and the new album seemed well-regarded, so I gave it a chance just before Christgau’s review appeared. (I then moved on to Ringo Starr’s Long Long Road, and having played even fewer of his records, I went back to his first three.) My other grades are close enough to stick with.

That leaves eight albums I haven’t heard yet:

1. R.A.P. Ferreira and Kenny Segal: The Night Green Side of It (Backwoodz Studioz)

2. Lalu: Lalu (self-released)

3. Low Cut Connie: Livin in the USA (Contender)

4. Mary Lee’s Corvette: Blood on the Tracks (Bar/None ‘02)

5. Glenn Morrow’s Cry for Help: Our Final Album Vol. 1 (Bar/None)

6. Margo Price: Days of Unrest (Loma Vista)

7. Tipps and Obermiller: Little Kid Heart (self-released)

8. Neil Young & the Chrome Hearts: As Time Explodes (Reprise)

Those divide into three groups: albums I was vaguely aware of but hadn’t prioritized (Price, Low Cut Connie, and Mary Lee’s Corvette — I was only aware of the latter due diligence after July’s Mary Lee Kortes review, but didn’t consider playing it given how much I’ve always hated Dylan’s 1975 album); albums I was unaware of by artists I knew (Ferreira/Segal, Young); and artists I had never heard of (Lalu, Morrow, Tipps and Obermiller). I will get around to these albums in future Music Weeks. I’m always catching up. Christgau may be primus inter pares of the dozen or so sources I consult regularly, but he only budgets himself 13 albums per month. When you average 30 albums a week, you need others to triage the torrent of at least ten times that many albums that come out each week.

The thing is, most of those sources are so busy catching up with each other that they don’t generate a lot of discoveries. What’s really remarkable about Christgau’s Consumer Guide is how often he still finds things that nobody else has written about. You can see that in this particular CG. And, I suspect, many more. Wondering whether I could gin up some statistics on this, I dug through my 2025 metacritic file[3] and found that he had graded 63 albums (2025 releases of new music) at A− or higher. Of those, roughly a third (17) were widely reviewed (10 or more reviews in AOTY, like CMAT, Billy Woods, and Lily Allen); another third (23) were lightly reviewed (1-9 AOTY reviews, with Tyler Childers, Patterson Hood, and Craig Finn near the top); and the other third (22) had no reviews in tracked publications. Let’s list the artists: Buck 65, Kasambwe Brothers, Mahotella Queens, Public Enemy, Jubal Lee Young, Margaret Glaspy, Todd Snider, Tommy Womack, Bill Scorzari, Jeff Evans Porkestra, Nandipha808, Grant Peeples, Helene Cronin, Gurf Morlix, Saint Pierre, Rory Block, From the Dirt, Michael Hampton, Peter Stampfel, Hamell on Trial, Nakibembe Embaire, K.A.A.N.

Some of those names seem like they should be well known by now, but most of them I first heard about from him. Public Enemy is the obvious exception among the 22. The only other ones I’m sure of are Block and Hampton, although I’m also pretty sure I wasn’t aware of any of those 22 albums before reading Christgau’s Consumer Guide. On the other hand, I was probably aware of nearly all of the first group of 17 albums, and had reviewed most of them before seeing them in a Consumer Guide. What I am doing is more in the spirit of the original Consumer Guide, but the task of doing it now is not just more difficult; it’s impossible. But I usually manage to listen to everything in the top 100 in my metacritic surveys, close to half of the second 100, and maybe a quarter of the third and fourth.[4]

Back in the early 1970s, I noticed that most of the people I visited had pretty much the same records, which suggested a common vocabulary. As someone with “no social skills whatsoever,” I found I could cut the ice with a bit of knowledge, which was easy enough to gain. Christgau invented his Consumer Guide in 1969, so he could weigh in on the records others were more officially reviewing. He was the first to attempt to cover it all. When he was wrapping up his 1970s book, he expressed to ambition to include every B+ or better rock album in the decade, as if that was real enough to be possible. I grew up with a similar ambition to master everything, so I found his scope really useful. Indeed, I still like his early 1970s quickies more than the arguably better crafted review style that he developed later.

But in the 1980s he started feeling getting more selective and idiosyncratic, and less concerned with the rapidly-decaying popular consensus. And in the 1990s he gave up on “listening to bad records so you don’t have to”[5] and turned the column into kind of treasure hunt — sure, he still noted “duds,” “neither,” and “choice cuts” from uneven albums, but eventually those too eventually sunk into a category he found in the 1980s: “distinctions not cost-effective.”

I’ve followed a similar trajectory, partly because I followed Christgau during my non-critic years (1980-2005), but more because the universe expanded at such a rate it became incomprehensible, leaving us isolated bits within our grasp, and also because I never had any professional responsibilities to satisfy publishers or markets, so I never had to stick with something until I made sense of it. Or maybe it’s just that I never worked as hard at being a rock critic, or a writer. And time is running out for both.

Dave Marsh died last week. I was surprised to find that he was only about 7 months older than me. We both came out of midwestern working class backgrounds, had left politics, and gravitated toward hard rock while remaining very fond of Motown. He seemed older because he got a quick start on life, founding Creem at 19, moving quickly through every publication that counted in the 1970s, then finally latching on to Bruce Springsteen’s rise to fame and wealth. He was one of the five featured in Robert Christgau’s 1976 essay, Yes, There Is a Rock-Critic Establishment, which was mostly about how everyone was so smitten with Springsteen. I read quite a bit of him during the 1970s, and disagreed with much of it, but I rarely ran across him after that — I noticed him in Counterpunch, but don’t recall reading much. Looking around my shelves, the only book I found was The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, which came out in 1989, so is mostly in safe territory (Springsteen at 24 and Van Halen at 28 are the only post-1970 top-40 songs, followed by good picks from Prince and Madonna).

I reacted very poorly to Springsteen, and to Marsh. Looking back over the latter piece, it’s hard to discern the context. I circulated the piece around a bit, and had one offer to publish it, but I let it slide, suggesting I wasn’t very happy with it. I don’t know whether Marsh saw it, or anything else I wrote. I always wondered whether his characterization of Queen as the “real fascist band” was a reaction to my review of ELP (title, which the Voice changed, “Up From Fascism”). If so, he mistook my point. Either way he was wrong about Queen (although I wasn’t much better until Mike Myers uncovered the joke in “Bohemian Rhapsody”).

I was, ultimately, wrong about Springsteen. Malcolm and I were very enthused by the English “pub rock” of the early 1970s, which I now see as an early postmodern return to the fundamentals of 1950s rock and roll. That’s pretty much what Springsteen was trying to do, but on a much grander scale, with an extra helping of bullshit. When he took a more modest tack, on The River (1980), I started to like him, and had no problem with the more pop-savvy albums that followed. I doubt that would have made much difference to Marsh, who often struck me as a guy who would rather cast people out of church than welcome them in.

I am sorry to hear of his death, and especially that he seems to have suffered severely in his last years. I found my post-Marxist intellectual community in the mid-1970s among rock critics, and whatever differences we had, he was definitely one of us.

Footnotes:

1. Most of what Christgau listens to never gets a mention, much less a grade, so it’s never totally clear whether he’s heard a record and chosen not to write about it, missed it completely, or just sampled a cut or two and decided not to pursue it. As the stats page shows, he hasn’t flagged a “Dud” since 2010, nor has he registered a “Neither” grade since 2001. (I snagged those from a scratch file in 2001. He’s never offered to update that list, and may not even track that grade.) On the other hand, I try to note every complete album I’ve listened to, so you can get a pretty good sense of the range of my listening, what I’m missing, and what the albums I hear are being compared to. I wish more critics did that, but it’s a lot of extra paperwork, and isn’t easy to access or make sense out of. I even have a “limited sampling” category for parts of albums (and conceivably for singles), but I rarely bother with it. With streaming, I have plenty of whole albums to review.

2. Of course, my grades don’t form a proper bell curve, mostly because my sampling isn’t random — I actively look for albums I might like, and avoid ones I’m pretty sure I won’t like — but also because the universe of recorded music isn’t anything like a normal distribution: this is especially true in jazz, but pretty much everywhere you look, you find musicians with real skills and/or creative ideas. The vast majority of people who don’t almost never go to the trouble of recording. Of course, it’s also possible that I’ve mellowed, or just grown more tolerant of styles and personalities I once judged more harshly. Switching from letter grades to my numeric scale (which I use in my compilations), my current 2026 grade distribution is: 10: 3; 9: 90; 8: 174; 7: 204; 6: 134; 5: 32; 4: 7; 3: 1. So the median is 7, or B+(**), but the skew is evident in that 267 albums have higher grades, while only 174 have lower grades. I’ll also note, and these are just swags, that about two-thirds of these records are jazz, and that nearly half of the jazz records I listen to are picked for me by publicists. But about half of my A− albums are non-jazz, where I get virtually no promos, so I’m picking those exclusively by reputation and hunches.

3. I collected this file during 2025, and factored in many EOY lists (see the Legend link inside the file), but in early 2026 I stopped, and I haven’t gone back to recheck anything, so chances are I’ve missed AOTY reviews. I’ve done similar files in previous years, often deeper than my 2025 effort. I haven’t been compiling a similar file this year, which leaves me somewhat less aware of what’s come out recently. The 63 albums differ significantly from his 2025 Dean’s List, which includes many albums released earlier but only reviewed in 2025, and excludes albums released in 2025 but only reviewed later. My file also excludes new albums of old music, compiled separately. That would have added 6 more albums, none with AOTY reviews, by: Hüsker Dü, Luke Bell, Edna Martinez, Joseph Kamaru, Grace Potter, and Eli “Paperboy” Reed.

   Needless to say, my metacritic files are biased toward my own interests: I give more weight to critics I like (including myself), and I find more of their lists. Still, they offer a view of common reality, and it’s easy enough to look at them and get a sense of what other people are thinking.

4. Those were guesses: actual 2025 figures for unheard albums in each of the first seven hundreds: 2 (Necks, Agriculture), 9, 25, 30, 38, 47, 46. By that point, the skew is actually pushing things I’ve listened to up the list, so you don’t really get to majority unheard blocks until much lower. My total of heard and rated 2025 new music releases is 1590.

5. Not his line, but something memorable I picked up elsewhere. I’m not sure it ever made much sense, given that “bad” often says more about the listener than about the music. I’m not saying it’s all subjective. I’m certainly not saying one should never listen to “bad” music — how else can you figure out what “bad” is? — and I’m not saying one shouldn’t write negative reviews. They give you a better a critic’s orientation than puff reviews. But maybe I just find critics as interesting than albums. In any case, the reason for following a critic’s advice isn’t whether the critic thinks the album is good or bad, but whether your interest is piqued.

I spent a couple hours yesterday at the local Toyota monopoly, for what was supposed to be a free service — every six months for the first two years, part of the new car purchase deal. I complained about numerous glitches with the “infotainment screen” that fills up the middle of the dashboard, where cars used to provide such useful things as a CD player, radio, and various HVAC/lighting controls. The lack of a CD player has kept me in a bad mood for a year now, exacerbated by Toyota’s schemes to sell me extra-cost subscriptions. The upside of the system is supposed to be its integration with my cell phone. I’ve generally been able to stream music from Spotify using Bluetooth, but it’s only been in the last two weeks that I’ve been able to get Android Auto working. Until then, the system was plagued by glitches too numerous to list here.

So I complained to Toyota, and to the dealer. The dealer at least took a look at the problem, and concluded there wasn’t one — at least one that they could fix. I’ve been locked out of the Toyota app for nearly a year, so they gave me a phone number to talk to someone else about that. Not their deal. Nor is the confusion over the rot of expiring subscriptions to “services” that never made any sense in the first place. I wrote a Substack post earlier this week called Yahoo Mail Really Sucks. I’ve thought about doing a Toyota Sucks piece, but I still feel the need for further research. I have a pretty old phone, which I use very little: mostly as a phone, occasionally as a camera. I find it extremely frustrating to try to look up anything on the internet. I’ve never gotten voice commands to work. (The car also has a microphone icon, but has yet to understand anything I say. On the other hand, is it possible that it’s picking up ambient noise and turning them into those glitches I complained about?)

I don’t like going through life with giant chips on my shoulder, but that seems to be my life these days. I don’t understand it all very well. I used to be better at coping. But I used to be better at getting all sorts of things done. I probably need to focus on the “serenity prayer,” and other “core AA slogans.” (Drinking isn’t an option, at least one with any appeal.) And as far as chips go, I’m in nowhere near as bad shape as Donald Trump. That’s a guy whose neuroses have really screwed up his life — a situation that isn’t helped by having the power to inflict his misery on others.

I was pretty despondent when I got up this morning. Then I saw that Yahoo’s POP server had coughed up 124 of my emails, with more arriving intermittently throughout the day. I did nothing to get this working again. And I have no communication from Yahoo saying they did anything, or were even aware of a problem. It may be that someone there did notice my post, or maybe they just looked at their own error log files, or maybe a broken server went offline and the slack got picked up by a working machine. At any rate, dozens of suggestions from their chatbot did no good whatsoever. They mostly served to deflect attention, with not the slightest care as to how much aggravation they caused.

But that left me with one less thing to do today. Not knowing what to do with this vacuum, I decided to go ahead and knock out this Music Week post. I’m running a day or two short of a week, but that’s ok. The bigger problem is that when I look at the full weekly file, I’m not very happy with the reviews I’ve written. For instance, I have written virtually nothing to back up B+(**) reviews for Johnny Blue Skies, Kiss Facility, Caroline Kraabel, Ravyn Lenae, Arlo Parks, The Strokes, Syd, Juanma Trujillo, and Yard Act, and even less on a B+(***) Wiki review. I also held back a more substantial A− review of Oliver-Smith Incomparables, as the album isn’t scheduled for release until Aug. 28. I’ve had it for a while, and was anxious to get to it.

On the other hand, I did write more about the albums below, if only because they have more history to frame. I’m surprised to find two of my favorite acts of the 1960s and 1980s have come up with top-tier albums this year, although both have had post-peak albums that I liked quite a bit, even if they never turned into regular plays. (Not much ever does these days.) That’s probably the case here, too, but I’ve played them both a lot this week, and they do hold up.

Pussy Riot was a slightly harder call. I’ve never paid much attention to their singles, and had little preconception going into this album. I also noted that so far it’s gotten poor reviews (AOTY 63/4; I’ve read several, and they align poorly with what I’m hearing). Conceptually, one problem is that they don’t have a signature sound or style: there are 4-6 different approaches here, but most of them are remarkable on their own terms. Also, it’s mostly in Russian, which blunts the politics, aside from “Disobey.” Not that I know or care much about their political agenda: while I blamed Putin for invading Ukraine, I have long thought that the war should be ended as quickly as possible, based on the current stalemate, and not drawn out in some vain hope of justice prevailing. But Putin is still their problem, even as my problem is Trump.

As for Satoko Fujii’s second orchestra album this year, she’s on a roll. I just got the third one in the mail. I’ve let my demo queue accumulate, as they’re mostly advances, some out to October. I’ll catch up in due course.

Michael Blake: Piccolos Before Rifles (2025 [2026], Baby Tank): Canadian saxophonist, a couple dozen albums since 1997, many more group- (Blake Tartare, Slow Poke) and side-credits. Plays tenor/soprano here, plus flutes, with Guilherme Monteiro (guitar), Skye Soto Steele (violin), Gil Lopes (bass), and Rogerio Boccato (drums) — three of those from Brazil, the other Puerto Rican. B+(**)
[Bandcamp]

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe: After the Storm (2026, Libra): The second of this year’s promised batch of five big band albums, a new recording where Bunker Ulmenwall Orchestra was an archive from 2014. That was around the time when Fujii released four big band albums with different orchestras. At the time, I compared one of them to Basie’s Atomic Orchestra from the 1950s, at least in terms of power and sheer brassiness. The new series is impressive so far, and this is one of the most immediately appealing of her large-scale efforts. A−
[Bandcamp]

Iceage: For Love of Grace & the Hereafter (2026, Mexican Summer): Danish post-punk band, sounded solid on their 2011 debut, uninteresting on three (of four) 2013–2021 efforts, but getting a lot of hype for this sixth album. Not punk in any meaningful sense, but upbeat, engaging, with a few hooks. I like the song that goes “life is for the weak,” for the words but also for the extra noise. B+(**)

Madonna: Confessions II (2026, Warner): Conceived as a sequel to 2006’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, which could just as well have been a sequel to 1987’s You Can Dance. Downside is that everything here sounds like something you already know. Good news is that it all sounds great (except maybe for the soft landing). A−

Pussy Riot: Cyka (2026, Stem): Russian feminist performance art collective, fiercely anti-Putin (and these days pro-Ukraine), founded in 2011, membership fluid and often jailed or otherwise harassed, has released an EP and several singles, appears here with a full album, probably because co-founder Nadya Tolokonnikova (and possibly others) escaped to Iceland. A fairly wide range of sounds and styles, where the punk/hardcore may be the most compelling because there the message comes through even without words, but the rap and electropop and something that sounds like a Kate Bush hit (“Pain”) also impress, suggesting a worldview that goes beyond rage, but doesn’t flinch from it when needed. A−

Rolling Stones: Foreign Tongues (2026, Rolling Stones/Polydor): Major group, rivaled the Beatles in the 1960s, has lasted much longer, survived the death of Brian Jones, the retirement of Bill Wyman, and more recently (and more importantly) the death of Charlie Watts. But the two singer-songwriters, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, are still active, however improbably, as is Jones replacement Ron Wood. But their ontogeny basically ended with 1972’s Exile on Main Street. Since then, they’ve mostly engaged in buckraking, with regular tours, concert films, live albums, and the occasional studio effort — most lukewarm, but some significant enough to be hailed as return-to-form comebacks. Those too have trailed off and thinned out, but this is the best in quite a while (probably since 2004’s A Bigger Bang, or 1986’s Dirty Work, or maybe 1981’s Tattoo You). The key word is “return,” as they virtually defined “classic rock,” and can tap into any time they want — at least half of this overly long album. Key wisdom for the aged: “Life’s too short for just making money.” The irony is palpable, but the line is credible nonetheless. A−

WDR Big Band: Jagged Edges & Elegant Lines: The Music of Ayn Inserto (2024 [2026], Summit): Inserto (b. 1976) studied at New England Conservatory, was a protégé of Bob Brookmeyer, teaches at Berklee, has two albums as Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra, a couple more where her compositions are performed by others (she also conducts here). I tend to dismiss European big bands, but this group, featuring Sean Jones (trumpet), is pretty sharp, possibly because that’s what the compositions demand (or inspire?). B+(***)

I build my own computers from components, and load them up with Xubuntu Linux and lots of free software. I may have a few drivers that aren’t properly open sourced, but nothing I pay (or have paid) for. I edit my files like a real 1980s vintage programmer, with emacs. I use make for automation, and write shell scripts (mostly in awk, although I should learn python one of these days). My web pages are hand-coded PHP, and I’ve never gotten the hang of JavaScript (something else I should learn that I’ve never quite seen the need for — that’s why people keep commenting about the “antique” look of my websites). On the rare occasions when I have to do something Office-y, I use LibreOffice. When I have to fiddle with images — which I do very sparingly — I use gimp. When I want to play something I’ve downloaded, I use vlc, which is also useful for watching DVDs (something I rarely do).

I have the window manager set up for six workspaces, so I have separate spaces for working on various projects (three are for websites I work on regularly). My browser is Firefox. I’m currently running eight windows in those three workspaces, and each has a dozen or more open tabs. So basically, what I do all day is look things up in the browser, and write things down in my editor. I’ve been doing that, with those same tools, for more than 25 years now. Some things could be improved, but it’s my workflow, and I’m pretty productive with it.

There are more tools I’d like to figure out. It would be nice to have a CAD program. And a video editor. And R for statistics. And some AI tools. I wonder if AI, if I took a picture of a bookcase, could give me an ordered list of all the books there? And while I sympathize with the usual objections to AI-produced art slop, I’m handicapped by not having artwork for my web pages. I’ve done some database work with MYSQL, but I could see making much more use of it if I had a way of getting data in and out other than hand-coded SQL. There could be synergy here: for instance, I could use AI to write python programs to move data in and out of databases.

Then there is email. I use Thunderbird as my mailer, or at least have until last week, when it broke. I keep two email windows opened in different workspaces, because sometimes I want to check something out without disturbing where I was. The mailer is set up to use the POP protocol to fetch mail. (POP downloads the mail to my mailer; an alternative, IMAP, leaves the mail on the server, so the mailer has to constantly coordinate with the server.) I have, well, tons of email archived in my mailer: basically, everything I’ve sent, and everything I have received, except for stuff that I quickly trashed, for many years (since 2018; I have some older mail in an archive under a different mailer, back to 2011 or so; earlier email is unfortunately lost).

Back in 2024, Cox decided to dump their email business — which, frankly, they were doing a lousy job of supporting — so they sold their accounts off to Yahoo, which treated them as “free” accounts (although I haven’t been plagued by the ads that they promise to save me from if I sign up for their paid “pro” tier, so maybe their Cox deal puts me in a slightly different tier). Yahoo allowed me to keep my cox.com address. After jumping through some hoops, I got Thunderbird to work with their POP and SMTP servers (the latter is used for sending email), after which I was back to normal. I also set up my phone to use Yahoo, using Android’s (not Yahoo’s) email app, and the IMAP and SMTP servers. (IMAP made sense for the phone, because I almost never use it for email. I mostly use it to send myself photographs, although there are probably better ways to do that sort of thing.)

Of course, what Yahoo wants is for me to use their webmail app, but, well, see the title above. The main thing I’ve used it for has been to check the Spam directory, which regularly catches email I want to see (while letting through crap I don’t want). However, since the POP server broke on Tuesday, I’m having to use it regularly, and, well, it really does suck. I’m not going to try to catalog all of the ways it sucks, but let me make a couple of general points:

1. It is very slow. Recall my complaint about IMAP: that every time you interact with a piece of mail, it has to coordinate with the server. Same thing here, only the protocol is an order of magnitude slower.

2. My view of the mail is messed up. Some of this is me reacting to it being different, but there are other things, like separating the email into arbitrary categories (like “primary”). The handling of threaded messages is especially baffling.

3. While in theory I can keep my sent mail and an archive of saved messages, they are on the server, not on my local machine (where I have many archives organized, and lots of messages filed away). I see no way to download the archives, let alone merge them into my own mailer. Saving mail in Yahoo uses up limited disk space, so I wind up deleting things that I would normally archive.

4. The mail write tool is also weirdly formatted, with limited tools, and super slow. Moreover, the sent mail is kept on the server, not in my mailer.

5. There are another dozen-plus minor annoyances, like it’s always asking me to “add application” so it can handle “mailto” links. Also, when I open mail, I often see a boxed off piece that is not mail, but “Summarized by Yahoo Scout,” some kind of AI reader that mostly adds confusion. The net effect of all these issues is that it takes me 3-4 times as long to go through my mail with Yahoo as it takes in Thunderbird, and I have much less to show for it. (The only thing I like so far is that it’s easier to delete an email without opening it.)

Some of this is due to the web interface technology, which does some things well, others poorly, and many not at all. But much is because Yahoo! Mail is what I call a “greedy app”: it tries to keep you prisoner within its own single interface. (Facebook is probably the mother of all greedy apps, although the idea goes back at least to AOL in the pre-web 1990s. One reason I do so little with phone apps is that nearly all of them try to own you.) Long ago I learned that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That one maxim will unlock a lot of mystery in the world.

But I’m not using Yahoo! Mail because I want to. I’m using it because Yahoo owns my email account, and their POP servers won’t let me access my email. I’ve gotten the same error message every 10 minutes or so every day since last Tuesday:

RETR command did not succeed. Error retrieving a message. Mail server responded: Server error - Please try again later.

The POP protocol is initiated by a client program (in my case Thunderbird), and responded to by a server (in this case, pop.mail.yahoo.com). The RETR command is sent by my client after other commands have established a connection including password login, and several other commands which identify which messages are new and need to be downloaded. RETR says give me the messages. Servers have timeouts, in case something hangs up, and when this happens the error message you see above is returned. Normally, this is a temporary problem, and the transfer will work next time, or sometime soon. If this error message recurs, as it has persistently for nearly a week now, something else is broken on the server side. Someone needs to take a look at the logs on the server, identify this problem, and fix it.

My problem is that I can’t find anyone at Yahoo to communicate this problem to. I’m not asking for hand-holding to help set up or recover an account. I’m asking them to fix their own server. But they’ve made this so difficult that I’m still stuck after 10-12 hours of scouring their website, chatting up their AI robot, and slogging through external resources. Even when I managed to corner their chatbot into offering to connect to a human agent (three times), only to find that no such person is available.

The only option I see with Yahoo is to sign up for a paid tier. But I can’t even find a salesperson to reassure me that doing so would help. The extra features offered are pretty close to worthless, but they’re promising “access to our customer support team for general Yahoo account support.” It’s not yet clear whether their “team” includes humans, or whether “general” account support includes troubleshooting their faulty servers. Before moving to Yahoo, I spent many hours on the phone with Cox agents who couldn’t escalate issues to their server team. I only got help from the latter when I complained about them on Twitter, and got a message back with the magic email address.

I expect to spend much of the next week figuring out what to do about this. I will probably wind up switching to a new email address. I could shop around for another service, or I could just use my own server. I need to factor in the need for email service during the jazz critics poll, which has always been difficult. I need to get a better handle on my Thunderbird setup. I also must admit that I’ve never been very good at managing email services, so I’m likely to face a steep learning curve there. I know a few things, but I’ve never managed to get such basic things as local network mail delivery working properly.

I’ve been reading books about the wonderful/horrible future AI promises. But while I don’t doubt that bad people can use AI for bad purposes, the far more likely scenario is that greedy corporations will use it to frustrate and stifle customers who will increasingly find themselves with no other options. Cory Doctorow’s recent books, Enshittification and The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, are useful guides to a trend that’s becoming ever more extensive.

On the other hand, my carefully phrased questions to Google, and my interrogations of other chatbots, have saved me considerable time in diagnosing problems and figuring out solutions to some highly technical configuration problems. In many ways, AI is better at that sort of thing than people are. So I may be able to find the help to figure a way out of my present email hell. But the bitter taste of trying to deal with Yahoo isn’t going away any time soon. This makes me wonder about setting up a website where people can list the companies they’ve decided to never do business with again. We could call it Burnt Bridges.

It used to be that the one arena in everyday life where one could expect to be treated with respect was when one presented as a customer. That’s changing now, rather quickly. AI is accelerating this, but it really the corporate owners and managers who are driving it. The last 40-50 years have seen an extraordinary concentration of power into their hands, and the more power they have, the more manifest their indifference and callousness becomes.

Google’s summary of Robinson’s essay is: “Robinson argues that Peterson is an intellectual fraud who uses obscure, grand language to mask a lack of substantive, valuable ideas.” I don’t know how often in Peterson’s work that is true, but this title is one jam-packed example.

Let’s start with the word “catastrophism.” It’s a real word, with a specific meaning, just not the one Peterson intends. In the 19th century, there was a big divide between geologists who thought that the Earth and its features were formed slowly over vast time by processes that are currently observable, and others who sought to explain those features as resulting from sudden catastrophic events. The latter group started from the biblical story of creation, and sought evidence in geology to prove its truth. They were disparaged as “catastrophists,” while the former group called themselves “uniformitarians.”

Contemporary views have evolved: those who sought to use science to validate the biblical creation story have retreated into dogmatic creationism; meanwhile, scientists have accepted that some catastrophes occur naturally, like the meteor strike that ended the Cretaceous with a mass extermination. I have no idea what Peterson thinks of this, or whether he thinks at all, but his use of “catastrophism” is just a verbal sleight of hand. He knows that many critics of climate change warn that failure to address the problem will be catastrophic. All he seeks to do is to characterize those views as an “ism”: the dogmatic faith in an overarching idea. He knows that many people have grown skeptical of all “isms,” and seeks advantage from that.

However, he does seem to make an exception of “capitalism,” seeing it not as an arbitrary belief structure but as a proxy for all the valuable creations of human industry. A more common term for what he’s describing is “civilization,” but that too has baggage we don’t need to drag along. I’m going to propose a better definition of capitalism below. But at this point, let’s see if we can rewrite Peterson’s title in the form of an argument:

1. The Left wants to destroy capitalism.

2. The Left sees the threat of catastrophic climate change as a tool for undermining people’s faith in capitalism.

3. Therefore, our love of capitalism demands we deny the argument that climate change will lead to catastrophe.

I don’t doubt that the first two premises can be illustrated by referring to individuals who believe those things, but most people who identify with the Left have more complex and nuanced views that Peterson doesn’t recognize. I also want to point out that while capitalism has had much to do with causing climate change, the solution does not necessitate the end of capitalism, or even any fundamental reforms. In other words, the linkage between the two issues (capitalism and climate change) is weak, and the impulse to link them tends to be politically opportunistic: while Peterson complains about the Left trying to link them, he’s as guilty of that himself.

Let’s start by clearing up some terminology. Capitalism is a system where the owners of capital claim all of the profits from its use and employment. Property rights are secured by government, which may attempt to represent democratic interests, but often is captured by capitalists for their own purposes. Markets are also constructed by government, and again may be captured. (Markets and property rights go back before capitalism, but the role of government is now universal, even if some capitalists like to romanticize its natural origins.)

Capitalism is productive, exploitative, and alienating, shot full of contradictions that make it unstable and self-destructive. Because of its ownership, it concentrates wealth in the hands of a few, resulting in pervasive inequality, which poisons society. Its defenders, like Peterson, celebrate the wealth it has produced, and write off all of the side-effects as incidental. They argue not only that the side-effects are necessary to obtain the wealth, but that any effort to limit the side-effects would only hamper this fabulous engine of wealth-creation. Whether they claim that would be to everyone’s detriment, or just to that of the rich, varies according to how pompous and/or cynical they are.

The terms Right and Left date from the French Revolution. The Right were defenders of class stratification, and of the privileges of those higher up to rule those lower down. At the time, the higher ups were the king and aristocracy, but by the end of the 1800s, they had been supplanted by wealthy capitalists. Even when revolutions toppled kings, ended aristocracy, freed slaves, redistributed land, and/or confiscated businesses, the Right always bounced back, ever ready to defend the privileged (including themselves) against the poor.

The Left, on the other hand, asserted that all people deserve to be treated as equals, endowed with inalienable rights, not subject to the whims of privilege. While Left and Right may correlate with other issues, their only definition is in the opposition of privilege and equality. It should be noted that the vision of Left and Right has always been circumscribed by history: just as the Right has always rallied to those already in power, the Left has supported whoever opposed the existing privileges. Thus, early capitalists found themselves on the Left, only to switch sides as they grew wealthy and were accepted into the prevailing hierarchy. By then, their own ideology embedded in the established power, in lieu of the previous justifications of popes and kings.

While the Left has a reputation for being anti-capitalist, the critique has always been more nuanced. Most on the Left have always loved the productivity that capitalism unleashed, and saw it as the foundation for an equitable society of plenty. The Left’s critique focused on details: power-seeking, inequality, impoverishment, toxic waste, and ideology.[2] But the goal was not to “destroy capitalism.” It was to save capitalism from its bad side-effects. And arguably to free capitalists from the bad habits their ideology instills in them.

There are ways to do this that avoid the full state ownership that older communist (and sometimes socialist) parties favored: that allow firms to continue independently, innovate, and compete in free markets, with profits and productivity gains going to workers and/or the public.[3] There are many good reasons to do this.[4] Fighting climate change isn’t necessarily one of them, but a major obstacle is the entrenched political power of the fossil fuel industry. But there are other obstacles, some ideological, some psychological.

Nonetheless, it is possible to address climate change without changing the capitalist paradigm. Indeed, there is considerable reason for current capitalists to fight climate change. They have much property tied up in land, farms, and other operations that finely tuned to the current climate. And as severe weather increases its toll, insurance will become increasingly unaffordable. On the other hand, switching over to renewable energy sources opens up lots of business opportunities. Isn’t capitalism supposed to thrive on such “creative destruction”? The problem here isn’t capitalism as such but the politically entrenched interests of fossil fuel moguls.

And ideology: perhaps Peterson is on payola, but more likely he’s just fallen, like Trump and most of his MAGA fan club, for the idea that gas guzzling is an intrinsic part of their lost American greatness. How dare those commie-liberals take anything away from our heritage? That’s remarkably short-sighted, not to mention dumb, but it isn’t unprecedented. Those 19th century catastrophists didn’t necessarily see the light. Most opted to double down on faith and come up with creationism, which with no scientific evidence whatsoever still has a fairly substantial number of believers.

Still, the worst thing about this right-wing ideology isn’t its ignorant denial of climate change. The worst thing is that they’re stuck on a power trip where their willingness to resort to violence (and all other forms of manipulation) to impose their will over all those they consider enemies — ultimately for most or nearly all of us. But there’s much more wrong here. They’ve somehow managed to make their ideology impervious to logic, reason, evidence, and any sort of human sympathy or solidarity. Peterson’s title is not just a bundle of wildly erroneous, rather ridiculous assertions. It’s a defensive shell, designed so that nothing I’ve said above can penetrate it. As such, it’s intended more to rally believers, not to convince others.

One last point, which I’ve skirted around above because I didn’t want to go down this particular rabbit hole: while I accept the well-established science behind anthropic climate change, including the range of predictions based on that science, I’m not especially inclined to view them as catastrophic — at least not in the sense of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, or the global thermonuclear war that we’ve been threatened with since 1945. What I expect is that the Earth will get progressively hotter for decades after we reach some future point where we’re no longer adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than are being removed. The longer this takes, the worse the situation will be, but whatever that point is, we will adapt to it. The costs may be unimaginable, but nothing we can’t cope with. The worst case scenario isn’t heat, or weather, of any degree. The worst case scenario is war.[5]

So the real question going forward is how well we can cope, and how soon we realize that this isn’t going to be easy. How well we cope depends mostly on our ability to cooperate constructively, and here we should stress that “our” means pretty much everyone — not just a cabal of makers and shakers. That’s a big problem, because right-wing ideology divides people between us and them, and solves their inevitable opposition by the imposition of power. And while capitalism could cope with the technical problems of climate change, it’s stuck in the same ideological rut, only worse: there the division is between the few people taking profits and the many who are feeding them and/or being preyed on.

Peterson’s nightmare scenario is a world where masses of people slip out of his propaganda bubble and start to pay attention to facts, science, and reason, and who start to find common cause with their neighbors, and decide to elect a government that responds to their concerns and needs, not to the ultra-rich and their ideologically groomed cadres.

The irony is that the more influence, and the more complete control people like Peterson think they have, the harder they’re going to fall. I’m not happy saying that. At my age, I’d be happy with a boring ruling class I’d never have to give a second thought to. But they’d have to care, and they’d have to be competent. They’d have to help people other than themselves. They would have to anticipate problems, which means they would have to understand how the world works, and not just for them. They wouldn’t have to be perfect, but when they screwed up, they’d need to apologize, learn, and make amends. They’d have to earn respect and trust. And I’m not getting that from smart guys like Peterson, let alone clods like Trump.

Here’s another version of Peterson’s title: “To protect the fragile egos of oil-based capitalism’s billionaires, we’re willing to ignore all we know and risk everything by pretending climate change is just an imaginary threat conjured up by people who hate us for no reason.”

Notes:

1. If you’re curious, Robinson’s essay is available online as The Intellectual We Deserve (2018). You might also be interested in Ben Brooker’s The 14 Rules for Eternal Fascism: Jordan Peterson and the Far Right (2019). Peterson occasioned these pieces by publishing a book called 12 Rules for Life. Peterson’s piece is paywalled here. Google explains that “Jordan Peterson argues that ‘climate change catastrophism’ is an exaggerated, politically motivated narrative driven by anti-capitalist ideology, Malthusian overpopulation fears, and a psychological desire for unearned moral superiority, rather than an objective scientific emergency.” Two more arguments that pop up here strike me as especially wrong: one is the insistence that the goal of anti-capitalism is “forced impoverishment”; the other is the assertion that “economic growth and technological advancement are the true solutions to environmental issues.”

2. By “ideology” I mean the public discourse which makes it very difficult to rationally disentangle the constituent elements of capitalism, and for that matter of everyday life. This is a vast subject, explored at great length (but far from exhaustively) by the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School. For our purposes here, let’s just note the role of intellectuals like Peterson in confusing issues.

3. State ownership runs multiple risks of excessive political direction, including a tendency toward monopoly. Employee ownership would in most cases be preferable, especially if profits are limited. All companies should be tempered by regulation. Exploring these variations is a job for another time. But for purposes here, suffice it to say that any such arrangements preserve the firm, its division of labor, and its market competitiveness: basically everything that makes capitalism productive, except for the rarefied upper echelon of capitalists.

4. And there is little space to list them here. But for starters, we live in an increasingly complex, largely synthetic world, which exploits the formerly natural world to a huge extent. (For example, something like 95% of all the mammalian biomass in the world is now humans or livestock.) We need people who are competent and who can be trusted to run this thing. And that’s not going to happen if everyone is a precarious profit-seeking gig worker (i.e., thinks and acts like a capitalist, with even more to lose).

5. We’ll leave war dangling here, since the scenarios are too many to imagine. But if, say, world production drops 20%, while the world remains as heavily divided and armed as it currently is, what do you think is going to happen? (Did the Great Depression cause World War II? It certainly didn’t prevent it.) Wars are the result of compound errors made over many years. Trump’s war in Iran started back in 1953, and is being fought now with the same degree of self-conscious care as it was entered into back then.

After racking up 184 reviews in July, I’m down to 19 this week (6 below + one revisit). I knew I wasn’t going to keep the pace up this week. My cousin, Max Brown, died in January. He owned a ranch near Douglass, 30–40 miles southeast of Wichita, and the estate set up an auction of his equipment, tools, furniture, guns, and so forth for August 6. His nephew and nieces were coming up for that, and I spent some time with them, taking the opportunity to rustle up a fairly substantial dinner, mostly old family favorites.

So that roughly cut my week in half. But by the time that was done, I had gotten caught up in several tech crises. Unfortunately, these are not the sort of tech crises that one can research, troubleshoot, and find technical solutions to. These are tech crises wrapped up in an oozing blanket of corporate strategy, of the sort that Cory Doctorow wrote about as Enshittification. Don’t be surprised if you see that word again in a title here, specifically in reference to Toyota and Yahoo!

I’ve spent a bunch of time already trying to figure these things out. The Toyota case basically comes down to extorting money for a monthly fee for something I don’t particularly want, and may not work anyway. In the meantime they’re breaking things that I understood to be standard — but it turns out that “standard” is just a free trial subscription that sooner or later will blow up in your face. And that’s on top of the more fundamental problem, which is that the new car didn’t come with a CD changer, so I’ve been at the mercy of my phone whenever I drive. I’m so unhappy with the car, and for that matter with the dealer, that we’re tempted to go shopping again.

The Yahoo! problem is more urgent: I haven’t been able to POP email since Tuesday. I’m only on Yahoo! because they bought up Cox’s email accounts. The only customer support I’ve found is a chatbot, which exists mostly to make sure no person can be disturbed by an irate customer (assuming there even are people left there). The bot makes technical suggestions with no confidence that they will work — looks like tasks to send me off, while they do nothing. Nor is it even clear that paying them extra money will help. I can still see my email (via their webpage, which also allows me to reply), so I shouldn’t panic. But if I can’t fix this, I’ll have to abandon an email address I’ve had for 25 years.

I hoped to get some free time after the Mid-Year Poll, but we’re off to a horrible, depressing start. With problems coming so fast, and solutions so slow, I’m starting to worry about bumping unprepared into another poll season. Or possibly finishing another year with nothing to show for it but the polls and a bunch of angry political posts.

By the way, last week’s two full-A albums (Laurie Anderson: Let X = X, and Swamp Dogg Contemplates the Afterlife) are still in heavy rotation. That’s another reason I’ve had less time for new music this week. I should also note that the main source for what I did manage to listen to last week was Phil Overeem’s July list.

CS Cleaners: What’s This? (2026, Wharf Cat): Brooklyn-based post-punk band, first album after a 2023 EP, claim influences from “NYC downtown music from CBGB’s diverse first wave through no-wave’s mutations and deconstructions,” but with hooks as well as overtures. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

Mark Lomax, II & the Urban Art Ensemble: Black Odes: A Reclamation Suite (2026, CFG Multimedia): Drummer from Columbus, Ohio, with many records since 1999, should be a major figure but few people are aware of him, or for that matter his brilliant saxophonist, Edwin Bayard. Part of the problem is that the streaming interface on his website is hard to find let alone trust. This seems to have four pieces, of indeterminate length, promising “jazz, classical, hip-hop, and poetry are brought together to imagine a world where racism never existed.” Long on concept, but hard to track in this form. B+(***)

Vince Staples: Cry Baby (2026, Loma Vista): Los Angeles rapper, seventh studio album since 2015, has come up with a different sound here, thin beats, moderate speed, words basic enough for rock, a combination I find appealing, much more than anything else he’s done. A−
[Bandcamp]

Twisted Teens: Florida Water Blues (2026, Going Underground): New Orleans-based post-punk band, third album in quick succession, songs written by bassist C.P.N. Hollywell, sung by guitarist Cas P. Ian, 13 songs run an unrushed 42:29. Gets more interesting when it veers into swamp rock. B+(***)

Los Orientales De Paramonga: 1972-1976 (1972-76 [2026], Analog Africa): Peruvian group, from somewhere north of Lima, recorded several albums in this time period. Really nice guitar and percussion. Vocals come and go, over 25 songs (73 minutes). Probably not major, but very pleasant. A−
[Bandcamp]

Gary Stewart: One Track Mind (1970-73 [2026], Delmore Recording Society): Country singer-songwriter (1944-2003), made a big splash with his 1975 debut album (Out of Hand), which got MCA to finally round up a bunch of older singles and miscellany as You’re Not the Woman You Used to Be. The search for his juvenilia continues here, in the label’s third collection of “previously unreleased, pre-RCA recordings.” Starts strong, in excellent voice, but my mind slides off the track by the end. Recording dates approximate. B+(**)
[Bandcamp]

Ratboys: Singin’ to an Empty Chair (2026, New West): Chicago indie rock band, Julia Steiner the singer, guitarist David Sagan the other principal, sixth studio album since 2015. Sounded fine when I gave it an initial play, but evidently not much of a listen. [was: B+(**)] A−
[Bandcamp]

I spent most of last week doing just that. And since the last time I published one was June 14, there was quite a bit to catch up on. (Sure, some stories, like Graham Platner, can now be forgotten. But others, like the Iran war, are still very much with us.)

These posts take a long time, and could conceivably take forever, so at some point I have to force myself to stop and publish. I did that on August 1. I rushed it out a bit: no table of contents, just a quick spell check and a glance at the formatting. I figured I’d re-read it later, make a few more edits, maybe add some relevant links. But the main purpose of the re-read would be to write this post for Substack: an executive summary of sorts, but mostly just further reflections.

I’m going to minimize the number of links here, as they may score against the email. I may later add more links into the archive version of this piece. In any case, I’m referring to entries in this Loose Tabs.

Let’s start with Donald Trump. While he’s not the root of all evil, he’s its inescapable face. Not only is he directly responsible for a large share of what’s gone wrong with the world, he’s a constant reminder that the US presidency, and effectively the entire US political system, is not going to be of any help to us until after his term ends (probably 900 days, barring death or, less likely, a majority of Republicans growing a conscience). I have four sections devoted to Trump and various aspects of his administration, plus one for his Iran war, and one for the party he basically owns. During his first four years, I thought that most of the really bad things were due to the generic Republicans he employed, and that his own character flaws were just window dressing designed to draw attention away from the real damage. But this time, both ends of the equation are much worse. That’s largely because he’s found he can get away with shit he couldn’t imagine doing before, and because the creeps and cretins in the Republican rank-and-file are seeing what he’s doing, and trying to push their own luck. The result is that the stories in the war, law, and admin sections are not just bad: they’re way beyond anything that we’re used to, or really know how to process. And my guess is that I’m barely scratching the surface in those areas.

The personal section on Trump is at least easier to understand. There are roughly three sets of stories there:

1. Trump’s vanity projects, which are orders of magnitude more vain than anyone had previously attempted.

2. Trump’s corrupt dealings, including with his own government.

3. Trump’s plummeting popularity.

Again, I’m only scratching the surface here. I’ve basically ignored the torrent of memes he produces (although I note one under “tweets”). The Trump news is overwhelming and exhausting. We know enough already to last us through the election, and way beyond. The only question is when (if ever) others will wise up and start to rein him in. In this regard, I suggest you look at the Seth Meyers dissection of the White House Correspondents Dinner. While it mostly focuses on Trump’s own ineptness, the main thing it reveals is the Stockholm Syndrome of the reporters charged with covering the Trump and his administration.

One problem with Loose Tabs is that I’m mostly reacting to stories, rather than to their underlying themes and subtexts. What all of the Trump stories have in common is that he has what for lack of a better word we’ll call a “superpower”: he draws energy from his base by offending (some might say enraging, others humiliating) his enemies, and no one has really checked him on it. The Fox press is fawning. The mainstream press is wary, a strange mix of embarrassed yet still striving to be respectful. Scolding him just makes him double down. His fans hate the scolds, and see him as courageous. Worse, because they see him as dominating people they hate, they think he’s on their side. That’s ridiculous. He’s only out for his own grift and ego, which is becoming increasingly obvious as he fails at virtually everything he attempts. But he’s one note: he can only continue playing the rule-breaking tough guy, as that’s worked remarkably well so far.

I keep toying with the idea of writing a “ten worst things Trump has done” list, and he keeps trying to add stupid stuff to the list, to basically, as Steve Bannon advised, to “flood the zone with bullshit.” The list has so many really serious things I’m tempted to dismiss things like putting his face on money and passports as just sick jokes. But he seems to spend most of his waking hours figuring out ways to infuriate us. After all, he has regular Republicans busy wrecking the country. They hardly need his direction, as if he could even provide it.

The next thing to look at is the section on war, starting with Iran. The time period started with the Memorandum of Understanding, which I wrote about on June 22. Given the combination of arrogance, ignorance, and fear that goaded Trump into attacking Iran back in February, the Memorandum was surprisingly sensible. The only really viable way to negotiate the end of a conflict is for both parties to search out and support the needs of the other, in some sort of mutually beneficial accommodation. The best possible solution here would be for Iran and the US to leave themselves no further grounds for conflict: Iran would be secure, and able to function like a normal country; the US (and Israel) would no longer have to deal with Iranian interference in their own affairs — a bit more of a stumbling block, since the US (and Israel) routinely intervene in other countries. The Memorandum didn’t solve all issue, but in promising complete freedom from sanctions, it made a major step in the right direction.

However, it fell apart in about a week, as the US tried an end run around Iran’s Strait of Hormuz leverage, and Israel continued to demolish Lebanon. So Trump restarted the bombing, and it more or less continues. (They’re talking ceasefire today, but really?) Of course, a big part of the problem is that Netanyahu and his cronies like the late Lindsey Graham — who seems to have encouraged Ukraine into attacking Iran just to boost Ukraine’s utility as a US ally — have worked consistently to wreck any possible peace agreement.

At this point, I think every observer who’s not totally in thrall to the Israel lobby or the war profiteers recognizes that the only path out of this war is to go back to the terms of the Memorandum, only with more explicit guarantees not to pull the kind of tricks Trump and Netanyahu resorted to. I remain convinced that it is the Gulf States that will force this war to an end. The question is, how much pressure does Iran have to put on them to get them to sway Trump (which is difficult not because Trump is obdurate but because it means turning Trump against Netanyahu). Thus far Iran has treated them rather gingerly, but the more successful the US bombing campaign is — and we have no idea, one way or another — the more they will be tempted to attack the Gulf States. There is no scenario where the US bombs Iran into submission without also dooming its ostensible allies in the region. Trump may be able to flout his power at home, but in the world, he has real limits.

Then, of course, there is the section on Israel, which continues to kill and displace Palestinians, while occupying and demolishing a large swath of Lebanon (and Syria, which is less reported). I could have added much more to this section, but I think you get the idea. The following section is on how Israel is viewed around the world, especially in the US. Despite furious efforts to curtail free speech, especially in the US and Germany, support for Israel continues to slip. One might argue that Israel’s killing has slowed down to pre-genocide levels, but the intent is still there, and they’re still doing what they think they can get away with, which with Trump distracted is quite a bit.

I have several sections on politics, looking forward to the November elections. I haven’t paid much attention to the primary contests, although many of the sources I read are psyched by the successes of leftish Democrats. Upcoming primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan get a brief notice. I’m not convinced that Michigan is really a referendum on Israel, although people on both sides would like to think so. My general feeling is that any Democrat who can win in November is a good Democrat. And I wouldn’t assume that the more “moderate” (which usually translates as indebted to business lobbyists) candidate would do better. So I’m reluctant to get my hopes up, or to second-guess the primary voters. As long as Trump is president, there is very little Democrats in Congress (or the states) can do, but replacing Republicans with Democrats of any persuasion is a worthwhile step.

I do note that Kansas’s primary is next week. Senator Roger Marshall is so bad he’s motivated a dozen Democrats to run against him — something I’ve never seen before, where even getting one challenger is often a chore. The poll favorite is a guy who would become one of the most conservative Democrats in Washington. None of my friends can stand him, but I’ll happily vote for him against Marshall — a MD who during Covid prescribed Ivermectin to his family to build up his Trump credentials.

I do cite a number of articles about “centrist” attacks on the growing democratic wing of the Democratic party, because I regard their arguments are counterproductive if not downright traitorous. One of my arguments for Harris in 2024 was that, regardless of how much you oppose her specific positions on matters like Israel, she was open and approachable, at least on humanitarian grounds, in a way that Trump could never have been. The “center” should view the left at least that generously. Bernie Sanders, for instance, has pushed hard for Medicare for All ever since he entered Congress, but he was a reliable vote for ACA when it counted. It’s very rare for any left Democrat not to support meaningful reform because it’s not good enough.

The section on Democrats has several long comments as I work my way around partisan strategy issues. Under Yoder, I talk about climate change as an issue, and that could be expanded quite a bit. Under Kruse, Prokop, and Scher, I talk about various aspects of the center vs. left “civil war.” Much of this boils down to the “centrist” promise to win elections and fix problems: even when they did the former (not often enough), they failed to do the latter. The latter is easier to understand, given that the left has a lock on real answers to most of our problems. (This is basically because capitalism, at least when given anywhere near as much power as the capitalists have enjoyed since the 1980s, really sucks. We’re not saying you have to replace it, but you do need to limit its power, and provide alternatives where it doesn’t work at all well.) The losing is a bit harder to explain, but in a world where very few people are doing well, and relatively few of them are liberals, policies that only benefit liberal elites aren’t very popular, especially given a media biased to hang them on their elitism. And the protests of elite Democrats that they really want to help middle class people ring hollow, because they don’t deliver results.

There is more on Ukraine this month than there has been in quite a while. I’m not quite sure what this means, but continuing the war is becoming increasingly untenable. So right now there’s a lot of jockeying for position, with both sides racking up strikes that don’t actually move the lines but play well in the press. Reasonable people should be able to sort this out[1], but instead we have Trump, Putin, and Zelensky: the former has no skills, while the other two are likely to lose when the fighting stops. And you can try to factor Europe in, but it’s hard to figure out what they really want out of the deal.

The section on Republicans is very spotty. Most are mere Trump ciphers at the moment, but JD Vance is getting some attention (with more pieces in the Books section). I’ve also grouped in donors (like Ken Griffin) and “right-wing gasbags” (Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Erika Kirk), but there’s many more where they came from. Only one breaking scandal, but again that’s not an isolated story. But how much do you really need to know about Ken Paxton?

The sections on Economics, Technology, Environment, and Media are pretty anemic. I wish I could focus more on those stories, as they represent tectonic forces that will wind up mattering more than the political noise that dominates our attention. I’m near the end of reading four books on AI (straight, or six in the past year), and I expect to spend some practical time working with it later this year. I’m approaching it cautiously, wary of hype, much as I did climate change when I first read McKibben in the 1990s — a study I’ve still not finished, but one I’m getting a pretty good feel for.

In the Miscellaneous Pieces section, the one by Paul Starr on “Proportional Representation” gives me another chance to lay out my “Representative Democracy” ideas. I should turn that into a proper essay, but it seems like it deserves a much bigger platform than I actually have. (Same for ideas like “Right to Exile” and “War Insurance.”) The one on Emily Topping could also have been turned into a full-blown essay, or two: one on how all digitally reproducible art should be available free to everyone; and one on what to do with all the “owned media” we have lying around (I probably have 10,000 CDs and no idea how many books, which should be in a library somewhere; I’d be much happier if I could look them up whenever I wanted to, without having to sort through all the physical clutter).

The Books section is very scattered, a mix of reviews and pieces about people who write books and pieces about the things they write about in books, which could be anything. I’m still hoping to get back into writing up some Book Roundup pieces (I’m over a year behind on that). While I read a fair amount of journalism, books are still for me the place where ideas get taken seriously, and as such become real.

The Music section is an accidental add: I had a piece I wanted to cite, and didn’t have any better place to put it. It should probably become a regular section. Like Obituaries, although I still haven’t developed a regular approach there. I’m surprised I didn’t come up with more links on Alan Greenspan, whose influence on America has probably been greater, and no less malign, than that of any other mere bureaucrat since the heyday of Robert Moses, J Edgar Hoover, and Floyd Dominy. Of course, it takes some time for reflections, especially critical ones, to emerge. I put Zach Beauchamp’s piece on Gordon S Wood under books, but it is really a delayed obituary.

Having scanned to the bottom of the post, I’ve quite possibly once again written more than anyone feels up to reading. If so, I don’t quite see how I can help you. There’s just a lot to cover, and it can only be reduced so much before you’re not talking about anything.

[1]: My Ukraine/Russia solution is to freeze the current lines and cease fire and other efforts at subversion. Referendums would be held in the Russian-occupied lands, and in any Ukrainian-occupied lands that Putin chooses to challenge. Both sides can decide whether to allow refugees to return to their areas, but people on both sides should be free to leave. Absentee voting is possible, but not required. My expectation (or perhaps hope) is that the areas will accept the current division, making it legitimate (and not just a deal based on relative power and terror. I’d like to see a second round of referendums in 4-6 years, in case there is any voter remorse. This would also give both sides incentive to rebuild, as if they didn’t, they’d probably lose. This election regime would also offer a set of guidelines for peaceably settling other Russian boundary conflicts, such as the ones in/around Georgia. After the elections, the newly validated Ukraine would be free to join the EU (if invited), and to form security deals with the US/Europe, but not to join NATO. (Ukraine could be defended by NATO, but could not join in NATO operations elsewhere. A Russian attack would trigger the defense arrangement, but preëmptive attack against Russia would not be supported.) Most sanctions against Russia would be dropped, with the rest removed if other grievances are settled. Russia and the US would agree to negotiate further arms reduction treaties, with Europe and possibly others involved. Some sort of international fund would be set up to deal with refugees and reconstruction. Any future violations would be referred to an international court, which could assess damages but not direct military response.

Note that this entire war could have been prevented had many of these provisions had been established earlier. The principle is that people in a region should be able to decide whether to remain in a country or leave. While Putin is primarily responsible for this conflict turning into a war, the conflict goes deeper, and he was not the only one culpable for escalating it. While NATO was primarily defensive during the Cold War, it took a more offensive posture after the Soviet Union dissolved, especially as the US started using it for expanding military operations around the world. I would argue that NATO should be abolished, but it is hard to do that now without agreement from Russia to respect the peace of its neighbors. But dissolving NATO should at least be considered as a bargaining chip. Reviving the Cold War is a truly horrible idea.

We’re a week now past the publication of the Mid-Year Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. I expected to have more to say about it at this point, but as is so often the case, exhaustion has left me looking elsewhere, so I don’t have much. I did start to do a slight facelift to the top-level website, but clearly still have a lot more work to do. Even further off the horizon is a complete redesign of the website. One problem there is that the notion of “modern website design” is obsessed with graphics, and I have neither the skills nor the inclination to figure out what to do about that.

As it is, I’ve spent most of the week trying to catch up after ignoring Loose Tabs for over six weeks — the longest gap since I gave up on doing the weekly Speaking of Which. My draft at present is up to 15,729 words (264 links). I am hopeful I can finally publish it over the weekend. It’s already provided raw material for my Lindsey Graham post (Famous Death Dwarves). Very little reaction to that, leaving me with questions about the experiment. It probably would have had more impact had I taken my links/comments and restructured them as a straight essay. I could also have expanded on where I see his legacy going. For now, the Ukraine war hawks are riding high on his dead horse.

More non-jazz this week than jazz, for the first time in quite a while. There are still many records from the poll that I haven’t heard — I have a list I’ve been ticking off, which has shrunk from 295 to 242 albums — but finding the ones that look most interesting is getting hard. Besides, there is much non-jazz I’ve neglected over the last couple months.

The full Music Week will be up soon on the blog. Looks like 34 albums, with the six A/A− albums already here. It is very rare that I give a full A grade to a new album. I expect those albums to not only sound great at first, but to grow on me over time. As my routine doesn’t offer much time, I tend to hold back, figuring I can bump up the worthy later. But I have two A albums this week, bringing the year’s total so far to three. Admittedly, I haven’t played either as much as the grades seem to warrant. But I’m pretty confident I will.

Laurie Anderson With Sexmob: Let X = X (2023 [2026], Nonesuch): Performance artist, combines very brainy spoken word with her violin and minimalist synths to produce a series of brilliant albums, starting with 1982’s Big Science, with 1985’s United States Live (a 5-LP box) and 1989’s Strange Angels most remarkable. Live album, with 23 songs in 94 minutes, based by a jazz quintet organized by Steven Bernstein and Briggan Krauss (brass) in 1998, with Doug Wieselman (clarinet/guitar), Tony Scherr (bass), and Kenny Wollesen (drums). They don’t replace, let alone eliminate, the synths and violin, but they add warmth, and occasionally some rhythmic flex. I suspect that Bernstein is the musical hero here, not for his trumpet but for his arranging skills. One surprise is they dropped in a vocal from the ghost of Lou Reed (they were married from 2008 to his death in 2013). But even more than the music, I’m struck by the philosophy, so much needed for our times: the last lines are “there are so many sad things in the world, and if you pretend they’re not there, you’re an idiot. The point is, that it is very, very important not to become sad yourself. And more than that, he said, ‘You know, you need to remember that the reason we’re here, the actual reason that we’re here is to have a really, really, really good time.’” A
[Bandcamp]

Nia Archives: Emotional Junglist (2026, Hijinxx/Island): British jungle/electronica producer Dehaney Nia Lishahn Hunt, I had her filed as such based on her early EPs, but this is a songs album, and she’s a singer-songwriter, even if her beats are exceptionally deft. A−

Owen Lake and the Tragic Loves: Bury Deep My Heart (2026, Carrier): Country singer-songwriter Jeff Snyder, sneaking up on a career that started in 2011 with an EP, then an album in 2018. Second album. His country + EDM concept has settled in clearly on the country side, with fiddle and pedal steel more convincing than George Jones covers. Still, there’s something synthetic here I don’t quite buy, although I’m not opposed to pop art in principle. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

David Maranha/Rodrigo Amado: Desolation Row (2025 [2026], Comets Coming): Organ and tenor sax duo, second album together. I’ve never looked into Maranha’s other work, which includes close to 20 albums back to 1994, as well as the experimental drone group Osso Exótico (9 albums 1990-2010). Here he fills out the background, for some pretty major tenor saxophone. A−
[Bandcamp]

Swamp Dogg: Swamp Dogg Contemplates the Afterlife (2026, S-Curve): Jerry Williams, started as a mainstream soul producer for Atlantic in the 1960s, adopted this persona for one of the singularly great albums of 1970, and has been hit-and-miss ever since. But at 83 he’s hitting as consistently as ever. Possibly his best since Total Destruction to Your Mind. Sure, the subject matter reminds me more of the later 1970s albums when his relationships went sour, but age has given him insights into the big picture, while he still has the chops to arrange and sing. A

Tucker Zimmerman: Dream Me a Dream (2026, Big Potato): Singer-songwriter, recorded the modestly titled Ten Songs back in 1969, more albums up to 1983, big gap to 2003-05, got going again in 2021. Died with his wife in a house fire in 2026, leaving this final album. Others have complained about “musical drop-off,” but I’m finding this very charming. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

Shūdan Sokai: Live at Hachioji Alone (1976 [2026], Aguirre): Japanese free jazz quartet, recorded this one album, group name translates as “mass evacuation. Group is led by Yoriyuki Harada (piano) and Kazutoki Umezu (alto/baritone sax), back from a spell in New York exploring the jazz loft scene, with Junji Mori (alto sax) and Takashi Kikuchi (drums). Umezu went on to have the more notable career, but the pianist’s Cecil Taylor moves are most impressive here. And when they switch gears, that’s doubly impressive. A−
[Bandcamp]

Mary Lee Kortes: Will Anybody Know That I Was Here? The Songs of Beulah Rowley (2016 [2023], Lakeside Lounge): Story goes that Rowley was a Michigan singer-songwriter who died tragically in the 1930s, leaving a locked box of songs that Kortes eventually discovered, inspiring her to a career that thus far includes five 1996–2006 albums as Mary Lee’s Corvette, plus this Hal Wilner-produced album, along with suporting prose, including a biography of Rowley. This doesn’t sound antique, but I suppose the themes are timeless. The music production is very tasteful. A−

I had no desire to write an obituary for Graham, so lots of things are omitted below. Like his “finish the job” cheerleading for genocide in Gaza. And his peculiar claim that he wasn’t a racist because he welcomed blacks into the Republican Party. Exact quotes on these and other issues will take some more digging. One might also look into his close and formative relationship with Strom Thurmond, who backed his political career, and whose Senate seat he claimed.

I’ve toyed with the idea of pulling excerpts from Loose Tabs out and posting them here. And after the third sizable chunk I wrote on Graham below (not in the order presented), I thought I had enough for a test case here. Today was Graham’s funeral, so another round of pieces is just coming out. I’ve picked up a couple, and may well find more before Loose Tabs runs. But the substantive part is in my comments. Sorry if some seem redundant. Piecemeal assembly will do that, plus the fact that Graham was such a one note character.

Lindsey Graham: The Senator (R-SC) died on July 11, age 71. While I have many unpleasant memories of the man who probably ranks as the most persistent war hawk in my lifetime (a span that includes Arthur Vandenberg, John Stennis, Henry Jackson, and Graham’s amigos John McCain and Joe Lieberman), one that sticks in my mind occurred back when he was an obscure junior member of the House (1995-2003). I pretty clearly remember him talking about the need for Republicans to lock up the judiciary and other centers of power whenever they have the chance, to stay in power even when elections turn against them. (Admittedly, it isn’t easy to fact check this rare instance of blurting out the usually unspoken part about subverting democracy.) While his passion for provoking armed conflict was his defining trait, he was an inveterate schemer, a political animal with no respect whatsoever for democracy, or for the people it’s meant to serve.

• Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [07-12]: Lindsey Graham, last great Cold War warrior, dead at 71: “The senator was an inspiration to those who believed military power was essential to making the world ‘right.’ Others thought he lost his ‘America First’ perspective in Ukraine and Israel.” I think the “Cold War warrior” concept misses the point. While he was old enough to have formed his hawkish beliefs before the Soviet Union dissolved, the Cold War was always constrained by a sense of limits. Graham, on the other hand, fully embraced the post-Cold War euphoria, relishing America’s singular superpower (aka hyperpower) moment, believing that the mere threat of “shock and awe” would cower enemies into surrender and submission. That doctrine almost immediately failed in Somalia (where it is still failing 35 years later). It failed in Afghanistan. It failed in Iraq. No nation embraced it more fully than Israel, and they’ve been locked in a hopeless forever war against everyone (even their own people) ever since. Most people know by now that Graham never met a war he didn’t want to escalate. What’s less commented on, perhaps because it’s even more ridiculous, is his inability to ever see a downside in the wars he promoted. They’ve failed time and time again, not only to achieve their stated goals but by causing enormous collateral damage that has only generated more chaos and resistance. But his only answer to such failure was to double down on violence. He not only worshiped power. He was locked inside its web, unable to see or imagine anything else. But perhaps worst of all was how glib and giddy his delusions made him. I don’t know why Al Smith was called “the happy warrior,” but he couldn’t have been a tenth as deserving of it as Graham.

• Benjy Sarlin [7-12]: Lindsey Graham sacrificed his reputation to Donald Trump. He got plenty in return. “His career explains why so many Republicans made peace with Trump — and what he gave up to do it.” The assumption, which isn’t unreasonable, is that Trump will be soon regarded as a disgrace, even to Republicans. But one could also ask the question, what did Trump sacrifice to gain the toadying allegiance of Republicans like Graham? (And Rubio, Cruz, Vance, dozens more, among them the most reactionary reprobates in American politics.) In 2016, Trump had the smarts to run against Republican orthodoxy on war, trade, corruption (”the swamp”), and social security. But after he got elected, he turned everything over to regular right-wing Republicans, reducing himself to nothing more than an inept front man.

• Jeet Heer [07-13]: Lindsey Graham chose evil: “Conspiracy theorists liked to say that Graham’s Trump sycophancy was a result of blackmail. But the truth is worse: He stuck with Trump to keep the US war machine going.”

• Michael Tomasky [07-13]: Lindsey Graham’s legacy? It’s about one thing, and it isn’t good: “He alone had the moral authority within the Republican Party to try to stop Donald Trump, especially after January 6. He chose not to. That’s what we must remember today.” It’s mind-boggling to think that Graham had any morality, much less moral authority. (I don’t have any more respect for McCain, but at least he had an act he appeared to believe in.) And for the record, the one Republican who could have stopped Trump after Jan. 6 was McConnell, who could have gotten Trump banned from running again by declaring him invalid under the 14th Amendment (with or without convicting him on impeachment charges). But by then hyperpartisanship had so rotted his brain he couldn’t conceive of crossing Trump.

• Chas Danner [07-13]: Was Lindsey Graham an opportunist, operator, failure, or disgrace? Probably all of the above. None of those are words a normal person would welcome in a eulogy, although Graham himself might have opted for the first two.

• Jeffrey St Clair [07-13]: Graham Crackers: The words of a professional warmonger. Lots of Graham quotes here, not a lot of context. He contradicts himself so often some quotes may appear reasonable, but rest assured that in its proper context everything he said was meant to be evil. Like this one, which can hardly be interpreted any other way: “When this [Iran] regime goes down, we are going to have a new Middle East, and we are going to make a ton of money.” I doubt that Graham was ever in the war business that much for the money, so most likely this quote was intended for an audience of the one who was [Trump]. But it sums up nicely what Graham saw as his Faustian bargain: he gets his war in exchange for his soul, which was never worth much in the first place. Still, odds are that in the end Trump will just pocket the money, leaving the old Middle East much as it was, but poorer.

• Nathan J Robinson [07-13]: Why mourn Lindsey Graham and not his victims? “The late Republican senator was constantly lobbying for the killing of others. Why should anyone weep for a man who didn’t care about inflicting death around the world?”

• Elie Mystal [07-14]: Lindsey Graham’s defense of Brett Kavanaugh told us everything: “The senator’s infamous cry of rage spoke not only to his cruelty but also to his larger role in changing the court.” Well, not everything, but enough.

• Peter Baker [07-28]: At Graham’s funeral, a glimpse into power in Trump’s Washington: “The political evolution of Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, both captivated and confused many of his old friends but reflected the changing order in the nation’s capital.” A report from the funeral, which doesn’t come close to capturing how very surreal it must have been. Imagine if all the old Nazis could have shown up for Eichmann’s funeral.

• Brett Wilkins [07-28]: ‘Lindsey liked war’: Trump laughs off Graham’s giddiness over Iran onslaught: “He’s never seen a war that he didn’t like.” And Trump finds that charming?

• Al Jazeera [07-28]: Lindsey Graham ‘almost cried’ tears of joy over war on Iran, footage shows: “Excerpts from a planned documentary show the hawkish senator claiming credit for persuading Donald Trump to attack Iran.”

I expect I’ll pick up more before I post Loose Tabs, but it is pretty unlikely that I’ll find anything that changes, or even softens, my view of Graham.

Although not directly attributable to Graham, his fingerprints are all over Zelensky’s decision to curry favor with Trump by attacking an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea. (Graham visited Zelensky in Kyiv in the days immediately before his death: see Inside Lindsey Graham’s relentless last days spent fighting for Ukraine and sanctions.) It would have been wholly in character for Graham to impress on Zelensky that the way to worm his way into Trump’s good graces would be to help out against Iran:

Trita Parsi [07-28]: Is Zelensky trying to merge the Iran and Ukraine wars? “. . . and why Israel would benefit from intertwining these two wars.” He explains the Israel angle thusly:

This dynamic would also appeal to Israel. First, it would give the Iran war another lease on life. Second, it would internationalize the conflict further by drawing European governments into the Iran theater through their deep commitments to Ukraine. And third, perhaps most significantly, it would transform the political narrative. Defeating Iran would no longer be presented as a necessity to defend Israel, but rather, to defend Ukraine.

Given the levels of elite and public support Ukraine enjoys — after all, it was the victim of an illegal invasion — such a framing is far more politically digestible than centering the war on Israel, given Israel’s plummeting standing in the West due to its genocide in Gaza and critical role in starting the illegal war with Iran.

Parsi turned this blog post into an article:

[07-28]: Zelensky’s dangerous gambit to merge the Iran and Ukraine Wars: “Of course this would also appeal to Israel, prolonging the Middle East war and potentially drawing European governments into the theater, too.” I’ve heard mixed reports about Trump’s support for Zelensky: his arms pipeline has more/less shifted to Europe, which isn’t capable of the same largesse as Biden provided, but also is less likely to saddle him with crappy weapons like the Abrams tanks. Zelensky’s resolve to fight on has been bucked up by European support, while Putin’s resolve builds on Trump’s indifference to the war. So one can see how Zelensky’s move tries to break this stalemate, but the key to getting Trump support isn’t alignment with Israel: it’s pushing Putin to align with Iran. At present, Iran is hard pressed to manufacture all their own missiles and drones. But Russia may have surplus manufacturing, and could provide Iran with weapons systems (like anti-aircraft, longer-range missiles, aircraft even) that could make a difference. Also, while Zelensky may fancy that the way to Trump’s heart is through Israel, he’s ignoring a lot of moral baggage that come with aligning with Israel. He’s already been reckless in provoking Russia, repeatedly crossing so-called “red lines,” which Putin has been reluctant to do anything about. But at some point, some Europeans are going to doubt the wisdom of following him into what might quickly become a World War. Especially if it involves supporting Israeli genocide.

I was as sympathetic as most people toward Ukraine when Putin invaded. However, the decision to continue an extremely long and costly war for no good reason has worn out my patience. I’ve long assumed that he held out because Washington (certainly under Biden, probably under Trump) felt that the war was good for their arms business. But in expanding his war to Iran, just to curry favor with Trump and Netanyahu, he’s risking joining them (and Putin) among the ranks of war criminals.

I’ve written quite a bit about Ukraine over the years, but my early 23 Theses on Ukraine is still useful historical background, and I hope quite clear on the need to wrap the war up as soon as possible. (Also, as I review it now, thesis 8 jumps out at me for my condemnation of Graham and McCain for wanting to jump straight to war with Russia over Georgia in 2008.)

Title recalls a famous Lester Bangs article, although his subject was much more benign.

I wrote on this yesterday, but it’s been such a large investment of my life that I feel entitled to mention it at the start of every post for the next month or so: Arts Fuse has published The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll at Mid-Year. While that link is a good place to start, the place to go for everything is my archive website. And by everything, I mean totals charts down to one vote, every voter’s complete ballot, links that tell you who voted for each album, the original drafts of the essays (including bullet lists of notes where I try to look beyond the music to find other subtle influences, and a lot of technical detail on the rules and how they are applied. There’s also an “In Memoriam” piece that’s nearly up-to-date. And when it occurred to me that I hadn’t said very much about the music, I pulled together a collection of my reviews on every charted album I’ve heard. (This also reveals how many I haven’t heard, a fairly substantial number — although I keep working to whittle it down, as this week’s albums demonstrate.)

While I’m nominally done with the Mid-Year Poll, freeing myself from constant thought about it going to take some time. I feel some obligation to promote it, although my skills in that regard are far from proven. I also feel like I’ve left a lot undone. (Although I do feel like I came closer this time than the last Annual Poll. I was hoping to elicit comments then, and while I can complain about lack of response, I also dropped the ball. That’s why, this Mid-Year, I decided to write it all on my own — although I did have some exceptional proofreading/editing help.)

But while more can be done on the website, including adding more notes and reviews, the bigger question is what happens to the website, and to the poll in the fall. I’ll write more about that as the fall approaches. For now, I do want to do some kind of redesign on the poll website, even if it’s just reprioritizing the current data (especially upgrading the link to the 2026 Mid-Year).

Of course, it’s also tempting to work on a Loose Tabs, especially as I haven’t posted one since June 14. And I’d love to do a Book Roundup, which is even more daunting given that the last one came out on May 23, 2025 (14 months ago). I also hope to post some other pieces here, including one on the DownBeat Critics Poll. (I was going to do one after voting. The results are out now, but I haven’t looked at them yet — partly because I decided it would be best not to get distracted while I was trying to wrap up our own poll.)

One note on the music below: I included the Maya De Vitry album, which I had reviewed a few weeks back, because its release date is today. I generally prefer not to review records before they are released, but sometimes I slip up. The review won’t be in this week’s Music Week, but I thought it was worth mentioning here. Rules, after all, are meant to be broken.

I’ll also note that a couple of times now I’ve jumped the gun and sent the post out before adding the album cover illustrations. I can fix them later on the website, but I don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. I also don’t really understand how Substack’s gallery widget works, so the tiling and scaling often take me by surprise. [PS: Even after writing this, I sent the message out without images. When I later added a gallery of five album covers, the second row was scaled much larger than the first. I didn’t like the look, so considered deleting the second row, but couldn’t find a way, so I added an extra image (not in the copy below) to even out the row.]

Bob Bert: Beach Bongo Bloodbath (2026, Bar/None): Name shortened from Bertelli, father played pro football after winning a Heisman Trophy in 1943, first drummer for Sonic Youth (1982-85), played in Pussy Galore after that, later Chrome Cranks, Lydia Lunch Retrovirus, other bands. First album under his own name, 14 songs, 25:58, some originals, some covers (Richard Hell, Jonathan Richman, Lou Reed, John Lydon). The covers are extra interesting, not least for the drums. A−
[Bandcamp]

The Paul Carlon Trio: Between Us Three (2024-25 [2026], TRRcollective): Tenor saxophonist, has several albums since 2006, credits include Grupo Los Santos and Schapiro 17; trio with bassist Alex “Apolo” Ayala and percussionist Wilson “Chembo” Corniel (congas, güiro, guataca, chemboro). I reckon this could count as Latin Jazz: the rhythms sure do, and the sax adds a single, uncluttered voice, a simplicity I admire. A−
[Bandcamp]

Maya De Vitry: All My Faith (2026, Mad Maker Studios): Folkie singer-songwriter based in Nashville, four previous albums since 2019. Sound reminded me first of Joy of Cooking, then Joni Mitchell (but warmer). That may be enough for now. I’ll take the faith on faith. A−
[Bandcamp]

Hannah Marks: Feed the Fire (2025 [2026], Endectomorph Music): Bassist, second album (first was on Out of Your Head), quartet with Nathan Reising (alto sax), Lex Korten (piano), and Steven Crammer (drums), produced by Jason Moran. Originals and selected jazz covers, including Dewey Redman and Geri Allen. Impressive. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

Ivo Perelman/Elliot Sharp/Cyro Baptista: Triacontagon (2024 [2026], Defkaz): Tenor sax, 8-string electric guitar, percussion/vocals. At some point, one has heard so many Perelman albums that one starts to take the superb sax play for granted, and look to the others for differentiation. From the first note, this album stands out, with its metallic sinews and odd klangs. A−
[Bandcamp]

Steve Swallow: Winter Songs (2024 [2026], ECM): Bassist, has played electric since the early 1970s, long associated with Carla Bley, 83 when this was recorded. With Mike Rodriguez (trumpet), Chris Cheek (tenor sax), Steve Cardenas (guitar), Gil Goldstein (piano), and Adam Nussbaum (drums). Original pieces, modestly numbered, elegantly played. B+(***)

Ellery Eskelin: Setting the Standard (1988 [2026], Prime Source): Tenor saxophonist, originally from Wichita, first album, a trio with Drew Gress (bass) and Phil Haynes (drums), released 1989 on Cadence Jazz, seven standards, remastered with two extra tracks added. Sometimes I talk about the major wave of tenor saxophonists that emerged in the 1990s. I’ve never really thought of him in that regard, possibly because he never appeared on major or mainstream labels, but on this evidence he could have squared off against any of them. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

Hans Reichel: Dalbergia Retusa (1973-88 [2026], Black Truffle): German guitarist (1949-2011), debut on FMP 1973, also designed typefaces, and invented instruments, most famously the daxophone, but much of his guitar work involved some degree of preparation, modification and/or invention. This collects 2-LP worth of solo pieces. He gets a panoply of remarkable sounds. A−
[Bandcamp]

The essays are:

• Warming Up a Riff — How It Happened, and Why It Matters

• Consensus in Retreat: The Year (So Far) in New Jazz Albums

• The Old World Gets Weirder: The Year (So Far) in Rara Avis (Reissues/Archival)

• In addition to those essays, the archival website contains more essays, standings, and all of the voter ballots, in an easily browsable form.

I’ve kept the introduction title here, because that’s where I want to start. The title itself is from a Charlie Parker tune. It occurred to me because I feel like I’m always rewriting the same piece.

Francis Davis got the poll running in 2006, when we were both writing about jazz in the Village Voice: he did the serious feature essays, and I mopped up the leftovers in my jazz consumer guide. Even then there was more quality jazz coming out than anyone could properly follow. We lasted past the firings of Robert Christgau and Chuck Eddy, but were frozen out after Rob Harvilla got sacked, as the Voice self-destructed. Capitalism may make the world go round, but it leaves a lot of waste in its wake.

While I voted from the start, I wasn’t really involved in the poll until a couple years later, when the Voice’s IT department balked at publishing all the ballots. By then the initial “circle” of 30 NYC voters had expanded nation-wide to 99 in 2009, and to 120 in 2010. Francis always insisted that every ballot be posted, so Harvilla worked out a deal where I would host the ballots. After the Voice, Francis moved his poll to Rhapsody, then NPR, and finally to Arts Fuse — where I did the drudge work of hosting the ballots. I was happy to do so, and made myself increasingly indispensable to the operation, especially as Francis’s health began to fail. (I wrote about this history in 2022’s Memoirs of a Pollwatcher.)

In 2024, I proposed running our first mid-year poll. I had been following mid-year best-of lists, and was upset over how few jazz releases were mentioned. I figured I had the mailing list and the website tools, and could use a break from political news where the big question was how long Biden would hang on to the Democratic nomination. I started late, and had lots of email problems, but wound up with 90 ballots (Francis approved, but didn’t vote). Struck with the breadth of the selections, I wrote an essay called Diversity Brings Riches. I was less interested in who won (Vijay Iyer, Charles Lloyd, and Mary Halvorson) than in how many albums got mentioned (366 + 109 in Rara Avis), over half of which I hadn’t heard. I never was into winner-take-all beauty contests. I wanted to know about everyone, and everything.

Francis kept his poll going for 19 years, until he died in April 2025. I figured he deserved a 20th, so I intended the 20th Annual Poll as a tribute to him, and saw the Mid-Year 2025 Poll as a practice run. I wound up exhausted and disappointed — the number of voters dropped from 177 to 168, the comments I invited rarely panned out (although the two for the piece on Davis were worth the effort; I’m sure I was right that much more could have been said). Then other perils and drudgeries of everyday life intervened, leaving me with doubts about carrying on. However, by June this year, I started feeling more confident, and once again I relished a break from the political news (especially the extraordinary stupidity of the war Trump had blundered into).

I had started Notes on Everyday Life, where I wrote long pieces on the Trump-Netanyahu wars, but it’s frustrating trying to reason about politicos who are so deluded and deranged. It’s not like we’re on the cusp of finding some magic evidence that will bring them down. We’re drowning in a tsunami of evidence, and have been for years — as anyone I could conceivably reach must already know. We should be smart enough as a species to figure it out, but unfortunately we’re run by people trapped in the tunnel vision of their own selfish interests, cloaked in a “society of spectacle” that doesn’t “manufacture consent” so much as it renders dissent unimaginable.

Yet most people can still go about their everyday lives, not oblivious to the drudgery and horror spreading everywhere, but detached enough to still be functional. And those who can still create art keep doing so. Granted, in many areas of the arts, much of the never-more-than-marginal money that once was available has dried up, a victim of the unprecedented transfer of money, both real and merely notional, to the tech and finance moguls, with their now relatively poorer cousins in what used to be called “the real economy” — the one where actual goods are made and personal services are rendered — scrambling bitterly to keep up.

But jazz musicians and labels have lived on so little for so long they’re used to surviving, and in many cases thriving, in this encroaching wasteland. Few things more clearly attest to the endurance of the human spirit and the drive for creativity than the uninterrupted and unstoppable torrent of brilliant new jazz albums we’ve already seen this year. But who has heard about them? Who has enjoyed them? Very few. The problem I see is threefold:

1. Media reporting on jazz is extremely thin and marginalized.

2. The amount of extraordinary music they have to report on is way beyond human grasp.

3. And our attentions are constantly battered, especially by those with the fame and money to hog the spotlight.

I don’t have a solution to these problems, especially the third. (Well, not here. As an engineer, I have lots of ideas, but none we can do much about any time soon, other than the individual’s last resort, “just say no!”) But I figured there was one little something I could do about the first two: run another mid-year poll. This helps with the media problem by offering you a single source for a lot of basic information, presented in a consistent way, with no ulterior motives or hidden agendas. And this helps with the cornucopia problem by employing many expert critics to make an initial pass at listing the year’s most interesting albums. We compiled the best-of lists from 127 critics. They identified 462 new jazz albums, and 137 rara avis (reissues/archival), a total of 595 albums (4 appeared on both lists).

The sort may correlate somewhat with some notion of quality, but it also measures lots of other things, including how many critics heard a record, what kind of publicity it got, how extensively it was reviewed, and how useful and appealing that information was to the individual critic. Like all polls, this one may tell you more about its voters than about its subjects.

To reach the top of the list, an album has to pretty much tick all the boxes for a large segment of the voters, but that segment could be 40% or less. This year’s winner (Tyshawn Sorey) appeared on 35.4% of the ballots, followed closely by the runner up (Tomeka Reid) at 34.6%. Past poll winners have dipped much lower (24.2% for New Jazz Albums; 16.8% for Rara Avis). I wrote more about this in my draft articles on the archive website.

Arts Fuse cut out several sections of my article here: one is just more statistics, the other circles back to the critics. I will pick up the latter in a bit. But before that, I want to pick up a section from the article on the New Jazz Albums chart: Consensus in Retreat, where I start to explain why my view of the poll focuses on large data:

Francis Davis had a knack for taking the vast pile of data produced by his annual polls and finding some overarching theme, which varied from year to year. I’m too literal-minded to do that. While I can find lots of variety within any given year, as a totality each year looks pretty much like any other. I think this is somewhat analogous to the differences between weather and climate: weather changes significantly from day to day, even hour to hour, while climate change is extremely hard to detect with one’s immediate senses.

After initial skepticism, I eventually came around and conceded the reality of anthropogenic climate change. But it took a lot of analysis, both gathering tangentially related evidence and seeing how theory fit it together. And it took a time frame much longer than a single year. Statisticians preach the need to separate the signal from the noise. In their view, climate is the signal that is obscured by the plentiful noise of weather. Longer-term shifts in jazz are similarly obscured by the broad range of artists and the enormous numbers of albums they produce. Pace Francis, when I look at any given jazz critics poll, I tend to see the literal, which is to say the noise.

But I do make an effort to spread all this noise out and see if I can find any larger patterns. The raw drafts, especially for the suppressed notes sections that Arts Fuse didn’t see fit to publish, have many instances of my simplistic attempts to find signals in the noise. At some point, I hope to have better tools, and better organized data, but even then I expect that the questions I’ll be asking draw more from intuition than conventional analysis. For instance, I wonder why MacArthur Genius winners do so well in our poll — the top two this Mid-Year, Tyshawn Sorey and Tomeka Reid, as well as Mary Halvorson in 5th place (winner of two polls), are prime examples — and/or why poll winners are likely to win prizes (Sorey, Reid, and Halvorson had all been strong contenders before becoming annointed). And why, for that matter, is Ken Vandermark the odd duck out, on both counts? (I don’t even raise that question in the essays, because he’s never been a factor in the poll. (I wrote about Vandermark and his MacArthur back in 2003.)

My intuition tells me that publicity, labels, and distribution have as much or maybe more to do with poll placement as anything in the music, but nothing in this problem reduces very cleanly. So while lots of people look at polls and just see winners beating out also-rans, I look at the same poll and see questions and more questions. I’ve tried to explore some of those questions in my essays, but I keep generating more of them. I had hoped to write up the poll and be done with it 7 days after deadline. Now we’re at D-Day + 18, and I haven’t come close to explaining what it all means.

I wrapped up the writing not because I was done, but because it’s not really my poll, so I felt I needed to share what I had, and move on. The poll exists because Francis started it. But it continues because a community of critics want to keep it going. I’ve kept returning to this theme over the years, an old riff that can always be warmed up. In business terms, jazz is extremely marginal music. Efficient markets should have wiped it out, yet every year more musicians produce more albums, supported by a tiny number of fans, some of whom write about it, because they care and deem it important, or simply worthwhile. I find that not just aesthetically pleasing, but heroic.

I’ve been desperately trying to finish up the essays for the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Mid-Year Poll. I had hoped to get them done mid-week, but now it’s Friday and, well, they’re almost but not quite done. If anyone wants to do some serious proofreading, let me know right away. (I ask things like that all the time, but almost never get any response, so maybe that’s just a rhetorical question.) What I have is long, and tries to draw many interesting points from the data. Given the state of the data, that’s error-prone. But given the amount of data, it’s also an impossible dream to get more than a trivial share of the points.

Adding to the delay is that I have other things to do this weekend, so what I don’t get done by Saturday afternoon won’t get addressed until Monday. Still, I’m hoping to deliver three essays to Arts Fuse by Tuesday. If they’re as quick as they’ve been in the past, the poll should be up by Thursday. That’s been my big project for the first half of Summer 2025. I have considerable unwinding to do. But my first project will most likely be to try to knock out a quick Loose Tabs. I’ve collected very little since the one on June 14, but I’m sure there’s lots to write about.

I’ve been listening to recent (and sometimes ancient) jazz like crazy, so there is a lot in the file this week: 50 albums, 10 A-list. This is just a sample. For the rest, you’ll need to check out the full Music Week, whenever I get around to posting it (probably tonight, maybe tomorrow).

Zoh Amba: Eyes Full (2026, Matador): B. 2000, made a big splash in 2022-23 with a flurry of astonishing free jazz saxophone albums, reinvents herself as a guitar-playing, Dylanesque singer-songwriter, but lower-fi and occasionally dissolving into some kind of detuned Sonic Youth postpunk. Not a direction I’d like to encourage, but fairly unique even if the signposts are easily recognized. A−

Gerry Hemingway: Live at Bau 4 (2025 [2026], Hat Hut): Drummer, part of Anthony Braxton’s famous 1980s Quartet, also of the long-running BassDrumBone trio, with several dozen albums on his own. This one features Izumi Kimura (piano) and Frank Gratkowski (clarinet/bass clarinet/alto sax/alto flute), who turn in exemplary solos, and Christian Weber (bass). A−
[Bandcamp]

House of the Black Gardenia: Mazurka in Jazz (2026, HOTGB): Trad jazz nonet, led by bassist Neil Hopper and vocalist Elise Rana Hopper, second album after a 2020 debut. Mostly original songs, which shifts them from nostalgia act to some kind of cabaret sophistication. A−
[Bandcamp]

I Compani: Basta: The Last Concerts 2025 (2025 [2026], I Compani): Dutch group, led by saxophonist Bo van de Graaf, founded in 1985, decided to call it quits after a series of “last concerts” in December 2025. Throughout their career, they’ve mostly recorded film music, in the circus style that seems peculiar to the Dutch avant-garde (cf. ICP Orchestra and Willem Breuker Kollektief) and is often deliriously wonderful. My understanding is that packages 2 CDs, which are available on streaming as separate albums. One is their core 7-Tet. The other is “Extended,” where an additional friends or hangers-on drop in for a song or two or more. The latter includes more vocalists, who add a cabaret air. Of the digitals, I prefer the latter, but I wasn’t able to give either nearly enough time. Maybe if the CDs exist, and could somehow be obtained? B+(***)

Mike Khoury: For Hind Rajab (2025 [2026], Relative Pitch): Violinist, based in Detroit, has a couple dozen albums since 2001, found this when I was looking for a forthcoming album with Jason Kao Hwang and two drummers. This is solo, a sound that often gets on my nerves, but nonetheless a tour de force. Hind Rajab was a five-year-old girl in Gaza, killed in the genocide, but unlike most anonymous victims remembered for her recorded calls desperately pleading for help after her family was killed by an Israeli tank (see the Oscar-nominated film, The Voice of Hind Rajab). I’m reminded of The Diary of Anne Frank as one more instance where focus on an individual helps dissolve the mass dehumanization that allowed such mass slaughter to happen. A−
[Bandcamp]

Sei Miguel: Viva! (O Carro De Fogo De Sei Miguel) (2023 [2026], Clean Feed): Portuguese trumpet player (1961-2025), first album 1988. This offers two improv sets (54:56 + 52:24) of an octet with trombone, alto sax, electric guitar, electric bass, organ, drums, and extra percussion, nicely spaced out with plenty of food for thought. This is being billed as the label’s final new release, after 25 distinguished years. (A quick check reveals I have 639 of their records in my database: 6 A, 70 A−.) They will be missed, but the music will continue. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

Olivia Rodrigo: You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love (2026, Geffen): Pop star, was groomed from a very young age, with vocal, acting, and piano lessons, which got her on screen by 7, and into Disney roles in her teens. Her platinum (6X) debut album in 2021 was one of the year’s best, and her sophomore effort topped my 2023 list (if only 3X). First couple songs sound great, but the “girl so in love” side is certain to beat out the “you seem pretty sad” side. But I’m less concerned with the narrative these days than with the sound. So while the hooks get subtler, they’re still pretty satisfying. A−

McCoy Tyner: The Seeker: Live at Umbria Jazz Festival (1993 [2026], Red): Previously unreleased live album, a quartet with Bobby Hutcherson (vibes), Avery Sharpe (bass), and Aaron Scott (drums), a few months before Tyner and Hutcherson recorded their duo album, Manhattan Moods. Their careers intersected as far back as 1966 (on Hutcherson’s Stick-Up!) and 1968 (on Time for Tyner). But the rhythm section really helps here. A−
[Bandcamp]

The July 5 deadline for the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Mid-Year Poll has passed, and I’m done with counting ballots. I’m especially done with fretting over who got or forgot their invites, and who might come around with just a bit more nudging, as well as all the others I didn’t manage to invite, but would have if I just had more time and energy. We wound up with 127 ballots, which is a drop-off from last year-end’s 168, but a bump from last mid-year’s 113.

The dropoff is similar to what typically happens in America’s “mid-term” elections — a term I hate because it implies that the presidency is more important than Congress, which was meant to more directly reflect and write the will of the voters into law. But for that to work, you need a president and a court system willing to follow the law, and right not we have neither, allowing a deranged and sociopathic moron to run roughshod over 250 years of popular, democratic aspirations.

One can only hope that the dropoff in this year’s mid-terms will follow the usual pattern, where lukewarm supporters of the president stay home, and those of us most furious with him and his Republican cronies turn out in droves. The dropoff in mid-year poll voters is similar at least in that those who actually voted are likely to be somewhat better organized, better informed, and/or more motivated. How much difference this has made is impossible to tell: if we knew what the others would have voted for, we would have counted it.

My big job for the next week, one I normally dread, will be to write up a couple of essays introducing and, to some minimal degree, explaining the poll results. Those essays will be published by Arts Fuse, hopefully around the middle of next week. They will include a table of the top 50 (or so) new jazz albums, and another table of the top 25 (or so) rara avis (reissues/archival), as well as some notes on how we got there, and where we’re going from there. At the same time, the full results will be published on the poll website, where you can already see every critic’s ballot.

The idea behind these Notes on Everyday Life posts is to pick out 6–8 reviews from the week’s batch, and send them out before I post the whole thing (this week 30 rated, 5 A-list) on my blog. I will probably do that in a day or two. Another big jazz week, as I’m still a long ways from catching up with the albums recommended in the poll.

Kirk Knuffke: Brother (2026, SteepleChase): Cornet player, “one of modern jazz’s most skilled navigators of the divide between freedom and swing,” presents a trio with Charlie Burnham (violin) and Thommy Andersson (bass), mostly keyed to Yusef Lateef. B+(***)

Catherine Russell: Live at Jazz at Lincoln Center (2024 [2026], Dot Time): Jazz singer, got a late start at 50 with her 2006 debut, but her famous father was older still when she was born (that’s swing bandleader Luis Russell, 1902-63, who after 1930 ceded top billing to his star, Louis Armstrong), although her less famous mother, Carline Ray (1925-2013, a singer who played guitar and bass) must have had a more direct influence. She’s impressed every time out, but rarely moved this far into the old songs, with a seven-piece swing band — including Jon-Erik Kellso (trumpet), John Allred (trombone), Evan Arntzen (tenor sax/clarinet), and Matt Munisteri (guitar), plus a tap dancer on four tracks. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

Cécile McLorin Salvant: With Every Breath I Take (2025 [2026], Nonesuch): Jazz singer, born in Miami, father Haitian, mother French, moved to France at 18, studied classical voice (and Sarah Vaughan), eighth album since 2013, moving into the top echelon of jazz artists — with the MacArthur “genius grant” to prove it, as if winning the vocal section of our poll every year she had an album out wasn’t testimony enough. Still, I’ve never been much of a fan. I admit that she has exceptional technical command (as did Vaughan), but I’ve never much enjoyed her albums (aside from the odd song or two). And this one, hyped as her first with an orchestra (Metropole Orkest, with big band master Darcy James Argue co-producing), seemed pretty unlikely to appeal. Then I found myself tempted, by “Send in the Clowns” (of all things), followed by “Barbara Song” (I’m always up for Weill, and she has impressed me there before). But after that, nothing really meshes — not even the French song, or her masterful navigation of the notoriously tricky “Lush Life.” Why is hard to pin down, or maybe doing so just doesn’t seem worth the effort. B+(*)
[Bandcamp]

Hein Westgaard & Matt Maneri: Chamber (2024 [2025], Gotta Let It Out): Guitar and viola duo. Guitarist has a few albums, including one from 2023 I liked. Maneri has many records since 1994, picking up his father Joe Maneri’s microtonal practices. “Chamber jazz” is a loose term borrowed from classical, where the defining feature is an intimate and intricate group of soft instruments: mostly strings, almost never drums, wind instruments only on their best behavior. Maneri’s viola fits the mold, but usually sounds too classical for me. But the guitarist plays around the edges, keeping it interesting, even adding a bit of rhythm. A−
[Bandcamp]

Jack Wright and Ben Bennett: Tourne (2026, self-released): Sax and drums duo, the former from Pittsburgh, with dozens of albums since 1983; the latter from Philadelphia, with several albums together since 2011. Three tracks (35:12). That’s a good length for this sort of prickly free jazz, which I find instantly appealing as long as it doesn’t run too long, or too loud. Reminds me that I’ve long appreciated Wright, even if I rarely remember his name. A−
[Bandcamp]

Carla Bley: Joyful Noise (Live in Hamburg 1984) (1984 [2026], Moosicus): Pianist (1938-2023), exceptionally famous as a composer and arranger, was a founder of the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association, whose initial project was her ambitious opera, Escalator Over the Hill. Large (10-piece) group, with four brass, two saxes, piano (Ted Saunders), organ (Bley), electric bass and drums. Title is taken from a song, but is also a philosophy of life. A−

Satoko Fujii: Satoko Fujii’s Bunker Ulmenwall Orchestra (2014 [2026], Libra, 2CD): Japanese avant-pianist, very prolific since 1996, went on a big band kick around 2007, organizing a series of orchestras wherever she traveled (first three were New York, Nagoya, and Tokyo). Many more since, with five new tapes of various vintages promised this year, starting with this one from Bielefeld, Germany (Bunker Ulmenwall was a WWII-vintage air raid shelter; to be followed later this year by the Orchestras Kobe, Nagoya, Berlin, and Tokyo). Detailed with many remarkable passages, demanding close scrutiny. A−

Mal Waldron & Sam Rivers: Live in Mestre Venezia 1984 (1984 [2025], Caligola): Piano and tenor sax duets. Around this time, Waldron was playing in duos with Steve Lacy and Marion Brown, so he has a well-honed sense of how to engage here. It’s hard to imagine a more astute accompanist, and his solos never leave you wanting. Probably helps that they stick to standards, including “Scrapple From the Apple” and “Blue Monk.” A−
[Bandcamp]

Most of my time continues to get sucked up in running the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Mid-Year Poll. With 2 days left to the July 5 deadline, I have 88 ballots counted, with a few more commitments to make the deadline, an increasing number of declines, and many more people I simply haven’t heard from. I’ll send a reminder to the mailing list tonight, but no time left to do any further invites. There’s always a big “mid-terms” slack in voting. We will certainly top 2024’s 90 ballots, but probably not 2025’s 113 ballots. Still, the people who have voted have done a terrific job. When all is said and done, I think people will be pleased and surprised by all that they discover.

As I explained last week, the ballots are already available online, as well as lists of all albums that have received votes. The totals will only appear when we publish the poll results at ArtsFuse, in mid-July. I hope to move into the writing phase more quickly than usual, as I want to get this done and out of the way.

The idea behind these Notes on Everyday Life posts is to pick out 6–8 reviews from the week’s batch, and send them out before I post the whole thing (53 rated, 7 A-list) on my blog (should be up later today, or worst case tomorrow). I’ll probably go into things at more depth there. The other main idea here is to keep the intro short, so I don’t trip myself up. (This one is mostly recycled, but the news is still timely.)

All jazz this time, as that’s been my overwhelming focus this week. There will be a couple of non-jazz albums in the full week post, including a country-ish album I like by Maya De Vitry, which I skipped here because it won’t be released until July 24.

I’ve included Bandcamp links where they lead to full albums (and omitted them when they don’t).

Patricia Brennan/Sylvie Courvoisier: Talamanti (2024 [2026], Antlia): Mallets player, from Mexico, based in New York, won our debut poll in 2018, finished 1st and 2nd overall with her last two albums, in a duo here with the Swiss pianist. Piano-vibes duos are rather common, partly due to similar tones, but also because the vibes focus the piano as a percussion instrument. You get a taste of that early here, but then the piano meanders into its own less-but-still-interesting space. B+(***)

Ron Carter & Yotam Silberstein: Duets (2026, Jojo): Bass and guitar duo: the 89-year-old bassist almost certainly holds some kind of record for most albums appeared on; while he’s still best known for his 1960s work with Miles Davis, one could probably construct a whole CG from his duo work, and delight in doing so. (Pick hit would be Chemistry, his 2016 duo with Houston Person.) The guitarist has appeared regularly since 2008, with a soft tone and delicacy that I find pleasant but rarely give a second thought. But this brief set (2 originals, 7 standards, 34:02) raises pleasant to pleasure. A−

Alden Hellmuth: Tether (2026, Leiter): Alto saxophonist from Connecticut (“she grew up surrounded by the legacy of the great saxophonist Jackie McLean”), based in New York, second album, seems to be a quartet with two basses (Logan Kane and Miller Wrenn) and drums (Justin Brown), but also “additional instrumentation” (trumpet, piano, voice, guitar, sound design, lots of effects). B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

Goran Kajfeš Subtropic Arkestra: & Avin Omar (2026, We Jazz, EP): Swedish trumpet player, leading a group that includes two saxophonists (one is Jonas Kullhammar), keyboards, guitar, bass, and drums, featuring the Kurdish-Swedish vocalist, leads off with a trad Kurdish piece (”Suleymanieh”) that is pretty captivating. Three songs (23:38), the first of three planned EPs with vocalists. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

James Brandon Lewis Quartet: Omni (2025 [2026], Intakt): Tenor saxophonist, possibly the best and certainly the most accomplished of any near his age (42), has won two of our jazz polls, often splitting his vote among multiple projects. Sixth quartet album on this Swiss label, with Aruán Ortiz (piano), Brad Jones (bass), and Chad Taylor (drums). Still keeps you on edge. A−

SML: Spontaneous Music Live (2025 [2026], International Anthem): Los Angeles-based jazz quintet, third album, two pieces (23:46 + 24:34), selected and mixed from a three-night stand (credit Bryce Gonzales, who mixed Jeff Parker’s live EVA IVtet albums). Close-knit group, most also known for their solo efforts: Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, Gregory Uhlmann. Groove is somewhat minimalist, but the differences matter. A−
[Bandcamp]

Martin Wind: Stars (2025 [2026], Newvelle): German bassist, close to 30 albums since 1993, the title may well refer to the talent he lined up here: Kenny Barron (piano), Anat Cohen (clarinet), Matt Wilson (drums). A mix of originals and standards, with “The Stars Fell Down on Alabama” especially delectable. A−
[Bandcamp]

Most of my time continues to get sucked up in running the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Mid-Year Poll. With 10 days left to the July 5 deadline, I have 53 ballots counted, with a couple dozen more commitments to make the deadline, a couple dozen declines (for reasons which mostly fall into bins for no time or no interest, although I’ve also been informed of an alarming number of long illnesses). I’ve tried to encourage some to send in whatever they can if they find as much as a stray thought, but I’ve let most of them go. I may do some more voter prospecting — I’m often surprised by the amount of quality of jazz writing when I find time to go searching — and I welcome further suggestions, but the response so far is generating a huge amount of album tips (349 so far, 131 not previously in my tracking files), with I’m sure much more to come.

As I explained last week, the ballots are already available online), as well as lists of all albums that have received votes. The totals will only appear when we publish the poll results at ArtsFuse, in mid-July.

The idea behind these Notes on Everyday Life posts is to pick out 6–8 reviews from the week’s batch, and send them out before I post the whole thing (53 rated, 7 A-list) on my blog (should be up later today, or worst case tomorrow). I’ll probably go into things at more depth there. The other main idea here is to keep the intro short, so I don’t trip myself up.

I’ve included Bandcamp links where they lead to full albums.

Adam Brodsky: American Epitaph (2026, Permanent): Antifolk singer-songwriter, released four albums 1995-2002, came back from wherever he went to “throw sand in the gears of the fascist regime.” Advises “don’t break bread with your fascist former friends.” (“Their brains are broken from the poison they’re fed.”) Like many of us, his ideals were set early, only to find a nation that has forsaken them. (“We were once the good guys but no more.”) I’m more tolerant of, and probably more sympathetic to, lapses of political judgment that he is, but he’s on the right side. A−
[Bandcamp]

Betty Bryant: Nothin’ Better to Do (2026, Bry-Mar Music): Jazz singer, plays piano, originally from Kansas City, where Jay McShann was a mentor, moved to Los Angeles in 1955, played clubs but didn’t record much — Discogs lists an album in 1987, two in 1999 — until she started releasing her own albums in 2013. Her Lotta Livin’ (in 2023, at 93) was terrific, and this (at 96) is also quite satisfying. Three songs by her and/or producer Robert Lyle (soprano/tenor sax, flute). Some guest spots, good for trumpet, not so good for strings. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]

Jesse Davis Quartet: Reflections (2025 [2026], Cellar): Alto saxophonist, from New Orleans, was a student of Ellis Marsalis, early albums (1991-2000) on Concord, regular side credits since then but not a lot of albums under his own name. Quartet with Spike Wilner (piano), John Webber (bass), and (cover says “featuring”) Lewis Nash (drums). Mainstream, but exceptionally vibrant, which could very well be the superb drummer hard at work, but you mostly hear it in the horn. A−
[Bandcamp]

Thomas Dollbaum: Birds of Paradise (2023 [2026], Dear Life): Singer-songwriter from New Orleans with a rep as a poet, second album, a roots-rock affair aided sonically by MJ Lenderman, but Dollbaum probably needed no help with the story lines and words. I’m not much good at following such intricacies, but I hear echoes of John Prine and Neil Young, and that’s pretty satisfying. A−
[Bandcamp]

KIND: Count (2025, Umland): Group led by German alto saxophonist Jan Klare, dozen-plus albums since 1998, also plays bassoon, all original compositions, group a sextet with clarinet (Shabnam Parvaresh), trombone (Shannon Barnett), cello (Emily Wittbrodt), bass (David Helm), and percussion (Bruna Cabral). Superb postbop, as the ever-shifting harmonics revolve eccentrically around an ever-changing rhythmic drive. Someone I should explore further. [PS: One album I did get to is Played, attributed to the group 1000 (Klare with Wilbert de Joode, Michael Vatcher, and Bart Maris), a similar freewheeling affair released on Leo in 2009, perhaps even more rigorous.] A−
[Bandcamp]

Pat Thomas & XT: Strata, Act (Joy Contemporary) (2022 [2026], We Jazz): British avant-pianist, also electronics, along with the duo (XT) of Paul Abbott (“real and imaginary drums”) and Seymour Wright (“actual and potential sax”; you may know him from [Ahmed]). The duo has 7 other albums, one with Thomas (a rendition of Cecil Taylor’s Akisakila). Three long (36:02, 43:24, 50:05) live sets on the 2-CD, plus two more digital tracks (20:31 + 16:43). Way too much, but pretty awesome when they all his peak intensity. B+(**)
[Bandcamp]

Immanuel Wilkins Quartet: Live at the Village Vanguard (2025 [2026], Blue Note): Alto saxophonist, 2020 debut on a major label made him an instant star, with serious chops even if he stays within usual boundaries. His rep led me to give him more chances, and often he’s repaid extra listens. That could happen again, but rather than edit his stand down to one really exciting CD, they’ve spread it all out over three volumes, releasing them a month apart, on some kind of marketing hunch. I’ve reviewed them separately, but poll voters insist on treating them as a single album — as the box set they’ll inevitably become — which was easy for me to agree to, being unable to pick between them myself. B+(**)

James Brandon Lewis & Lutosławski Quartet: These Are Soulful Days (2021 [2026], TAO Forms): Tenor saxophonist, makes his entry into the sax-with-strings forum with a well-known Polish string quartet (dozen-plus albums since 2012, including jazz meets with Uri Caine and Kris Davis). This was originally released as a bonus CD with Lewis’s poll-winning 2023 album, For Mahalia, With Love, so counts as a reissue here. A−

Louis Stewart: Joyce Notes (1982 [2026], Livia): Irish guitarist (1944-2016), recorded extensively from 1975 on, but I’ve only noticed him since this reissue series began. A six part suite composed for James Joyce’s centenary, with narration and readings from Ulysses by Eamon Morrissey, and a fairly large group with two saxophones, flute, piano, bass, drums, and extra percussion. The music is delightful, and the words add a powerful dimension. A−
[Bandcamp]

I’ve been reading a series of recent books on Israel, mostly hoping to get a sense of how the political system works, and what (if any) hope it might offer for a retreat and correction from Netanyahu’s far-right governments, especially his current coalition with Deri, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir. Israel has long followed the path that goes: racism to repression to exclusion to war to genocide. Of course, the stages don’t separate out cleanly: repression and exclusion (better known as apartheid, the South African translation of America’s segregation) overlap, and both not only reflect but reinforce racism. And the violence that defines war first appeared piecemeal as repression. And once you’ve dehumanized the other with racism, and enforced it with increasing violence, the temptation of wholesale slaughter is hard to resist.

I don’t mean to write a piece on whether “genocide” is the right term for what Israel did after 2023, in my notebooks for October and November I cited many pieces on the subject, and made my own statements. For instance, on October 9:

Anyone who condemns Hamas for the violence without also condemning Israel for its violence, and indeed for the violence and injustice it has inflicted on Palestinians for many decades now, is not only an enemy of peace and social justice, but under the circumstances is promoting genocide.

By October 16 I had decided that genocide had moved from threat to fact:

The only way to stop this genocide is to make Israel ashamed for even thinking such thoughts. Railing against Hamas won’t help. If anything, it only emboldens Israel.

On November 26, I wrote this:

Similarly, I can hardly condemn Israelis for defending themselves once the revolt broke out of Gaza. I would only point out that the defense was complete, and should have ended, once the attackers were rebuffed, and the border secured — which happened within 24 hours of the initial attacks. The war since then, including some 40,000 tons of bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza, cannot be considered self-defense. This bombardment is no less than an act of systematic destruction and slaughter, an act that can only be summed up in the word “genocide.”

I’m not interested here in relitigating that or any other charge against Israel. The question that interested me was what can stop and undo the five-step progression from racism to genocide. It is clear that no external force can or will stop Israel, as the US and USSR forced the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945. Germany had committed the textbook definition of genocide, and Japan had behaved little better in its imperial wars across Asia and the Pacific. But while defeat helped break the spell of the ideologies driving German and Japanese conquest, the reform that occurred in those countries had less to do with the occupation than the people’s own recalibration of their own humanity.

So what I’ve been looking for is whatever may lead Israelis to reconsider the beliefs that led them into this moral morass, and how they might possibly emerge from it. Thus far, I’ve found very little that gives me any hope on that count. I could try to explain why, but that would turn into a very long post, and all I intended to do here was note a couple of interesting quotes. But I will offer a paragraph each on these books:

• Dahlia Scheindlin: The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled (2023, De Gruyter): This is a fairly broad history of the idea and practice of democracy, from independence in 1948 to the book’s publication shortly before the revolt and war in Gaza, with a focus on legal structures — Ben-Gurion’s decision not to write a constitution; the delayed and always tenuous development of “basic laws”; the role of the Supreme Court; the influence of the religious parties; and to some extent the effects of treating Palestinians differently. There is not a lot on partisan dynamics, although it is interesting to find out that the right-wing Begin was considerably more liberal (at least when he was in opposition) than the left-wing Ben-Gurion. But one suspects there is a lot more to uncover here.

• Omer Bartov: Israel: What Went Wrong? (2026, Farrar Straus and Giroux): A distinguished historian of the Nazi Holocaust, he wrote an early article skeptical of the genocide charge, then later reversed himself. He’s mostly lived outside of Israel, but retains close ties there. In the end, he endorses a binationalism scheme advanced by Scheindlin (although not in her book above).

• Saul Friedländer: Diary of a Crisis: Israel in Turmoil (2024, Verso): Another Holocaust scholar, who like Bartov has lived much abroad, but presents this as a day-by-day diary of Israel in 2023. Most of the book precedes the Gaza revolt. He focuses on the changes Netanyahu was pushing to overhaul the Supreme Court, to make it much more subservient to the ruling coalition (which among other things would allow him to dismiss his corruption indictments). Friedländer is very agitated over this, and is strongly opposed to the far-right coalition. Then the revolt interrupted, and like most Israelis always, he redirected his ire against Hamas. That bothered me less than his tendency to accept at face value the notion that Iran was behind it all, and the ease with which he would view any foreign criticism of Israel as anti-semitism. This gives you an idea of how completely such ideas have been embraced even by principled opponents of the Israeli right.

• Hussein Agha/Robert Malley: Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine (2025, Farrar Straus and Giroux): This is a different kind of book, one I picked up in the library just intended to give it a quick glance, but it’s turned out to be the most insightful book I’ve read on the diplomacy of the so-called “peace process” and the unviability of the so-called “two-state solution.” The authors were active participants: Agha representing Arafat and Abbas, and Malley a member of US teams from Clinton through Obama, so they were close witnesses to multiple failures (Malley was also in on JCPOA, which one can score either way), but sympathetic enough to each other to meld their viewpoints. (Unlike, say, Dennis Ross, whose memoir is nothing but a recounting of his master’s talking points.) Not finished yet, so I’m expecting more speculation on ways to move forward. Don’t know what they are yet, but falling back on the “two-state” cliché is unlikely

• Richard Ben Cramer: How Israel Lost: The Four Questions (2004, Simon & Schuster): I read this when it came out, and while it’s been superseded by events, I’ve long regarded it as the smartest book ever written on Israel. It was one of the few books ever to delve into the psychology of the conflict, and especially the dimension of time, and why continuing the conflict often seems preferable to ending it and risking both your dreams and your solidarity collapsing.

That’s all preamble, and not why I started writing this piece. What I wanted to do here is to share a quote from Agha & Malley (p. 110):

The other difference between Arafat and Abbas has to do with their views on armed struggle. this had not always been the case and was not truly a matter of principle. Earlier in his political life, in 1965, Abbas had provided the tie-breaking vote that led Fatah to turn to armed resistance. When its Central Committee was equally divided between those, led by Arafat, who advocated immediate resort to arms, and those who argued the movement was not yet ready and counseled patience, Abbas’s vote favoring Arafat’s approach won the day. By the early eighties at the latest, he reached a different conclusion: Violence had played its part; its utility for the struggle had expired. The more time went by, the more convinced he was that violence was futile, if not counterproductive. It was tantamount to the Palestinians deliberately wielding their weakest weapon against Israel’s most potent tool. Israelis, spared the need to make a difficult choice, would close ranks; the United States, no longer under pressure to feign evenhandedness, would squarely take Israel’s side; the rest of the world would cease to see the Palestinians as victims, Israel as the aggressor. Israel had its weaknesses, he believed, but they were not military; they lay in internal contradictions and in tensions with the United States. He bristled when accused of docility. Palestinian nonviolence endangered Israel far more than did violence. When faced with an outside danger, Israelis rallied and united; without that menace, they tore themselves apart. The greatest threat Israel faced was the absence of an external one.

I want to continue with the quote, but let’s pause on that last sentence: “The greatest threat that Israel faced was the absence of an external one.“ That’s basically the conclusion of Richard Ben Cramer, who sees Israel as a fractious amalgamation of tribes that would fracture and fight if they didn’t have a common enemy to bind them together. Let me a few major historical examples:

1. After their war of independence, Israel signed armistices but never the peace treaties they had promised, keeping their enemies on edge.

2. After Begin signed the peace treaty with Egypt, he invaded Lebanon.

3. After Iraq was defeated in the Persian Gulf War, Israel started playing up the Iran threat. (Iran had been friendly with Israel, both under the Shah and after the revolution, when they had a common enemy in Iraq.)

4. After Trump pressed Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire in Gaza, Netanyahu intensified his lobbying for a joint war on Iran.

There is much more obscure history that fits this pattern, but let’s move on. The point is that the more Israel won, the more confident they became in their power, in their ability to dominate and manipulate their enemies. Ben-Gurion’s motto was “it only matters what the Jews do” (by which he meant his Jews, the Israelis who were ready and able to fight for their nation, or his vision of their nation). In the beginning, that motto was merely aspirational, but his life’s work was spent in realizing that ambition, and this sense of ever-increasing power has pervaded, and intoxicated, Israel ever since.

As Israel has gained power, Palestinians lost power, and with it the the ability to employ violence. Or perhaps I mean “get away with” violence: one could never quite convince most Palestinians that violence never works, because they saw it working for Israel all the time. As the authors note, Arafat’s attitude toward violence was instrumental: he embraced it when he thought it would work, and eschewed it when he thought it wouldn’t. He had a problem picking his moments, but his bigger problem wasn’t that violence couldn’t work, but that Palestinians never had enough power to use violence effectively (at least in the sense that the Israelis did).

Continuing with the quote (pp. 102-103):

For Abbas, who viewed violence purely in terms of cost and benefit, the costs were high, the benefits few, and the Second Intifada nothing short of catastrophic. He looked around and saw Palestinian land thoroughly reoccupied by Israel, the Palestinian Authority destroyed, widespread economic distress, and political mayhem. Practically anyone could acquire a gun and claim to make policy by showing it off. This was not resistance. It was anarchy of the worst sort, readily exploited by foes. All of this happened without the world lifting a finger, with Israel’s shrinking peace camp silent, with Arabs indifferent. In the court of international official opinion, the Palestinians lost the moral high ground so patiently acquired over the years.

So we can read this passage and agree with Abbas, but in the end, Abbas’s nonviolence was no more effective than Arafat’s (or Hamas’s) violence. With their absolute faith in their own power, Israel offered only two choices: die or surrender. In many ways they preferred the “die” option, as they never quite figured out how to keep surrendered people docile and invisible. And killing turned out to be much easier work (and dare I say it, more fun?) than administering occupied territories. So they never accounted for the risks of messing up and further alienating their wards. (That may strike you as a strange word to use here, but when you occupy territory, you assume responsibility for the people living there.) When the price of failure was resuming war, Israelis easily became callously careless.

I want to close with one more quote (pp. 141-143), on the 2006 elections, which represented a popular rejection of Abbas:

Palestinians saw Americans not as friend but as foe, the most potent enabler of their most loathsome enemy. Through the years, the United States compounded neglect of Palestinian suffering with degrading lectures about how they should behave and whom they should elect and with threats to cut off aid if they did not oblige. Each time Washington expressed backing for the PA or for Fatah, it sunk their chances; US denunciations of Hamas boosted its fortunes. Abbas’s ties with the United States were strengthened, yet he had precious little to show for it. . . . Throughout, the Palestinian Authority was becoming an irrelevance, acting as powerless supplicant, rejoicing in friendly visits to Washington and patronizing platitudes (”Abbas is a man of peace”) which, with no concrete supporting policy, further eroded the Palestinian Authority’s credibility at home. The more the United States offered Fatah and the PA, the more Hamas obtained. . . .

The vote for Hamas was more than a rejection of corruption, an expression of frustration with the peace process, and an act of defiance against America. It was an expression of deeply felt, if unarticulated, anger at years of lost dignity and self-respect, coupled with a yearning to recover a semblance of both. The list of indignities was long. . . . The destruction of Palestinian infrastructure, the killing of thousands, and the imprisonment of their historic and democratically elected leader, Yasser Arafat, who for decades had personified the Palestinian cause, prompted scarcely a yawn from Western leaders. His death was greeted in Washington with at times barely concealed glee.

In a normal democracy, Abbas would have been forced out, and new leaders would have taken over. And the world would have had to learn to deal with them, because in democracies you don’t get to choose other nations’ leaders. And they would have had to learn to deal with the world, because no nation can really stand alone. But in the sham democracy Israel and the US set up for Palestinians, Abbas carries on even 20 years later, less effective than ever.

I’ll save Agha and Malley’s chapter on 2023 (“Apocalypse”) for another post, but the first couple pages are as sharply reasoned as anything I’ve read on the subject. One thing that occurs to me is that I may need to make a fundamental shift in my understanding of the conflict. I’ve always refused to identify with the Palestinians, partly because I’ve found it easy to find fault with leaders like Arafat and Abbas (and one could go back, especially to Husseini, and forward as well), and partly because I so dislike nationalism in all of its manifestations (Israel being a particularly egregious example). So when I hear expressions of solidarity with Palestine (or “pro-Palestinian”) I naturally recoil. But there is another sense of the sentiment that makes more sense to me: if you think of the Israeli state as a cult of maximal power — which always reminds me of the maxim that “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” — then what do Palestinians represent? Not quite powerlessness, because it is really hard to completely wipe out agency, but humanity, at least what’s left after you strip all the arrogance and hubris away.

I expected to follow this piece up with one where I weighed out the answers to the sixteen questions, and thereby narrowed down the possible outcomes. I never wrote that piece, because Trump’s mood swings were too erratic and incoherent to clarify either a plan or a set of criteria for evaluating a plan. What was quickly clear was that Iran had survived and was able to continue a fairly long war of attrition, including the ability to inflict significant harm on the Gulf states, and through them to the world economy. It was also clear that Netanyahu would not of his own free will agree to any peace deal. (He could be voted out in October, but that’s a long ways away, and his prospects would be better if he could keep fighting.)

That left Trump as the main variable. The answer to question 7 (”how long can Trump sustain this war politically?”) isn’t clear. He’s shown himself to be pretty oblivious to his very low polls, and doesn’t seem particularly worried about losing Congress in November. He has 30 months left in his term, and seems to have absolute faith that he will win out in the end. On the other hand, while America isn’t much of a democracy, there are other people who have influence over Trump, which makes it difficult even for such an autocratic president to stick to such a disastrous course.

The other key question is number 9: “what is the minimum outcome that Iran can agree to that will allow Trump to save face?” That’s been very speculative until this week, when Trump signed this 14-point Memorandum of Understanding with Iran (and, notably, without Israel or Hezbollah, although a ceasefire and withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon are very much part of the understanding). The first thing that should be said here is that this outline is very clear, with little room for misunderstanding or future sabotage and recriminations — unlike Trump’s 20-point Gaza plan, which was mostly a matter of Trump negotiating with his own financial advisers. The second thing is that this is potentially a very good deal for everyone. It may not be treated that way, especially by those who had such high hopes for the war as a triumph of Israeli-American brute power, but that’s mostly sour grapes. If we learn anything from this war, it’s that power destroys, and makes losers of us all. The whole paradigm of “defense through strength” and corollaries like the notion of deterrence have been massively disproven by events.

In a nutshell, the future agreement that the Memorandum of Understanding points to is just a few simple points:

1. Trump will eventually be able to claim his victory in denying Iran the development of nuclear weapons, but only after the rest of the agreement is finalized. (Until then, Iran pledges not to develop nuclear weapons, as they have done all along.)

2. The Strait of Hormuz will also be opened to shipping, probably without any fees to Iran. (Iran could, of course, close the Strait and exact fees, should other means of financing their reconstruction be impeded.) This, too, is a clear Trump victory point.

3. Iran will be free from all US and other sanctions. This is the end of the economic war the US has been waging against Iran ever since the fall of the Shah in 1979. Aside from some excessive revolutionary zeal in the early days, when Iranians remembered all too well how the US embassy had been responsible for overthrowing their government and installing the much hated Shah, this economic warfare has been the force that has provoked nearly all of Iran’s subsequent hostility to the US and Israel. Take that away, and peace is possible. Don’t take it away (which was Obama’s tactic in negotiating the JCPOA), and hostilities inevitably resurface.

4. Israel has to end its bombardment and occupation of Lebanon. In return, Iran will stop providing military support for Hezbollah, which if safe from Israel will no longer have need of a militia.

5. Iran will be able to receive reconstruction funds in some form, without Trump admitting to reparations, and without Strait fees. Some of this will come from sanctions relief, and some will come from direct foreign investment, mostly from the Gulf States.

The only hard call for Trump is that he press Netanyahu to withdraw from Lebanon. Trump isn’t practiced at standing up to Netanyahu. They have many of the same donors, and he’s surrounded himself with people who would do anything for Israel. They also share the same instinct for getting their way through bullying. On the other hand, financial considerations rule Trump, and both the profit and loss ledgers favor the deal with Iran. So does the political considerations. Trump may not survive having started the war, but he certainly won’t last long for failing to end it.

On the other hand, I’ve long thought that the only reason Israel was so set on demonizing Iran was that they thought it was a good way to keep the Americans in line, doling out billions every year, doing their diplomatic bit, while effectively ignoring the Palestinians. While America was fairly magnanimous toward the world, including its defeated enemies, after WWII, the long history of fiascos ever since have been met by little more than sore loser grudges (starting in Korea, where after 73 years we are still technically at war). Iran was just another grudge, but one that Israel could pick at whenever they wanted. But will it continue to work? Not if Trump genuinely wants peace with Iran. Netanyahu surely understands that Israel cannot sustain its war against Iran without American support, and that even if they could (which presumably they could in Lebanon, at least for a few more months), would they risk breaking with Trump to do so?

I doubt it. That’s partly because I don’t think Israel really cares about Iran. I doubt they even care about Lebanon. Sure, the idea of annexing southern Lebanon goes back to Ben-Gurion, but he never seriously pursued it, nor did Israel build settlements when they occupied Lebanon from 1982-2000. The far right is pushing the idea now because no one has tried to stop them, but if Trump leans on Netanyahu, the idea will surely be put back on the shelf. What does matter to Netanyahu and his allies, and for that matter to many of his enemies, is the Palestinians.

It is noteworthy that the Memorandum of Understanding makes no mention of the Palestinians. While it insists that Israel withdraw from Lebanon and refrain from threatening much less attacking Iran and Lebanon, it places no restrictions on what Israel can do within its own borders, to its own people. Perhaps Iran is being pragmatic here, realizing that any demand on Israel’s internal affairs would be a step too far. (After all, they do insist on the US and Israel not interfering in their own internal affairs.) Or perhaps it just shows that the notion that Iran was hellbent on attacking Jews was never true. Or quite possibly both.

This gives Netanyahu leverage to get concessions from Trump, for an even freer hand in dealing with the Palestinians. He might, for instance, get Trump to revive his idea of driving the Palestinians out of Israeli territory. On the other hand, the risks of fighting Trump may be severe. Israel still depends on the US for arms and money, and for diplomatic cover, useful in fighting against BDS campaigns and ICC indictments. And much of Netanyahu’s political capital is based on the idea that he’s a master at manipulating the Americans. He will certainly whine and pout over having to leave Lebanon, but he would be stupid not to take this off ramp.

Whether Netanyahu can spin this war ending into some kind of victory narrative remains to be seen. Like Trump, he is facing an uphill battle, as memory of the wars and anguish he has caused, along with his own legacy of corruption and dishonesty, will vie with whatever new story he tries to tell, and how it compares with the fantasies he was hawking at the start. In Netanyahu’s favor, the war narrative has always been popular in Israel (at least among the only voters who count). Trump’s war has never been remotely close to popular. His only plus is that the media that excoriated Biden for losing Afghanistan is mostly in his pocket (see his press release (mostly quotes from loyal Republicans, like “The Iran deal is straightforward, common sense leadership from @POTUS,” and “President Trump secured a historic agreement with Iran, bringing an end to the conflict and demonstrating once again that peace is achieved through strength”).

By the way, I suspect that the real heroes of this deal are the Gulf State Arabs. They ran the biggest risk of an extended war, especially as they are rich in targets Iran could easily demolish. That Iran was reluctant to do so is fairly clear. On the other hand, they never broke publicly with the US, which allowed them to exercise back-channel influence. In the end, the money that greased the wheels of diplomacy will mostly come from them. But they’re used to throwing money at problems, and may now, with once the sanctions vanish, may find some opportunities in Iran.

While it’s possible that the Palestinians will be the big losers in this deal — Netanyahu still has Hamas to extirpate, and the settlers will continue to terrorize the West Bank with impunity — it’s also true that most genocides have taken place under the fog of war, and that the Iran war has mostly served as cover for Israel’s crimes at home and in Lebanon (while keeping the Americans distracted). And it’s just possible that peace will prove contagious. Since October 2023, Israel has exposed itself as an extremely racist and violent nation, and nothing short of genuine contrition (hah!) is going to erase that. Moreover, with the end of the Iran bogey, their claimed right to “self defense” rings ever more hollow. There is little doubt in my mind that Israel could, if only they wanted to, come up with a decent and respectful modus vivendi with the Palestinians. They’ve never had to, and never wanted to do, but at some point nearly everyone wants to settle into a normal (safe and secure and free) life, and to do that you need to allow others the same.

Of course, there is much that could wrong with this deal. I’m generally inclined to assume that all people on all sides will act rationally, but that clearly isn’t the case, as some of them started this war in the first place. Trump is easily the most delusional, and the most fickle and unsteady, of the bunch, but all sides have their mountebanks, eager to claim victory where none is possible, or to castigate others for facing reality while they still insist on imagining something better.

Iran and the Gulf States have an advantage here, in that their inner sanctums of power are more restricted, and their media is more constrained, so they’re less likely to expose in-fighting. Israel is somewhat more open, especially to the right, and their coalition system makes Netanyahu more vulnerable than Trump is (although with elections already scheduled, it’s not clear to me what more damage Smotrich and Ben-Gvir can do in breaking with Netanyahu). The US is much more open, but Trump’s power base is protected, and few in the right-wing media ecosystem are likely to cross him. Obviously, one source of discontent at the moment are those in the media who are more loyal to Netanyahu than to Trump. Another source of criticism, if not necessarily opposition, is from Democrats: some of whom are diehard Israel supporters, and some who simply want to score points by comparing the Trump and Obama deals, or to contrast the deal unfavorably with either the pre-war reality or with Trump’s stated ambitions.

It is easy to lapse into calling Trump weak and goading him into restarting the war, which is a real danger for someone as fickle and temperamental (and, sure, stupid) as he is. Trita Parsi has written a good piece on how “comparing [Trump’s] Iran deal with Obama’s or decrying the terms risks falling into the same traps as previous presidents”: Trump ended his idiotic Iran war. Good. The one point I want to add is that on paper and in potential, Trump’s “deal” is much better for all concerned than Obama’s was. That’s because Obama’s deal was all about tying Iran up, while leaving the US (and Israel) unfettered — a “solution” that could only lead to further hostility, especially when the US piled new sanctions in place of the old — whereas the Trump deal lays the foundation for lasting peace. The big question is whether peace is what Trump actually wants — it clearly isn’t what Netanyahu wants. And the test of this is quite simple and clear: whether Trump can and will pressure Netanyahu to withdraw from Lebanon.

If he does that, showing steadfast conviction for once, even I won’t quarrel with calling him the toughest US president since Eisenhower — a relevant reference point given how he backed Ben-Gurion out of Sinai in 1956. I won’t vote for him, because he’s still a fascist, but I won’t mind giving him some credit for one key thing the Blob has failed to do over fifty years. Not one I wished for, but Trump’s wake of wreckage is turning into some kind of revolutionary experience.