Dolly Parton, RIP

Remarks by Billy Strings on the mind of a musician

David Marchese, The Interview: Billy Strings Escaped the Darkness. He’s Playing to Not Go Back. NYTimes, August 10, 2026.

Billy Strings has drawn from something old to do something entirely new. The singer and virtuoso guitarist, who is 33, has broken ground by using the elements of traditional bluegrass to become an arena-filling, chart-topping phenomenon, straddling the worlds of roots music and jam bands. Along the way he has also acquired a Deadhead-like legion of fans who follow his tours from concert to concert.

As improbable as it is that Strings can sell out cavernous venues across the country while playing bluegrass classics — in addition to his own introspective compositions, which he and his drummerless band often spin into long improvisations — it’s even more surprising when you know the path he took to get there. Strings, whose real name is William Apostol, was surrounded by poverty and drug addiction in his family growing up in small-town Michigan. Those demons have continued to haunt him: Strings’s mother died from a drug overdose last year at 64 years old. That loss inspired much of the music on his beautiful new album, “So Much for Goodbyes,” due out Aug. 28. He discussed the genesis of that album, among many other things, in our heart-wrenching conversation, which took place during a rare day off from his summer tour.

Well into the interview:

How does playing music help process the feelings that you have, whether it’s about your mom or anything else? It’s always been my coping mechanism, survival strategy and my medicine. Playing bluegrass music, it’s like a portal back to my childhood, back before I knew anything dirty about the earth. And it’s a way for me to go back to a time that was just beautiful and full of light, growing up playing music with my dad. And then songwriting is my cathartic and therapeutic way of dealing with things. I think sublimation is one of my main characteristics. Instead of letting this hard stuff drag me down, I try to make art from it, make lemonade, if you will.

A bit later:

When did you realize that you had a real gift for the guitar? That was early on. I started playing when I was about 4 years old. By the time I was 6 or 7, I could carry a tune, and I was my dad’s rhythm player. He would play all the lead and do all the fancy picking and singing, and I would hold down the rhythm. One of the biggest moments for me was I was sitting in my dad’s bedroom with him, as I would basically do every night, and he was teaching me the song “Beaumont Rag.” We would play the tune and I would mess up the second part every time. And I stopped us right in the middle of the song and said, “Why don’t you just play it and let me listen?” And so that’s what we did. Instead of trying to count, I listened to what he was playing. I listened to the melody. Then I was like, “All right, let me try it again,” and I nailed it. He was awful proud. He called my grandma, made her listen on the phone. That was a big moment for me. That’s when this listening thing started: I was able to listen to the music more intently and I could tell what chord was coming next. I used to think it was magic or something. I had no concept of music theory or anything. But my dad would play a G chord and then he would play a G seventh and my ear would just lead me. I’d be like, Well, the next chord’s probably going to be a C, and then it would be. It’s better to learn bluegrass and folk and hillbilly music that way than to try to learn from some academic point of view. It’s better to learn it on the back porch and to let it get under your skin, because then it’s not some equation, it’s a feeling. It comes from your soul.

Before shows:

I read an article about you that talked about how before shows, you used to get real anxious and have stomach pain. Is that still an issue? I definitely get nervous before a show. Sometimes moments before I’m walking onstage, I feel like I might pass out. I’ve just got to get into the first song or two, and halfway through the show I’m the complete opposite. I have all this energy. I feel great. I feel super confident, almost cocky even. There is that expectation from the crowd to do something amazing, and also that expectation from myself to always do better than I did the night before, because this is my livelihood and this is my life, and deep in the back of my mind, I’m scared that this is all going to go away, and maybe I’ll have to go back to the way life was when it was really hard. There’s this little devil on my shoulder that tells me I don’t deserve any of this, and thinks that I should be in some little trailer somewhere addicted to drugs, not a penny to my name. So it does feel like I’m playing for my survival a lot. Each time I walk onstage, I’m playing so that I don’t have to go back there.

Of course there is more at the link. 

Douthat on Nolan's Odyssey: Banal, Bland, and Benighted [Media Notes 189 B]

Ross Douthat, It Is Banal, Bland, Thin and Didactic. We Can’t Stop Talking About It. NYTimes, Aug. 1, 2023.

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is the blockbuster that launched a million takes. The interpretations crowd my social media feed like Agamemnon’s assembled ships at Aulis. They keen in my ears like the Sirens’ seductive voices. They … OK, look, I’m just saying people have a lot of opinions about the biggest movie of the year.

And for good reason, because Nolan’s film is perfectly calibrated for the contemporary culture war. [...]

Then, having plucked the ripest fruit, Nolan proceeded to serve it in the blandest form. Gone is the sex and sensuality, the warring deities, the hero’s outsize ego and charisma. In their place is a story that’s very American, with tropes familiar from war movies and westerns, dialogue that belongs in a contemporary Y.A. novel and a moralism that’s at once extremely didactic and extremely general. “Civilization collapses when you violate Zeus’ law” is the teaching of Nolan’s story, and while you could imagine that Zeus’ law is some arcane instruction requiring the castration of a black heifer on the highest peak on the darkest night, it turns out to just be the golden rule applied to houseguests, dogs and Trojans.

This is a critique, but it’s also a key to the film’s cultural cachet. If you just want to like “The Odyssey,” if you just want to have a good time at the movie, the bland version still has all the good stuff — the Trojan horse! the Cyclops! a bloody homecoming! — stitched together by a director with a gift for propulsion and spectacle. If you have a great enough story, you can reduce the spice level and still satisfy millions of customers with the meal.

Then if you want to claim “The Odyssey” for your own worldview, to insist that the dominant movie of the summer is speaking directly to your concerns, the banal didacticism of Nolan’s script is unusually amenable to personalized interpretations.

At which point Douthat serves up a few. And then goes on to serve up sample critiques. But he didn't mention Damon's six-pack abs.

Little Miss Sunshine [Media Notes 188]

Little Miss Sunshine (2006) is a little strange and quite wonderful. Here’s how Wikipedia opens its plot summary:

Sheryl Hoover is a stressed mother of two living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her husband Richard is an aspiring motivational speaker and life coach. Dwayne, Sheryl's Nietzsche-admiring teenage son from her previous marriage, has taken a vow of silence until he accomplishes his dream of becoming a fighter pilot. Sheryl's older brother Frank Ginsburg, a gay scholar of Proust, is living with the family after attempting suicide. Richard's foul-mouthed father Edwin is also living with the family after being evicted from a retirement home for snorting heroin. Olive, Richard and Sheryl's 7-year-old daughter, is an aspiring beauty queen coached by Edwin.

Olive learns she has qualified for the "Little Miss Sunshine" beauty pageant being held in Redondo Beach, California, in two days. Richard, Sheryl, and Edwin want to support her, and Frank and Dwayne cannot be left alone, so the whole family attends. Due to financial constraints, they go on an 800-mile (1,300 km) road trip in their yellow Volkswagen van.

We know that much by, I don’t know, let’s say 10 or 15 minutes in (out of 102 minutes in total). At this point we pretty much know what’s going to happen, if only in broad outline. There will be a happy ending, because that’s how these films go; you knew this much when you bought your ticket, or picked in Netflix, as I did. You also that the trip is going to be, shall we say, stressful, with revelations and perhaps a (big) downer. It’s the details of the stress, revelations, and downer that matter.

As for the ending, obviously that’s going to be Olive’s performance at the “Little Miss Sunshine” pageant. Olive is cheerful and kind; she’s also a bit overweight, chubby but not fat. Somehow she made it to the finals despite being chubby but not fat. We know, because it is in the nature of beauty pageants for little girls, that chubby but not fat does not win the prize, no matter what kind of talent the contestant exhibits.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about that:

The hitherto-unseen dance routine Edwin had taught Olive is revealed to be a striptease performed to the Rocasound remix of Rick James’ “Super Freak”. Olive is oblivious to the subtext of the routine, but it horrifies and angers most of the audience, and the pageant organizer demands she be removed from the stage.

Needless to say, the audience is, shall we say, quite taken aback.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how the film turns that sow’s ear into a silk purse. Better yet, watch the film.

Don’t worry, you can listen to the music without having the film spoiled. The visual you see now is the only visual there is for the clip.

Quilts

The first one blew me away pic.twitter.com/1PLastuCR2

— Scott Wessman (@scottew) July 18, 2026

quite a few patriotic quilts this year in celebration of the semiquincentennial pic.twitter.com/jBrAB2gKTr

— Scott Wessman (@scottew) July 18, 2026

That is gorgeous. Here's one my mom did pic.twitter.com/OpzhijCSOX

— Karien (@jazzivalyn) July 19, 2026

This quilt was indeed inspired by the Chihuly, based on the artist's caption next to the quilt. Very impressive to notice this connection. https://t.co/qZgWXIET5S pic.twitter.com/NK9FRUlRqm

— Scott Wessman (@scottew) July 19, 2026

Soccer considered as a legacy of European colonialism

Akim Reinhardt, The Good, the Bad, and the Soccer, 3 Quarks Daily, July 19, 2026.

The fourth and fifth paragraphs:

Want proof that European colonialism is the real reason for, or at least the original factor in, soccer’s global popularity? Look at the nations that were not under European control during the late 19th or early 20th centuries, and you’ll mostly find countries where soccer is not the top spectator sport. The United States broke away from Great Britain long before the rise of soccer, and it has a bevy of its own sports that are far more popular (baseball, basketball, American football, and on a good day hockey). Canada, New Zealand, and Australia never rebelled, but rather faded away in time for their most popular sports to be, respectively: hockey, rugby, and cricket (summer) and Australian rules football (winter). Finland, up at the edge of the world, prefers hockey. Mongolia, at the center of the world, prefers wrestling. Ireland, forever looking to do whatever the English do not, very much prefers hurling and Gaelic football. China was never culturally colonized, and basketball is its most popular spectator team sport, with various individual sports also attracting huge fan bases. The United States is itself a massive colonial power, and wherever it held sway, soccer likewise takes a backseat: basketball in the Philippines; baseball and sumo in Japan; baseball in South Korea, Taiwan, and chunks of Latin America (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, and even Venezuela to some degree). India and Pakistan are odd, and extremely populace [sic], outliers. Ruled by Great Britain until after World War II, the English upperclass seems to have had an undue influence there, and cricket, not soccer, is by far the most popular spectator sport in both nations, which collectively account for over a fifth of Earth’s humans.

Add it all up, and we find that soccer is not actually the world’s game, but more accurately about half the world’s game. It’s tops across Europe, Africa, and most of Latin America, but secondary (at best) in the most populated parts of Asia, Oceania, and North America.

There’s much more to the article.

The Boys [Media Notes 187]

David Colman, The Emmy Awards Are Afraid of This Vulgar, Gory, Brilliant Show, NYTimes, July 19, 2026.

Last week, a raft of intelligent, watchable, enjoyable shows were nominated for the Emmy Award for outstanding drama series, the TV version of the best picture Oscar. Each of these prestige TV shows made tart references to our current moment. “The Pitt” dealt with ICE in the E.R. “Slow Horses” and “The Diplomat” dramatized the dangers of cynical political expedience. “The Gilded Age” and “Paradise” produced two very different takes on oligarch-itecture. “Your Friends & Neighbors” wallowed in larcenous suburban finance dads in midlife crisis, while “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” jousted with how to transcend one’s “low birth.” The only show to truly depart from dramatic realism was “Pluribus,” a sci-fi show about a space virus that made virtually all humans highly agreeable zombies, making you wonder if this is what life will be like living in a world ruled by A.I. agents.

But in the end, none of them actually tried to capture the grand farce of a moment we’re in. They didn’t even come close. Each of them is too polite, too nuanced, too, in the end, moderate — centrist, even.

And then there’s The Boys, which captured our current moment, where it’s “as if we’re living in a burn-it-all-down age of greed, mayhem and corruption.”

There was one show, however, that hit this head-on — and it’s not “Industry,” HBO’s finance-and-cocaine drama that was also snubbed by the Emmys this year. It’s Amazon Prime’s “The Boys.” The superhero spoof, which ended its five-season run this May, received not a single Emmy nomination in a major award category. Despite the fact that it dared to land savage, serious and entertaining punches about everything warped in American culture — corporate greed, celebrity worship, moral hypocrisy and how they all fit together. [...]

For those unfamiliar, “The Boys” is set in an alt-present-day United States, where superheroes (“supes”) are real and abundant. But instead of renegades valiantly saving the world from doomsday plots, they’re more like substance-abusing superinfluencers: entitled, narcissistic pursuers of fame whose high-profile “saves” are frequently stage-managed photo ops. They often offhandedly end up killing bystanders. The supes — especially the elite supe group known as “The Seven,” a parody of DC’s Justice League — are controlled, weaponized and monetized by the company that came up with the chemical to create them: Vought International, a corporate octopus whose business interests range from Disney-style entertainment to pharmaceuticals to military contracts.

The gullible public laps up all the supe mythology — especially that of Homelander, the all-American, charismatic leader of the Seven whose authoritarian megalomania drives him to take over the Oval Office, having naysayers locked up in detention camps (or just laser-visioning them in half) along the way.

For what it’s worth, I was hooked from the first season in 2019, while the Trumposaurus was finishing off his first term.

This vulgar world of corporate-branded superheroes isn’t just an ironic conceit; it’s a brilliant, subversive lampooning of our politically divided, social-media-addicted, celebrity-hypnotized society — and, in the words of the “Boys” showrunner Eric Kripke, of the “powerful and selfish people using social media to intentionally tear people apart for their own selfish interests.”

It may not be subtle. But neither is the era we live in. The Shakespearean scramble of “House of Cards” or “Succession” (both repeat Emmy winners for outstanding drama series) seems quaint by comparison with what we get on newsfeeds every day. [...]

You might wonder why a show that focuses on the superheroes isn’t called “The Supes,” but that’s really the point here. The characters putting the plot into action aren’t the supes, but “the boys,” the four men, and eventually two women, who commit themselves to destroying the company and the supes who are making their world a living hell. Even if some have superpowers, they don’t know what they’re doing. They take insane chances. They fail over and over and keep getting outsmarted by Vought — until they don’t. The show’s real heroes, working outside the official system, pursue their impossible task no matter how the deck is stacked against them. And that is how they win.

There’s more at the link.

Blood, Sweat & Tears was bigger than I've remembered (what the hell happened to them?)

What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?

From the YouTube page:

A political thriller about the first American rock band to perform behind the Iron Curtain, whose members find themselves in the crosshairs between the Right and the Left of a polarized America with severe career repercussions.

I was certainly aware of Blood, Sweat & Tears back in the 1960s and 70s. After all, I played in a band that played a number of BS&T tunes. But I don’t remember them as being THAT big, perhaps because, as the Wikipedia entry notes, “by the mid-1970s the group’s popularity began a decline.” And if I was aware of their State Department-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe in 1970, which is the focus of this fascinating documentary, I’ve forgotten or repressed it.

Feelings for Sale in China

There's a video at the link (NYTimes). Here's a transcript of the voice over:

Visitors to a theme park in central China are lining up for selfies with this cosplayer. While this hiker is paid to guide and carry visitors up one of the country’s most popular mountains. It’s all part of a growing trend among young people here who are increasingly anxious about the future because of declining wages and high youth unemployment.

So many are buying feel-good experiences and products that provide “qíng xù jià zhí” — which means emotional value in Chinese. The phrase is everywhere. Companies use it in ads to sell everything from A.I. pets that provide companionship to blind boxes that bring surprise. Even some local governments are using the term in their annual economic reports.

The trend has fueled a nearly $400 billion market that’s estimated to grow 70 percent by 2029. We found two young Chinese workers who are cashing in on the craze. Their social media posts and videos they shared with us give a glimpse inside the emotional value phenomenon.

College student, Lu Zhaoyu, is part of a group that helps people hike Mount Tai in eastern China. The 20-year-old markets his services with photos of himself, promising “maximum emotional value” all the way up to the summit. He said his clients are usually women in their 20s and 30s who prefer to spend money on their feelings rather than practical things.

A Lang bounced between different jobs before becoming a cosplayer at an amusement park. The park advertises that its good-looking actors and actresses provide a “full emotional experience” for $15 per visitor. The 30-year-old usually spends an hour transforming himself into a warrior from a video game. He said some visitors in the crowd are fans who have seen his videos on social media. A Lang said his goal is to create a moment of joy for each person.

What sets Lu apart from a typical hiking guide are the services he offers his clients such as fresh fruit at a rest stop or champagne to celebrate the hike. Clients pay about $100 for a six-hour trek. Many get exhausted along the way and ask to be carried. Sometimes Lu said he feels like a therapist. Both Lu and A Lang said the job can be emotionally and physically draining. But emotional value can also be a two-way street. “Getting exhausted during the hike is inevitable. But providing emotional value or carrying their bags is the basics of the job.” “When I am tired, I will turn on the livestream and sing to release my emotions.”

Rick Beato interviews Bill Joel [fascinating!]

YouTube:

In this interview I finally get to sit down with the legendary Billy Joel. We talk about Billy's prolific career as a singer and songwriter, his love of classical music, and his techniques for writing such timeless music. Billy also shares some hilarious stories and demonstrates his unmistakable piano chops.

SpaceX has become a securitized narrative, a meme stock

Know why $SPCX is so volatile?

Because it’s a meme stock with a rocket company thrown in.

So the price is being driven by vibes, not news.

— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) June 26, 2026

From the S-1, p. 30:

Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. To do this, we have formed the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth with unmatched capabilities to rapidly manufacture and launch space-based communications that connect the world, to harness the Sun to power a truth- seeking artificial intelligence that advances scientific discovery, and ultimately to build a base on the Moon and cities on other planets.

In other words, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

A Face in the Crowd [Media Notes 185]

Bret Primack, aka Jazz Video Guy, has a post about A Face in the Crowd (1957), chilling movie starring Andy Griffith. Here's how it opens:

There’s a drunk in an Arkansas jail who’s about to become the most powerful man in America.

He can’t help himself. He’s funny, loose, dangerous, and magnetic in ways that make you lean toward him even when something in the back of your brain is sending signals you’re choosing to ignore. His name is Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, and Elia Kazan put him on screen in 1957, which means the film has now spent nearly seven decades being more relevant than it was the year before.

If you haven’t seen it, stop reading, scroll down watch it first. If you have seen it, you already know what I’m about to say.

Kazan made A Face in the Crowd with screenwriter Budd Schulberg, fresh off On the Waterfront. Both men were carrying complicated personal freight — they’d each named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Schulberg in 1951, Kazan in 1952. Both were condemned by significant portions of the Hollywood left, and that condemnation followed them. [...] What they actually made was something darker and more personal than a political warning — a film built by two men who understood betrayal from the inside. [...]

Lonesome Rhodes is not just a villain. He’s a product. His raw, folksy charm makes him an instant hit on local radio, and the machine takes it from there — television, sponsors, politicians, handlers. As his power grows, so does his contempt for the audience that made him. He holds his followers in private disdain while publicly celebrating them as the heartland soul of America. The film understands something that most political films miss entirely: authenticity itself can be manufactured, and the more real someone seems, the more carefully that realness has been constructed.

When it was released in 1957, critics called it unrealistic. Too paranoid. Too on the nose. That’s worth sitting with for a moment — the scenario that seemed like exaggeration then is now just Tuesday.

Andy Griffith’s performance is the reason the film works at the visceral level. He had almost no film experience before Kazan cast him, and that rawness is inseparable from what he does on screen. There’s no technique getting in the way. [...]

Kazan reportedly called it one of the finest performances he ever directed. Given that Kazan worked with Brando at his peak, that’s not a throwaway remark.

Contemporary resonance:

The comparison to Donald Trump gets made every time this film is discussed, and it holds up to a point. The billionaire performing as populist, the television personality who understands the medium as a tool of dominance rather than information, the contempt that surfaces in unguarded moments, the persona of success constructed over a private reality of failures. Rhodes and Trump share the same operating mechanism.

But the comparison reveals where the film’s imagination ran out. Rhodes is ultimately destroyed. The hot mic moment — caught mocking the very people who worship him — ends him. Schulberg and Kazan still believed in a rational audience that could be shocked back to its senses. That faith looks genuinely touching now, the faith of men who lived before the complete dissolution of shared reality.

Trump’s supporters processed every exposure, every revelation, every unguarded moment, and stayed loyal. The mask slipped repeatedly and it didn’t matter, because the audience had decided the mask was the point. What Kazan and Schulberg couldn’t anticipate was social media removing the last gatekeepers, so that the Lonesome Rhodes dynamic now operates at a scale and speed that makes 1957 network television look like a church bulletin.

The film identified a structural vulnerability in media democracy — that charisma plus television produces a kind of power that bypasses argument and rational persuasion entirely. What it couldn’t imagine was an audience that already knew, and didn’t care.

There's much more at the link. The full article is worth reading. And if you've not seen the film, do so.

NYTimes Opinion: Don't Stress about AI; Don't Bring Back the Tests; A New Generation of Creatives

Three from The New York Times, June 22, 2026.

Robert J. Shiller, We Have to Stop Freaking Out About A.I.

Like many others, I believe A.I. could lower employment. But unlike most, I don’t necessarily blame the technology itself. Instead, I worry about the potency of the fear it is generating.

Our brains are wired to respond to stories. Narratives floating in a population can affect individuals’ economic decisions about whether to buy a big house, or whether to send their kids to an expensive private school or even whether to have kids at all. When millions of people make millions and millions of decisions based upon negative expectations, there is a risk that fear can actually help birth the reality.

The idea that something like artificial intelligence will replace many human jobs goes back thousands of years. Aristotle envisioned a powered loom and a self-playing lyre someday replacing human servants. In the 19th century, groups of textile workers (the Luddites) destroyed the new machines they believed were replacing them. In the 1920s, the play “R.U.R.” — the letters stand for “Rossum’s Universal Robots” — depicted a war of the robots against humans. [...]

...the British mathematician I.J. Good wrote an essay that imagined a new technology that could continue improving itself until its abilities would surpass those of humans. The idea, which came to be known as the “singularity,” would quietly circulate until 2005. That’s when the futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote “The Singularity Is Near,” a book arguing that human-level A.I. would arrive by 2029. Either we would merge with machines and transcend our biological limits, or the machine would grow so powerful it could end all of humanity.

The theory captured the imaginations of tech titans, and even the top A.I. researchers and executives, who warned of a range of alarming scenarios, from job losses to widening inequality or even the eradication of humanity itself. While the job market has slowed for a host of reasons, there are reports that fear of an A.I. apocalypse is worsening the freeze and contributing to record lows in consumer sentiment.

There’s only so much Washington can do about these narratives. And, suffice to say, Donald Trump is no Franklin Roosevelt.

As such, perhaps the best we can do is to appeal directly to the leaders of Silicon Valley who have been promoting these negative narratives with such vigor. Surely the resulting media attention highlighting how dangerously powerful your A.I. model is may help you sell more wares, but it may be far harder to do so in a period of recession. Try not to forget the critical lessons taught by our past.

Ross Wiener, I Thought ‘No Child Left Behind’ Would Fix Public Schools. I Was Wrong.

The new data is emboldening calls to restore something like the No Child Left Behind Act, the stringent, test-based accountability policy that defined American education from 2002 to 2015 and imposed penalties on schools whose students did not meet proficiency requirements on state standardized tests. The Atlantic captured that impulse in a 2025 podcast episode titled “Bring Back High-Stakes School Testing.” In it, Margaret Spellings, a secretary of education under President George W. Bush and now president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, argues we need to restore “the muscle of accountability, the muscle of assessment.” Rahm Emanuel, exploring a 2028 presidential run, said in April that Democrats have abandoned standards and accountability and must return to them.

It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers. Reading and math are profoundly important and improving instruction must be part of any serious agenda. But test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now. [...]

Over time, I became convinced that, with the best of intentions, I and many others in the education reform community had transferred our moral commitment to children over to the standardized tests. We had done this earnestly, not cynically, but we still did damage.

In 2023, 40 percent of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. One in five had seriously considered suicide; nearly one in 10 had attempted it. Research from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins found that 40 percent of Gen Z believes political violence can be justified, compared with 11 percent of baby boomers. Too many students experience school as an obligation with few opportunities for agency or meaning; recent survey data indicates that large shares of students find school boring and irrelevant and are struggling with engagement in the classroom. The academic crisis and the human crisis are not entirely separate phenomena. [...]

Taking their priorities seriously would mean broadening what we expect from the classroom. Schools should put what students can do on equal footing with what they know, embedding real skills in academic learning rather than leaving them to chance or sequencing them to later in life. Schools should reconnect with the communities they serve, so young people learn through and about the places where they live. And they should reanimate the character-forming, developmental mission a pluralistic democracy requires.

Tom Rothman, Hollywood Needs Regular Jolts of Creativity. It Just Got One.

In the last month, “Backrooms,” a horror movie directed by Kane Parsons, a YouTube creator who just turned 21, opened to an astounding $81.5 million in America. A second horror film, “Iron Lung,” made and self-distributed by Mark Fischbach, another online creator, has grossed over $50 million worldwide. Perhaps most significant of all, “Obsession,” a horror film directed by Curry Barker, a 26-year-old YouTube creator, crossed $200 million at the box office this weekend and surpassed the latest “Star Wars” film.

“Backrooms,” “Iron Lung” and “Obsession” each has its own unique origin story. But what they have in common is that they’re all fueled by an avid young audience — exactly the demographic that gloomy industry pundits have repeatedly declared will never return to movie theaters.

Wrong.

Is this YouTube-fueled youthquake simply a coincidental confluence of events? Or does it portend an upending of the Hollywood status quo? Actually, it’s a bit of both. Indeed, for any fear of YouTube barbarians at the gates, this is instead a great opportunity for traditional Hollywood. [...]

Rothman then goes on the list changes in taste following Altman's M*A*S*H in 1970 and Soderberg's Sex, Lies, and Videotape in 1989.

This kind of moment is happening again. Mr. Barker, with a background in short films and YouTube sketch comedy, tells a story in “Obsession” that is so powerfully relatable to Gen Z audiences that the word of mouth has caused the box office to defy gravity.

When Mr. Parsons expanded his YouTube short films into the feature-length “Backrooms,” the aesthetic he’d honed as a teenager on the internet captured an underlying anxiety in his audience, with whom he’d already developed a direct relationship online. These filmmakers are very young, but what matters is not chronological age so much as an iconoclastic spirit, an instinct for what the audience is wanting but not getting and, of course, talent. [...]

“Backrooms” and “Obsession” are also the beneficiaries of expensive and savvy studio marketing campaigns. Reminiscent of how the New Hollywood directors made a lot of money for the old studios in the ’70s — think Francis Ford Coppola and “The Godfather” — and how the indie darlings of the ’90s did the same, these YouTube-born phenomena have ultimately prospered handsomely inside the system.

For perfect symmetry, note that the No. 1 film at the box office when it debuted two weekends ago, one spot ahead of “Obsession,” was “Disclosure Day,” made by Steven Spielberg, the greatest artistic and commercial director in history. “Disclosure Day” is his 37th film. His first was the ’70s New Hollywood anti-authoritarian film “The Sugarland Express,” which he made when he was not much older than Mr. Barker and Mr. Parsons.

The integration of independent creativity with industry influence is a good thing all around. It offers exposure for, and help to, new voices, giving them more visibility and opportunity, and it promotes the kind of originality that Hollywood desperately needs.

Needless to say, there's more at the links.

Our alien overlords have arrived and their name is “Elon” [Starbase, TX]

Amy Gamerman, Elon Musk Is Colonizing Earth, NYTimes, June 12, 2026

In this town, almost every communal space is private property. A company controlled by the world’s richest man owns nearly all of it. He shapes its future.

This is Starbase, Texas, the city that Elon Musk built on America’s ragged hem at the southern border as the home for SpaceX, his aerospace and artificial intelligence company. Locals describe a highly secretive environment overseen by a company-affiliated city commission that rubber-stamps Mr. Musk’s vision, a place where even kindergartners are guided by his philosophies. Starbase is the newest manifestation of Mr. Musk’s political power. It is a beta test for a rising oligarchy that seems intent on transforming America from the inside out. [...]

On May 12, Mr. Musk announced on social media that “SpaceX is considering several locations domestically and internationally to build the world’s most advanced spaceports!” His announcement came on the heels of reports that a large parcel of land in coastal Louisiana may have been acquired by an anonymous aerospace company, widely rumored to be SpaceX.

These spaceports will allow Mr. Musk to create his own reality for other people to live in. He doesn’t need Mars. Mr. Musk has already built a colony of his own.

Mr. Musk often cites “Star Trek” as inspiration for founding SpaceX. “We want to make ‘Star Trek’ real, OK?” he said in January. But Starbase bears less similarity to the enlightened wonderland depicted in that 1960s television show than it does to the autocratic company towns of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Like Mr. Musk, the industrial titans of that era built their own private fiefs, not only to cement control over workers, but to realize their vision of an ideal society.

Perhaps the most grandiose company town of them all was Fordlandia, the sprawling city that Henry Ford built in the Brazilian rainforest to grow rubber trees. Fordlandia was Ford’s personal Utopia, an expression of his social views, his personal predilections and even his vegetarianism. Workers were forced to subsist on a diet heavy on brown rice, oatmeal and canned peaches, as detailed in Greg Grandin’s “Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City.” For amusement, there was square dancing — Ford loved square dancing — and poetry readings.

Fordlandia’s ghost haunts Mr. Musk’s colony. Corporate control is so all-encompassing at Starbase that a warning on the menu at its Astropub restaurant alerts diners to the “confidentiality and proprietary nature” of the fare. Students at its private Ad Astra school are guided on “hands-on experiential missions.” The interplanetary mission is even written into the job description for a facilities supervisor overseeing waste management and janitorial needs.

There's much more at the link. It's not pretty reading.

Public encounter with AI differs from elite conversations about it

Encountering and using AI is different than what a person may think about AI or data centers or job loss etc.

The public sentiment we are seeing regarding AI comes from straight forward polling questions, not from elite conversations.

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) June 9, 2026

Gen Z Musician First Time Reaction to Chicago - 25 or 6 to 4

This is a reaction video, a minor interest of mine these days. As the title says, we have a Gen Z musician reacting to a Boomer hit, Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4." This particular tune interests to me because I performed it many times back in the Ancient Days with the Saint Matthew Passion, a jazz-rock band in Baltimore based out of Johns Hopkins. Andiroo is himself a musician, keyboard and producer, so he loves making technical comments about the music. He obviously loves this tune, the intricate craftsmanship of it, as though that kind of intricate craftsmanship was a rare commodity in music.

To me, and the guys I played with, that's just how music is, and none of us were professional musicians. We were just college kids – well, young adults – performing music we loved. None of us regarded our own technical skill as particularly evolved, not on the level of Chicago. But we performed this tune, and others, well. To me, and many musicians I've played with since then, that's simply what music is about. No (particularly) big deal.

On Steven Spielberg, three vignettes

Wesley Morris, Why We Still Need Steven Spielberg, NYTimes, June 7, 2026.

The cultural importance of movies:

Lately, the idea of a Steven Spielberg has felt endangered. For more than 50 years, his imagery has epitomized American movies, maybe even epitomized America. He has been at the center of an industry that, if it’s not dying, is certainly diminished. The sort of original movies that made Spielberg Spielberg are virtually nonexistent, even though the two major flavors that now define the industry — global box-office smash and best picture nominee — are, with Spielberg, indistinguishable (start with “Jaws,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial”). More than once, he inhabited both modes within one calendar year: “Jurassic Park” in the summer of 1993, for instance, then “Schindler’s List” at the end of Hanukkah, perhaps the most triumphant single-year change-up any Hollywood director has had. (He’s still the most commercially successful director ever, and he’s tied, at 13, with William Wyler for directing the most best picture Oscar nominees.)

Popular art has always bonded us to one another, no matter what might have been cleaving us apart, no matter how different our lives or how our responses to that art diverged. And Spielberg’s films have been a premium adhesive. Not only the ones he directed but the dozens of swooshing, indelibly kooky hits unleashed by Amblin Entertainment, his production company: “Poltergeist,” “Gremlins,” “The Goonies,” the “Back to the Future” trilogy, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Arachnophobia.”

Spielberg’s stardom arose from the collision of capitalism, audacity and creative vision. His movies emerged alongside the arrival of cable television and proliferating advances in personal computing and home entertainment. I watched “E.T.” at the movies, devoured it on cable, played it on my Atari and let Michael Jackson sing me a lullaby the movie inspired him to write. (Spielberg: so titanic that the other king of pop worshiped his thrillers.)

But a kind of cultural malnourishment has set in. While you once needed a pair of hands to count the major studios, we’re on the verge of barely needing one. And the best, most lucrative ideas entail microwaved nostalgia that we all know by its legal nickname: I.P. The takeovers and reheating, the obscure metrics that ensure we never quite know exactly how popular anything is, it’s dispiriting: Pac-Man eating ghosts, algorithms keeping secrets.

Working through his parent's divorce:

“For years, I was working out my mom and dad’s divorce through my stories,” he told me. The split happened when Spielberg was about 15, but the marriage had begun to fade years before. The family dissolved, too. He went off to live with his father, Arnold, a computer engineer, in Los Angeles, while his three sisters remained in Phoenix with their mother, Leah, a classical pianist who used to operate a kosher deli. But it seems that living under the same roof didn’t significantly change how remote Arnold could feel to his son.

Over dinner one night, Spielberg told me about working on “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” with George Lucas. The movie reunites Harrison Ford’s Indiana with his father, a Holy Grail expert played by Sean Connery. “My contribution was: ‘OK, but I want to meet Indy’s dad, and I want them to have had years of estrangement and father neglecting son because the father was a workaholic. And this story will bring them back together again.’” When Spielberg said this, he still sounded wishful and a touch sad. Watched through the lens of his childhood, his movies can seem newly forlorn, someone blowing on a birthday cake gated with stubborn candles.

For centuries, we’ve lived with a myth that genius — male genius — expresses itself as wild eccentricity or madness, that the personality warrants a cult or a harem. Spielberg disorients in that regard. I, at least, needed a moment to absorb how familiar he felt, how familial. The man who made “E.T.” was eerily reminiscent of the woman who took me to see “E.T.” Both of them have in common a special intuition to anticipate needs we don’t know we have. My mother did it for a household. For more than half a century, Spielberg has been doing the same for a planet. [...]

Spielberg hasn’t been to see a therapist since he was in college. Instead, the movies are the arena in which he has worked on some of the mysteries he couldn’t solve on his own. What we experience as sorcery is, for him, a process of exorcism. “I can’t express enough how therapeutic and healthy it is for me to keep doing this job over and over and over again,” he said deliberatively, almost as if he was feeling this out. “I work so much out through this process. So much out. I get to bleed off some of the darkness instead of letting it fester inside me. You get to let it fester inside you.”

A six year old:

As we were getting ready to head over to “Oh, Mary!” Spielberg told me a story about the time his mother’s brother, Bernard, took him and his cousin, Paul, to visit the Lincoln Memorial. It was 1952 or ’53. He would’ve been 6. The three of them climbed the steps. “Suddenly I was standing at the foot of a scary giant,” he recalled. “I remember glancing up and being so terrified I could only look at the hands.” He fixated on how they “were overhanging the armrests” and felt the urge to flee. But something held him back. “When I turned around, I looked up at his face. At this statue. Of Lincoln. A calm washed over me. An instant connection washed over me.” His fear ceased. What arrived in its place was unabated curiosity. He began to read all about Lincoln and started making silhouette cutouts of him, an obsession you can see re-enacted in the opening scene of “Minority Report,” when a child makes a paper mask of Lincoln.

There's much more at the link.

125 years of women's fashion in America

1900 - 2025: 125 anos de evolução na moda feminina.

🎞️ vgraphs/IG. pic.twitter.com/SgVfBrH2dW

— Arquivo Curioso (@arquivocurioso) May 30, 2026

Danger, Will Robinson!

The Devil Wears Prada 2 [Media Notes 182]

I saw the original The Devil Wears Prada back in 2006, when I came out in theaters, and then again in 2022 on one of the streaming platforms. I can’t say that I remember much about it, but if it looked as good as The Devil Wears Prada 2, which I watched in a theater, then I probably liked it. Why? Because the current film is gorgeous and gorgeousness certainly counts for something in a movie. It surely counts for something, even something important. But I can’t carry the whole film.

And neither can a vibe. I’m talking about Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, the haughty editor of Runway magazine, a high-class fashion magazine. As soon as the film gets going you know that somewhere down the line that this b*tch Lady Boss will reveal herself to have, if not a heart of gold, at least one filled with crème brûlée. How do you know this? Because you’ve seen lots of movies and that’s how these roll. But you can’t hang the whole damn movie on that unveiling so that the revelation eclipses whatever events brought it about. That’s what Prada 2 does and, I’m willing at this point to assume, the original as well.

Somewhere within view of the end, Priestly is talking with Emily (played by Emily Blunt), a former assistant and explaining why she never promoted her within the magazine. She tells her: “You don't have what it takes. I'm sorry, but you're not a visionary. You're a vendor.” I know what the words mean, but in this context I’m afraid they don’t compute.

There’s nothing in the movie that gives meaning to the idea of a visionary editor of a fashion rag. We’re supposed to believe that that’s what Miranda is because, well, that’s what the plot requires of her, and that’s what she thinks of herself. That’s not enough. In The Aviator (2004) Martin Scorsese shows us what made Howard Hughes a visionary. Francis Ford Coppola does the same for failed auto maker Preston Tucker in Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). For that matter, the 2024 documentary, Martha, shows us that Martha Stewart was a visionary, and the first Lady Boss to become a billionaire. None of that, whatever it is, made it into the Prada films.

What we see are gorgeous clothes in beautiful settings. I hardly even noticed the “plot” in this film, which is about Runway being taken over by tech billionaire who has no interest in fashion. All he cares about is generating clicks he can sell to advertisers and settling his girlfriend, the afore-mentioned Emily, in as the new editor. The plot is foiled by Andy (Anne Hatheway), also from the old days (and the original film). What I’ll remember, however, is a beautiful light blue sport jacket in a subtle windowpane plaid worn by Nigel (Stanley Tucci), fashion director for the magazine.

No, I’m afraid there are no visionaries in the movie. Just vendors. High class vendors perhaps, but still vendors. All that talk about beauty and art doesn’t change that. 

* * * * * 

P.S. For very different look at the world of fashion, take a look at the Japanese series Atelier [Media Notes 110]. It's much more intimate, but also includes a central character reminiscent of Anna Wintour.