The New York Times generated a lot of online attention this week when they published a list of “The Thirty Greatest Living American Songwriters.” The list, which I found quite quirky (not to say peculiar), was compiled by six in-house critics at the Times, with some vaguely defined input from a list of contemporary musicians. The strangeness wasn’t just a function of which songwriters were included. It also followed from the prior decision to limit the parameters of the list in ways that irritated me. Why only living songwriters? (Paul Simon can make the list but Tom Petty and Prince can’t? Ok, I guess.) And why only Americans? Given the interpenetration of American, British, and Canadian music in our pop culture, that seems a little arbitrary. I’d have included all English-speaking songwriters, including those from Australia and New Zealand.

But anyway, the point of such lists is to generate conversation and controversy, and judged by that standard the Times hit it out of the park. It also prompted my favorite music critic (Steven Hyden) to publish his own list—which I liked much better than the one in the Times, and which has inspired me to do the same, though mine will be a little different than his.

That’s because I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and include songwriters from the beginning of the rock era (circa 1963), whether living or dead, and also include songwriters from across the English-speaking world. Unlike Hyden’s list, mine will also include short statements under the entries to give readers a sense of why I’ve included them. The end result is a long list, with 36 entries (and 50 individuals) instead of 30. There will also be no paywall on this post, so anyone who wants to read can do so. Please share as widely as you’d like.

A final preliminary word: I obviously can’t explain my reasons for excluding all of the artists who didn’t make the cut. It’s possible I forgot people I would have chosen otherwise. But it’s more likely I just don’t revere those absent songwriters as much as many others do. Sorry about that. As they say, there’s no accounting for taste. I promise I could justify each of those exclusions if pushed to do so, but attempting such a thing in advance is obviously impossible, given the seemingly infinite number of excluded artists.

The list below unfolds by decade, with each decade’s artists placed in a descending ranking from the very greatest to those merely very, very good.

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The 1960s

John Lennon, Paul McCartney—No surprise here for those who read my recent post about John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. I adore the Beatles from start to finish. The 200 or so songs John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote between 1962 and 1969 set the standard for pop songwriting going forward—simultaneously inspiring pretty much everyone who came after and usually managing to avoid being surpassed. Something else that’s pretty remarkable about them: Their solo work is, with a modest number of exceptions, vastly inferior to what they produced together, showing there was something truly magical about their collaboration. That’s why neither individual shows up elsewhere on this list. As solo artists, neither of them were great enough to warrant inclusion.

Bob Dylan—Some will object that Bob Dylan didn’t come at the very top, but sorry, this is my list, and I don’t think Dylan has the melodic/harmonic gifts of Lennon and McCartney. He does surpass both by quite a lot as a lyricist. But lyrics without a melody are poems, and this is a list about songwriting. Still, I’d place Dylan near the very top of any list of great songwriters no matter how many years were included for the ranking. He’s written a stupefying number of great songs down through the decades—songs that will be recorded and sung as long as people care about and appreciate popular music.

Leonard Cohen—Leonard Cohen belongs in a category of his own, since there is no songwriter I can think of with a greater discrepancy between the quality of the songs and the quality of their delivery. I much prefer Tom Waits’ notoriously abrasive voice to Cohen’s narrow range and colorless, often flat singing. And Cohen’s production and arrangement decisions consistently leave me baffled. His albums just sound terrible—dated, small, taking part in the worst sonic trends of the times in which they were recorded. Nearly unlistenable. But the songs! The lyrics, yes, but quite often his melodies, too. Exquisite. So I’m always left scrambling to find the best covers of Cohen’s incredible songs. Thankfully, there are plenty to choose from.

Paul Simon—What a career, what a list of songs, with Art Garfunkel, and without him. Fantastic, both musically and lyrically, from the mid-1960s on down to his most recent release in 2023.

Ray Davies—I’ve placed Davies higher than some others, despite a ratio of great to mediocre songs that’s less impressive than some of his peers, and also despite a shorter productive career than some others, because the quality of his best work with the Kinks is so astonishingly high.

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards—Has any band put out more great rock singles than The Rolling Stones? I doubt it—even though I don’t think they ever rivaled Lennon-McCartney for sheer overflowing creativity and artistic range and ambition. On the other hand, the Beatles were done by 1970, while the Stones kept on going at something close to top form through the 1980s. That matters.

Brian Wilson—The era of Brian Wilson’s creative peak with the Beach Boys is quite brief, but he reached such enormous heights in that period, with such an astonishing influence on the future of pop/rock songwriting that he has to be included here.

David Bowie—It feels a little odd to place David Bowie in the 1960s when he reached his multiple creative peaks during the 1970s and early ’80s, but his self-titled debut album and first hit single (“Space Oddity”) were released in 1969, so this is where he lands. If you doubt my comprehensive love for Bowie’s music and artistry, I challenge you to try and listen to all three episodes and 10+ hours of the Political Beats podcast in which I narrate and weigh in on his entire career with hosts Scot Bertram and Jeff Blehar.

John Fogerty—Another songwriter with a very narrow window of peak creativity who nevertheless knocked it out of the park to such an extent that he can’t possibly be excluded from a list like this. For a few years there at the end of the 1960s, Creedence Clearwater Revival could do no wrong, putting out great single after great single with apparent effortlessness. And they still sound as great today as they did then.

Elton John, Bernie Taupin—The sheer number of great songs on Elton John’s string of rapid-fire albums starting in 1969 and continuing on through the first half of the 1970s is mind-boggling, as is the fact that after parting ways for a period in the late 1970s, John and Taupin began to work together again in the early ’80s and returned to something close to their prior peak.

Pete Townshend—The Who started out as a solid British singles band competing against the Stones and the Kinks, but by 1969 they’d produced the first “rock opera” in Tommy. That double album, Who’s Next from 1971, and Quadrophenia (a second double-album rock opera from 1973) are a run of records as great as any band has produced. From there, things downshifted to a lower gear through the early ’80s, and then it was mostly over. But from 1969 to 1973, they could do no wrong, and Townshend’s spectacular songs were the foundation of the achievement.

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The 1970s

Bruce Springsteen—Yes, I’ve placed him at the head of the 1970s, which has some fierce competition. Now that we have several albums’ worth of additional music from the late ’70s and early ’80s that Bruce recorded and didn’t release at the time, I think it’s indisputable that from his debut in 1973 on through the release of Born in the USA in 1984, Springsteen was a songwriting juggernaut unlike just about anyone else. And this is on top of being possibly the greatest live performer in rock history. He did some great work after that point as well, but I’d have him in the lead here even if he had died in 1985. His accomplishments in these years is simply astonishing.

Elvis Costello—Just about the only artist who can give Springsteen a run for his money on absurdly high-quality songwriting productivity is Elvis Costello from his 1977 debut through the two fantastic albums he released in 1986 (King of America and Blood and Chocolate). If we include an album of outtakes he put out in 1987 (Out of Our Idiot), Costello released 13 albums in that decade. Three of them have 20 or more songs each for a total of about 188 songs in a wide range of genres, and all but a dozen or so written by Costello himself. It’s astonishing. His work from the late ’80s until the end of the ’90s remains extremely strong, with occasional gems scattered across his albums of the past quarter century as well. But his work during that initial decade is unsurpassed in its intelligence, verbal facility, passion, and melodic inventiveness. At his best, Costello was as good as rock/pop songwriting ever gets. (I wrote about his career here.)

Billy Joel—I will go to my grave an unapologetic defender of Billy Joel against his legion of snobby and tasteless detractors. (That’s right, I’m talking to you Ron Rosenbaum.) From Turnstiles in 1976 through An Innocent Man in 1984, Joel set an incredibly high bar for pop songwriting and sold a gazillion records in the process. His three previous albums and the three that followed that period are spottier affairs. But the six albums released in those eight years are masterpieces with remarkably little fat on them. Joel deserves every bit of the love and respect that’s rained down on him since the release last summer of the excellent two-part HBO documentary about his life and work. I highly recommend it to admirers and detractors alike.

Jackson Browne—I grew up enjoying Jackson Browne’s big FM radio hits of the late 1970s—“The Pretender” and “Running on Empty”—but I only came to appreciate and adore his earlier work much later in life. His first three albums—the 1972 debut, For Everyman (1973), and Late for the Sky (1974)—are jam-packed with wonderful songs, as are a number of his later albums. Anyone who could manage to write “These Days” as a teenager is someone aiming for a career as a top-rank songwriter, and he has more than fulfilled that promise.

Tom Petty—My favorite era of Petty’s career is the run of three Jimmy Iovine-produced albums from 1979 to 1982 (Damn the Torpedoes, Hard Promises, and Long After Dark). That was the Heartbreakers at their swaggering best as a band. But others adore the solo and band albums Jeff Lynne produced in the late ’80s and early ’90s, while others gravitate to 1995’s Wallflowers. But across all of those eras, and beyond, are Petty’s lean and muscular songs, many of which became hits and long-term staples on classic-rock radio. He’s indisputably one of the all-time greats.

Tom Waits—If Tom Waits hadn’t radically altered his style of singing and songwriting after his first two albums, he’d likely be known today as a talented down-market singer-songwriter in the mold of The Eagles and Jackson Browne. Waits came out of that same early ’70s LA/Laurel Canyon/Troubadour club scene, but with his Small Change album from 1976, he made a radical left turn. No longer merely singing about beatniks, drunks, whores, and bums, he now sang like he was starring in a musical about them, with a gravelly croak and often slurred phrasing. Then, in the early ’80s, he turned left again, this time embracing experimental, highly percussive arrangements that sounded like adaptations from a Captain Beefheart album recorded in a junkyard. The results have been extraordinary and inimitable. And if you’d like to listen to me talk for several hours about all of it across two podcast episodes, once again with Scot Bertram and Jeff Blehar, you can do so here.

Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel—They’re listed together, obviously, because they were both members of the prog-rock band Genesis. Gabriel was its conceptual visionary and lead singer from the band’s founding until he quit in 1976 to pursue a solo career, after which drummer Collins took over lead vocals and guided the band toward a level of international pop stardom no one would have predicted in the mid-70s. With the band and on his own, Collins became one of the biggest pop sensations of the ’80s, while Gabriel’s solo venture started out every bit as artsy as one would have predicted in 1976 but went on to join his former bandmates in the chart-topping stratosphere with the So album in 1986. Both proved to be top-notch songwriters in their different ways.

Sting—Given how ubiquitous The Police were in the late 1970s and first half of the ’80s, it’s kind of amazing to realize that they were really only creatively active for six years, from 1977 to 1983. They came back together to play live on a few occasions over subsequent decades, but that was pretty much it for the band. Yet on its five studio albums and across his decades-long solo career, Sting has proven himself one of the greats.

Prince—I can’t deny it: My list is extremely white. Sorry about that. I’m a white guy. I grew up listening to white guys (and a few white women, coming up below), and that’s what I know and love. (I’ve adored some Stevie Wonder songs over the years, but I don’t know his catalogue well, and it begins with a dozen album made when he was a child during the 1960s that I’ve never even heard, so I didn’t include him here.) But Prince was a force of nature with stunning talent as a songwriter, musician, and performer. No list like this could go forward without bowing down before him.

Jeff Lynne—I’ll be honest: I really can’t stand Jeff Lynne as a producer. That includes his immensely successful work with the Traveling Wilburys and Tom Petty. The click-track drums and mechanical arrangements sound like the aural equivalent of a movie directed by Wes Anderson, never one of my favorite filmmakers, with pristine and perfectly symmetrical interlocking metronomic parts killing any sense of groove, spontaneity, or feeling. But as a songwriter? Oh man, ELO is overflowing with gorgeous melodies that compete with the Beatles at their best for joyous tunefulness. There was a period there in the ’70s when Lynne could simply do no wrong.

Mark Knopfler—I’m a big Dire Straits fan, though that’s as much about Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing as his songs. But throughout a long and consistently excellent low-key solo career it’s his songs that really stand out. He’s written dozens and dozens of lovely tunes. Have you listened? You really should.

Chris Difford, Glenn Tillbrook—In retrospect, it was silly and unfair for the press to have gone so far out of its way to dub Chris Difford and Glenn Tillbrook of Squeeze the next Lennon and McCartney. But it’s also possible to hear why they did so. Squeeze in its late ’70s/early ’80s heyday was a very Beatlesque band, with intricate melodies and sometimes adventurous harmonic shifts. Add in Tillbrook’s vocals, which resembled McCartney’s just enough to make listeners do a double take, and it all makes sense. Those were also just damn catchy tunes. Enduringly so.

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The 1980s

REM (Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe)—What kind of a kid was I? The kind who read music reviews in the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times every Sunday. That’s how I discovered REM, when the paper published a review of the band’s spectacular debut album Murmur. It was 1983, I was 13, and the review made it sound so compelling that I saved up money from my paper route so I could buy the album. (There was no other way to hear it, since the mainstream FM radio stations in New York City and southern Connecticut wouldn’t play a brand-new band with no hits or following to speak of.) Once I brought it home and listened to it on my turntable, I was instantly hooked. I played the hell out of it for months and did the same for every album REM put out over the next three decades. They remain on regular rotation in the Linker household to this day. For my money, they wrote more great songs than any other band that launched during the 1980s.

Neil Finn—I think the four albums Crowded House released between 1986 and 1993 are fantastic and criminally underappreciated in this country. (The band hails from New Zealand and are superstars Down Under.) The primary reason those albums are so great is that singer and lead guitarist Neil Finn is a songwriter on the highest levels. You all know their first single “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” which has become a modern standard, but there are so many other great songs you’ve probably never heard. Finn also wrote good songs for Split Enz, which preceded Crowded House, more good songs on a couple of collaborations with his older brother Tim Finn (a founding member of Split Enz), and a string of solo records starting with 1998’s Try Whistling This. (You can read me on his 2017 solo album here.) I’m less fond of the Crowded House records released since the band reformed in 2006. But that hardly matters. The early records remain there to be listened to and enjoyed.

Aimee Mann—I wrote a heartfelt tribute to Aimee Mann a couple of years ago right here, so I can just point you there if you want to read more. Here I’ll just say that she’s an extremely gifted songwriter who in a just world would far more widely known and appreciated than she is. But I try not to let that bother me, because I know how good she is and can listen to her rich catalogue of great songs any time I want. I often do and always will. You should join me.

U2 (Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen, Jr.)—For some reason, people love to hate on U2. I’m perfectly happy to concede that their career has seen several cycles of ups and downs when it comes to song quality. But they’ve released three masterpieces (The Joshua Tree [1987], Achtung Baby [1991], and All That You Can’t Leave Behind [2000]) and several other solid records, and that’s more than enough to place them at or near the very top of the game. I think they’re owed a little love from the songwriting afficionados.

The Smiths (Morrissey, Johnny Marr)—The Smiths were an active band for just five years (from 1982 to 1987), but they put out 70-odd songs in those years. That’s pretty prolific, especially when you begin listening and realize how great so many of those songs are. Yes, that includes Morrissey’s often comically self-pitying and emotionally overwrought lyrics, sung in a distinctively moaning croon. (As a deeply unhappy child of divorce, I felt back in the day like he was singing to me personally about my teenage misery.) Somehow, when blended with Marr’s chiming, angular electric guitar riffs and lush acoustic guitar strums, and backed up by a propulsive post-punk rhythm section (the late Andy Rourke on bass and Mike Joyce on drums), it works perfectly.

The 1990s

Fountains of Wayne (Chris Collingwood, Adam Schlesinger)—Some will be scandalized: How could I rank Fountains of Wayne above the songwriters from Radiohead and Oasis? Well, I can do it because I think Collingwood and Schlesinger are better. They released five albums between 1996 and 2011, and all but one of them (2007’s Traffic and Weather) is fantastic. What if the Beatles had been an American post-grunge rock band? They might sound an awful lot like the Fountains of Wayne. Then there are both songwriters’ side projects (Collingwood’s 2016 Look Park album; Schlesinger’s band A Perfect Circle, a flood of songwriting for the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend TV show, and other gigs), which also tend to be very high quality. These guys were the real deal, which only makes Schlesinger’s tragically premature death from COVID in 2020 even sadder. How many great songs will never be written as a result? I shudder when I contemplate it.

Noel Gallagher—I’ve never been the biggest Oasis fan in the world, but I appreciate their songs and really like Noel Gallagher’s solo work as well. The guy really knows how to craft a great, soaring chorus. That’s more challenging than it looks, and we should be grateful for every person who does it on the highest levels. Gallagher is indisputably one of the few.

Radiohead (Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood)—I’m not a Radiohead stan. But I do appreciate, respect, and often enjoy their work, at least within limits. My favorite Radiohead album is 1995’s The Bends, which shows them at the peak of their songwriting powers, just before they took a turn into experimentation that I think ended up going way too far. OK Computer from 1997 is about two thirds masterpiece and one third overly indulgent. And then that ratio shifts to something more like 90 percent overly indulgent with Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001). (My line on those albums is that they’re great; all that’s missing is the songs.) They came back a bit with Hail to the Thief from 2003 and nailed it with 2007’s In Rainbows, a late-career masterpiece that rivals The Bends for top spot in their catalogue. After that I lose interest again. But there’s undeniably greatness there. I just wish there were somewhat more of it. What can I say? I can be a greedy bastard.

Tori Amos—I really felt the absence of Tori Amos on the Times list. She’s American. She’s alive. She put out one of the greatest debut albums in pop-rock history (Little Earthquakes from 1992), she’s powerfully influenced nearly every female singer-songwriter since then, and she released her 18th album last week. A few of those records are reworkings of old songs or other niche projects. But most contain new material, and a good number of them are very strong. (My favorites, in addition to the debut, are Songs from the Choirgirl Hotel [1998], Scarlett’s Walk [2002], and The Beekeeper [2005].) There’s more than enough excellence in Amos’ catalogue to warrant inclusion on any list of the best songwriters. (I interviewed Amos for Newsweek back in 2012, if you have any interest in reading that.)

Dan Wilson—Everyone knows “Closing Time” by the band Semisonic; it was one of the most ubiquitous songs of the late 1990s and still gets a lot of play today. But most people don’t know that the guy who wrote and sang the song has gone on to be one of the most prolific and accomplished songwriters of the past three decades. He’s written songs with just about everyone. You almost certainly know a few of them. The most omnipresent is undoubtedly Adele’s “Someone Like You,” which will be supplying Wilson with a steady stream of royalties for the rest of his life. But there are so, so many others. Wilson has also put out a few very strong solo records (my favorite is 2014’s Love Without Fear), a couple of EPs, and a ton of singles. If you love great songwriting, Dan Wilson has to be on your radar. He’s among the very best working today.

Rufus Wainwright—There was a moment in the mid-2000s when I thought Rufus Wainwright was going to go down as the greatest singer-songwriter of his generation. He released a very strong self-titled debut in 1998 and then followed it up with three masterpieces: Poses from 2001, Want One from 2003, and Want Two from 2004. Those albums still blow me away today, and I’m sure they always will. But then things started to go sideways in Wainwright’s career. Subsequent albums have occasional home runs on them, but they are rarer now, with self-indulgent experiments more common. And Wainwright himself spends a lot of time doing other kinds of things—albums and tours focused on covers of other artists’ songs (he’s a fabulous singer), writing operas, setting Shakespeare sonnets to music, and so forth. But those early records are so great that he easily earns a place on my list. (I also interviewed Wainwright for Newsweek back in 2012. You can read that here.)

The 2000s

Taylor Swift—This one’s a no-brainer. No one from her generation comes close to matching, let alone surpassing, Taylor Swift’s capacity to churn out perfectly crafted pop confections. I’ve written about how that can be an artistic problem (she needs an editor!), but it’s an awfully nice problem to have.

Jason Isbell—Isbell’s career started in 2001 when he joined the southern rock band Drive-By Truckers at the age of 22, but he has done his best work as a solo artist, with 2013’s Southeastern receiving my vote as quite possibly the best album of the 2010s. Most of the album’s 12 songs are truly great, and all of them are at least very good, both musically and lyrically. Subsequent albums with his band (the 400 Unit) and on his own have been more of a mixed bag. But there are always strong songs in the mix, and Southeastern is the kind of album that set an astonishingly high bar. (I wrote about Isbell here.)

Just a quick postscript here to explain why there are only two artists in the 2000s and none after that point: It’s because I don’t think it’s possible to make these kinds of judgments without getting at least a bit of distance on the songs and the artists. Plus, as many of the above paragraphs reveal, it’s often a good idea to judge an artist’s long-term track record before issuing comprehensive judgment on their body of work as a whole.

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I never feel like more of a normie than when I tell people I adore The Beatles. What could be more ordinary? Doesn’t everyone love The Beatles? Actually, I’m well aware that not everybody does, since even a few in my relatively small circle of friends actively dislikes them. But the truth is I take pity on these unfortunate souls, much as I would upon learning of a child being born deaf. Rather than lacking the physical capacity to perceive sound, these people are merely incapable of enjoying and appreciating the intricate beauty and overflowing artistic possibilities of popular music at its peak.

I fell in love with The Beatles in the spring of 1973, when I was just 3-1/2 years old. That’s when my father brought home and began playing the just-released “blue” double-album compilation of the band’s work from 1967 to 1970. My parents kept the “hi-fi” stereo with a built-in turntable on a low table that I could reach. For weeks I would rouse the house early in the morning by dropping the needle on “Hey Jude” and letting it play through “Revolution” at the end of Side 2 of the first record—a perfect one-two punch of McCartney and Lennon, respectively, showing that even then, I refused to choose between the two songwriters. Both wrote great songs, together and separately, just as they each sang beautifully, as individuals and in harmony.

I’m not the kind of obsessive who reads every book and watches every documentary about the group. A few years ago, I spent an hour or so watching and fast-forwarding through Peter Jackson’s eight-hour Get Back film and found that to be quite enough. I’ve read just a small handful of books on the band down through the decades. So it was not inevitable I would purchase and read Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, which was published last year. But the title instantly grabbed me. What a novel and yet also obvious way to tell the story of The Beatles. I can’t believe no one thought to take that approach until now. I’m still amazed by that, now that I’ve finished the book. But I’m also extremely grateful that Leslie got to be the one to write it—because it is an extraordinary achievement, one that touched me deeply, helping me to appreciate Lennon and McCartney as people, as incredibly gifted artists, and as male friends struggling to make sense of and express their intense, overpowering love for one another.

Beginnings

John and Paul met and became fast friends in July 1957, when they were teenagers: Lennon 16 and McCartney 15. Both came from working-class homes in Liverpool, England. Lennon’s early family life was an emotionally wrenching, chaotic mess. His father Alfred was a merchant seaman who showed little interest in parental responsibilities. Neither did his mother Julia. When John was 5, “Alf” returned from his latest voyage at sea and kidnapped the boy, eventually intending to take him to Australia. Julia tracked them down and confronted them two weeks later, a few miles away. John ended up going back home with his mother that night; he didn’t see his father again for 20 years. But John spent most of his remaining childhood living with his aunt Mimi after Julia proved herself unfit to raise the boy. (She was more interested in drinking and conducting one-night stands than in being a mother.) John’s aunt gave him care and attention, yet he nonetheless spent much of his youth longing for the love of absent and indifferent parents.

Paul McCartney’s family life was much more stable and loving, granting the boy (and later the man) greater confidence and uncomplicated ambition than John. Though Paul also knew suffering: his mother died of breast cancer eight months before he met John, and that loss provided a shared foundation of pain and loss with his new friend.

Their bond was strengthened further when, a year after they met, John’s mother, who had maintained a distanced relationship with him while he lived with her sister, was struck and killed by a car. John was devastated by the loss and spent much of the next two years indulging in hard, rage-filled drinking. He regained his equilibrium after that, but his personality would remain volatile, marked by dramatic mood swings, a horrible temper (with occasional acts of violence), extreme jealousy, and a tendency to fall with wild-eyed enthusiasm for fads and gurus, followed by angry, embittered disappointment when they invariably failed to soothe the aching wound inside him.

Before and throughout this early period of their friendship, John and Paul spent endless hours together. John quickly invited Paul to join his band (The Quarry Men, forerunner of The Beatles), so they played together at rehearsals and occasional gigs. But they also met privately after school, usually in the front parlor of the McCartney home or in one of their bedrooms. Sitting on chairs or the bed, they would face each other, holding acoustic guitars, attempting to play their favorite songs from the radio or else trying their hand at writing songs together.

As Leslie notes early on in the book, songwriting collaborations—Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, the Gershwins—usually involve one member of the pair writing lyrics while the other crafts the music. Elton John and Bernie Taupin would later follow that model. But Lennon and McCartney didn’t practice that kind of division of labor. Theirs was a more holistic collaboration. Both wrote music, both wrote lyrics. Sometimes they would start with lyrics one shared with the other. More often, they would begin playing a chord sequence together while one or the other would try singing a melody with wordless syllables which the other would work to refine in real time, with lyrics crafted later.

Their earliest songs emerged out of this kind of free-form collaborative improvisation. Later, it became more common for one or the other to share the rudiments of a song he had begun on his own, which they would complete together, with one acting as the author and the other as editor. Usually, the person who began the song would sing it, regardless of how much the other contributed to the final product. The exception would often be for the bridge (the eight-bar section usually placed after the second chorus and before the third verse, sometimes repeated a second time later in the track), which the other member of the partnership would frequently contribute to the song and then be tasked with singing. (Think of “A Hard Day’s Night,” a John song to which Paul contributed the bridge, or “We Can Work It Out,” a Paul song to which John contributed the bridge.) As part of the songwriting process, the two teens would often stare intently at each other as they played their guitars, separated only by inches, focusing on one another’s mouths as they refined the phrasing of the melody and lyrics and crafted complex vocal harmonies.

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The Middle of the Journey

Leslie tells the story of John and Paul’s collaboration and turbulent friendship in chronological order, with most chapters focused on a single Lennon-McCartney song, using it as a prism to refract the rapidly evolving artistry of their music and lyrics, as well as their deep interpersonal bonds and fractious tensions. After the band breaks up in 1970, Leslie looks at several songs from each man’s solo career in order to shed light on their attempts to get past the anger, hurt, bad blood, and legal battles surrounding the split to renew their friendship and express their enduring love for each other.

What emerges is a story of an incredibly fruitful creative partnership—and mutual love that struggles to express itself. Their collaboration was intensely competitive but also filled with joy, inside jokes, and camaraderie. Their intense love of music and ability to make it together became a private language for conveying and sharing emotions. On the road, as The Beatles rocketed into high orbit beyond the fame of any musical act in the world, John and Paul would run off to spend time together with their guitars to play, write, and sing in shared hotel rooms. The experience made them extremely close. Yet they only rarely praised each other’s work. That could be hurtful, but it also spurred each of them on to ever-greater songwriting ambition. Each wanted to be the best they could be at their craft, with their excellence measured by the (always very sparing) approval they would win from the audience of one that mattered most of all to them both.

At the start of the story, John is at the helm. The Quarry Men was his group, and his songs were most of the first Beatles hits and dominated the band’s early albums. But Paul ascended quickly, with his contributions taking up a greater share of album tracks over time and doing at least as much as his songwriting partner to push the band to higher levels of creativity, ambition, and experimentation. (Leslie is very effective at showing how John worked in the years following the breakup to shape public perception of the band in such a way that he came to be viewed as its main artistic force, with Paul mainly portrayed as a craftsman of frivolous pop tunes.) By the time of the band’s demise, Paul had been the lead composer on more of their #1 hits than John, his songs were covered by other artists at much higher rates, and he had been serving as the group’s de facto leader and taskmaster for years.

John’s diminishing role had several causes, among the most significant being his foray into drug use (first psychedelics, then narcotics). That appears to have begun, as it did for the rest of the Beatles (and for much of their generation), as a form of boundary pushing. They were eager for new and intense experiences, for thinking outside of bourgeois boxes, and taking drugs was a quick, easy, and often fun shortcut to achieving a longed-for higher state of consciousness. But in John’s case, the LSD and heroin also appear to have been a form of self-medication for what certainly sounds, in retrospect, like depression. Unfortunately, the treatment arguably proved worse than the disease, as John began to succumb to stretches of inactivity and lethargy followed by bouts of self-loathing.

Paul was there to pick up the slack, but this change in the relative stature of each in the band came with complications. John was resentful of Paul’s almost manic productivity, sometimes lashing out in passive-aggressive ways about it, and yet the band’s continued viability increasingly depended on it. Paul, for his part, felt uncomfortable taking on more of a leadership role, because he feared John’s rage and lashing tongue, but also because he vastly preferred having an equal partner in crafting Beatlemusic.

But that became increasingly rare. The real troubles appear to have begun in February 1968, when the band traveled to Rishikesh, India to learn about meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. At first John thrived sitting at the feet of a religious figure he greatly respected. He and other members of the band would listen to lectures and meditate for part of the day, followed by hours when he and Paul would disappear to write music together. (Later that year, the mountain of songs they composed in India would appear on the double album The Beatles, usually referred to as The White Album.)

Then something happened. We don’t know the precise details, but Paul left India before John, as planned, and then John quickly became enraged at the Maharishi, apparently for sleeping with women staying at the ashram. It seems odd that this would provoke such an intense reaction from a man who’d slept with countless women behind the back of his own wife (Cynthia Lennon) while touring the world—unless it exposed as profane a teacher John had allowed himself to revere as authentically holy.

John returned to England furious, and when he sought validation for his feelings of betrayal from Paul, Paul apparently gave him the verbal equivalent of an eyeroll. That left John feeling even more deeply betrayed and abandoned, this time by his closest friend. Terribly hurt, he leapt immediately into an intense romantic relationship with conceptual artist Yoko Ono, whom he had met in late 1966, while Paul pursued a relationship of his own with Linda Eastman, an accomplished photographer from a prominent American family.

The band would remain breathtakingly prolific over the next year and a half, but their time together was now fraught in a way it never had been before. The joyous moments were rarer and interspersed by irritations, intentional provocations, and jealous rages. Though John would sometimes make joking remarks about the possibility of he and Paul being gay, there’s no evidence they ever acted on such impulses with each other. But that they once enjoyed an unusual level of intense emotional intimacy is undeniable—as is the reality that this intimacy quickly came to an end once Yoko and Linda had entered in the picture.

Both men found the rapid diminishment of that closeness extremely difficult to navigate. Both of their guards were now up. John was increasingly insecure about his status as both an artist and Paul’s friend. Paul was newly insecure about whether John still wanted him as a friend and collaborator at all. They kept coming back together because they loved making music so much. But the former exuberance was increasingly crowded out by bad feelings, hurtful comments, bitterness, and unresolved misunderstandings. It was as if each of them had decided to seek fulfillment in the arms of a romantic partner when formerly they found it only in each other’s musical embrace.

The End of Friendship

All of this bottled-up tension exploded into recriminations in the events surrounding the group’s breakup. Over the next few years, John repeatedly laid into Paul in cruel and unjustifiable ways in interviews and song lyrics. Paul, for his part, at first struggled with depression and then got himself out of it by throwing himself into launching a hugely successful solo career and new band project (Wings). By the mid-’70s, with lawsuits settled, the two men began talking on the phone from time to time and occasionally saw each other in person. Their interactions were warmer now, but John’s volatility still sometimes got in the way. That didn’t prevent each of them from expressing extreme affection for each other in interviews and to mutual friends and acquaintances.

When John was murdered in late 1980, shortly after the release of his first solo album in five years, Paul took it very hard, though in characteristic fashion, he mostly kept his suffering private. The rare exception is the song “Here Today” from Paul’s 1982 album Tug of War, which is the subject of Leslie’s final chapter. All the world expected some kind of musical tribute to John on the album, Paul’s first since his friend’s death. For the occasion, Paul went small. The song is just two-and-a-half minutes long. Paul plays an acoustic guitar and is accompanied by a string section after the first stanza. It is a song of great tenderness and emotional honesty, Paul’s characteristic reticence momentarily dropped.

And if I said I really knew you well
What would your answer be
If you were here today?
Here today

Well, knowing you, you’d probably laugh
And say that we were worlds apart
If you were here today
Here today

But as for me
I still remember how it was before
And I am holding back the tears no more
I love you

What about the time we met?
Well, I suppose that you could say that we were playing hard to get
Didn’t understand a thing
But we could always sing

What about the night we cried
Because there wasn’t any reason left to keep it all inside?
Never understood a word
But you were always there with a smile

And if I say I really loved you
And was glad you came along
Then you were here today
For you were in my song
Here today

There’s so much going on in this short song: Two open professions of love. A reference to “playing hard to get” when they first met. Two confessions of crying—once in the past when they shed tears together, emotional defenses dropped, “because there wasn’t any reason left to keep it all inside,” and a second time while grieving in solitude for the loss of his departed friend. And an admission that he and John never really “understood a thing” about each other, or about what drew them so powerfully to one another.

Love has many meanings—erotic love, filial love, Platonic love. But we lack a word to capture with precision the kind of love that connected John Lennon and Paul McCartney—though some writers have tried to describe and plumb its mysteries. I had them in mind as I devoured Leslie’s book, and the fact that in his final pages the author discusses them explicitly is what elevated John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs to the highest levels in my mind.

First he quotes Plato’s Symposium, in which the character of the comic playwright Aristophanes describes how “a pair of friends can be ‘lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy’ yet unable to ‘explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has toward the other does not appear to be the desire of sexual intercourse, but of something else, which the soul of either evidently desires but cannot identify.”

Then he turns to Michel de Montaigne and his friendship with writer and jurist Étienne de La Boétie. The two men were intense friends for six years before the latter died at the age of just 32 in 1563. Leslie quotes Montaigne on how their friendship began: “We sought each other before we met … from reports we had each heard of the other…. And at our first meeting, which happened by chance at a great feast and town gathering, we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together, that from that moment on nothing could be as close as we were to one another.”

Leslie goes on: “When La Boétie died, Montaigne was brokenhearted. He never stopped grieving for him, and his pain only increased with age. In an essay called ‘On Friendship’ he wrote about his feelings for La Boétie, without naming him, transmuting the deeply personal into the universal. He struggled to articulate why he loved his friend so much…. In the end, after multiple scratchings out, he settled on a simple formulation: ‘Because it was him; because it was me.’”

“Because it was John; because it was Paul”—with those words, Ian Leslie’s book comes to close. I can’t imagine a more fitting, humane ending to this remarkable portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most fruitful friendships.

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A couple of announcements: First, The Unpopulist, a must-read for those aiming to fight back against the rise of right-wing populism in the US and around the world, is holding a membership drive. Please consider giving them your support for their important work. Second, I have a few stints of travel over the next few weeks. That will make posting more erratic than normal. I’ll have a post up by the end of next week (the Friday after Christmas), another early in the week of New Year’s Day, and then the next one toward the end of the week of January 5, 2026. After that, I’ll be back to my usual two-posts-a-week schedule. I wish all of you happy holidays and hope you know how much I appreciate you being here, reading my writing, and engaging with and sharing it. Now to today’s rather unusual post!

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I don’t think I’ve ever done a post like this one. The best way to describe it is to call it a public service announcement. For the first few months following the event it describes, I had no intention of writing about it because it didn’t fit easily in any of the three newsletters I write under the title of Notes from the Middleground. But as I’ve told more people in my life about my experience this past August, a number of them have implored me to share it publicly so my readers can be made aware of what’s happening out there in the world. One of these people is Yascha Mounk, founder of Persuasion, who at the end of November wrote a post of his own like this one.

What’s happening is that technology is enabling the scammers and crooks who have always been around, thriving in the libertarian funhouse of American democracy, to scale unprecedented, elaborate heights of deception. It goes far beyond the phishing emails and spam phone calls we all contend with every day—messages or verbal deceptions that use some lie or a ruse to get you to give up your password or bank account info or Social Security number, or to click on a link that promptly floods your hard drive with malware that cripples your computer, destroying its content or stealing personal information or turning it into a hostage to be used for the extortion of various forms of ransom.

All of those are bad enough—though if your experiences are anything like mine, also pretty easy to avoid. Fool me once, shame on you; try to fool me 973 times in a calendar year, shame on you even more. Elementary reasoning and experience is sufficient to avoid most of these. Nearly all of the rest can be deflected using skills conferred by the mandatory trainings required by the human-resource departments of most organizations these days.

But what happened to me on the morning of August 14 was something else entirely.

A Warrant for My Arrest

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I began last year’s list of my favorite songs by noting how alienated I felt looking at year-end lists of top artists according to music critics. Who are all these people? That made me feel like an old man. But then I noted that the people I listened to in 2024 more than any others, according to Apple Music (I’m not a Spotify guy), were nicely distributed across the past five decades of pop culture. I wasn’t some fossil who just kept listening to the same stuff I did when I was a teenager and an early 20-something, which are the years when a person’s musical taste gets most fully shaped. I continued to listen to new music and search for quality amidst the blizzard of new material blowing in from the digital capitalist marketplace. Not bad for an old fuddy-duddy, I concluded.

But here’s the truth: Though I do continue to search for new music well into my 50s, what I’m searching for is a lot like what I listened to as a young man: guitar- or piano-based pop and rock. I love melody, and a Beatles-inspired harmonic palette. I love passionate vocals, even when the singing is far from perfect. Lyrics matter, but far less than the tune. Unless the words are immediately ridiculous, I often don’t even attend to them until I’ve begun humming the melody. Hooks don’t matter much to me, and neither does rhythm, with certain rare exceptions. My taste runs toward the artsy and away from the carefully team-crafted confections that dominate the pop charts these days.

The Apple Music algorithm knows all of this about me, obviously. So do my kids. So does my brother (who released a four-song EP and three singles this year—please check them out!). Put them all together, and I have a steady stream (pun intended) of new music flowing my way. The songs below, and in some cases the albums they came from, are the ones that grabbed me, held my attention, and embedded themselves in my mind more than any others this year.

1. “No Happy Endings”—Emma Swift (Album: The Resurrection Game)

Though I loved Taylor Swift’s pandemic records (Folklore and Evermore), I agree with the critical consensus that the album she released this year (The Life of a Showgirl) was weak. The Swift I gravitated to this year was Emma Swift (no relation I’m aware of). Indeed, several songs on her album The Resurrection Game showed up at the very top of my most-streamed lists this year, which is impressive, given that the record was only released three months ago.

Swift first came to my attention a few years ago, when I happened upon her album of Bob Dylan covers (Blonde on the Tracks). I’m a sucker for Dylan covers because I simultaneous think he’s one of the greatest songwriters in history and usually don’t care for the way he presents his own music. I depend on other artists to perform his songs in a way that my ear will find more palatable. Judged by that standard, Swift hit it out of the park. As her playful album title implies, Swift’s choice of songs is heavily weighted to Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks, which I consider his two strongest records. And her voice and arrangement choices really work for me. I was especially moved by her revelatory cover of “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” a lesser-known track from Blonde on Blonde that’s been a long-time favorite of mine. (Dylan’s version contains much of Elvis Costello’s future career in its DNA.) Swift slows it down and infuses it with just the right amount of longing and self-loathing, while also bringing out the beauty of its melody. I also love her version of Blonde on Blonde’s marathon side-long closing track, “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” a slow, lilting waltz that serves as the perfect conduit for conveying Dylan’s surrealist flood of disorienting metaphors about his wife at the time, Sara Lownds.

But Swift isn’t just a singer and interpreter of other people’s work. She also writes songs, and The Resurrection Game has some great ones on it. Most of them reflect on her struggle with depression—falling into it, crawling her way back from it, and ongoing efforts to keep it at bay. I could share any number of tracks from the record, but I’ve chosen “No Happy Endings” because it’s the one that moves me the most—and one that delves most deeply into the theme of “resurrection” that gives the album its title. It also gives a good sense of the album’s sound: dreamy, reverb-saturated ballads that sound a little like latter-day Lana Del Rey crossed with a touch of Patsy Cline. (Swift lives in Nashville, but she was born in Australia.)

The song’s lyrics are also well-crafted and powerful in their honesty and vulnerability. The first verse begins like this:

I’ve come up for air
After years underground
Still got the taste
Of dirt in my mouth
Delicate, delicate as a skeleton
Holding a jar of flowers

And just like those flowers
I am wild and I’m blue
I’ve come back for the spring
And I’ve come back for you
But everything, everything changes
Maybe you have too

She’s back from the nearly dead, trying to reconnect, but that doesn’t mean she’s acquired the capacity to deny the realities that plunged her underground in the first place. We learn that with uncommon power in the opening of song’s third verse:

Let’s make love in the dark
The way old people do

Those lines hit me like a bolt of lightning when I first heard them. Why? Because I turned 56 and celebrated my 30th wedding anniversary this year. Because I’m getting old much faster than I anticipated, and I crave art that understands and reflects back to me the often brutal truths of that ineluctable process. In that respect, Emma Swift’s wonderful album was just what I needed this year. Give “No Happy Endings” a try, and then maybe dip into the title track, “Impossible Air,” “Signing Off with Love,” and the rest of the record.

2. “No One Knows Us”—Brandi Carlile (Album: Returning to Myself)

I’ve liked Brandi Carlile’s music for a long time without ever becoming a true fan of her work. She writes appealing songs, but her voice is often recorded and mixed quite loudly. Especially when she goes to the top of her range, the tonal quality of her singing, especially its wavering vibrato, irritates my ear. So I’ve mostly observed and appreciated her work more than actually enjoyed it. That began to change with her 2021 album In These Silent Days, which included several songs I quite liked, and with her latest release, Returning to Myself, I can finally say I’ve been converted.

I give a decent amount of credit for that to Aaron Dessner of The National, who produced or co-produced four of the songs on the record and co-wrote my two favorite tracks. In his work with Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and other pop stars, Dessner has shown an uncanny ability to bring celebrities down to earth, slowing them down, lowering the volume, getting them to write and record music that sounds more intimate and emotionally open than they often do. That ability helps to rein in Carlile on her 2025 record, softening some of her rougher edges and allowing her to express intense feelings without hectoring. The best examples are on “A War with Time,” “Anniversary,” and the song I’ve chosen to highlight, “No One Knows Us.”

3. “The Subway”—Chappell Roan (A single)

I wrote about Chappell Roan last year. Like millions of music lovers, I was blown away by her debut album (The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess). There’s no new pop artist of the past few years I’d be willing to bet on having a longer and more successful career ahead of them. Roan’s raw talent as a songwriter and singer is astonishing. And as if wishing to confirm that conviction, she dropped a single this year that shows she’s not a flash in the pan. “The Subway” is a heartsick tribute to a former lover whose visage continues to haunt the singer on public transit. The tunefully mid-tempo verses come to an arresting halt as the music mostly drops away for a whispered chorus. That surprising production decision threatens to drain the energy of the song at the moment when one expects it to spike. The reason it works is a delightful shift that takes place after the second chorus, when the song shifts into a new, very different section that continues for the rest of track. Roan and several background singers repeat a pair of playfully ambiguous lines—“She’s got a way / She got away”—as the gorgeous melody repeats and evolves, rising higher and higher into the stratosphere as it goes on. I dare you to listen to “The Subway” and refrain from singing those lines by the end. All I know is I can’t pull it off—or resist spontaneously exclaiming at the end of song, “That’s so damn good.”

4. “Pickleball”—Ruston Kelly (Album: Pale, Through the Window)

I had some nice things to say about a Ruston Kelly song on my 2023 list. Kelly was back with a new album this year, and it has some winsome tunes on it. There were limits to how much I could get into it, though, because, you see, the man has fallen deeply, achingly, gloriously, droolingly in love—and I just find an album full of songs about the all-encompassing wonderfulness of his girl more than a little insipid and hard to take. Sorry if that makes me sound like a sourpuss. I’m really not. I have a deeply sentimental streak and am prone to swooning at sap. But that’s different than listening to an infatuated guy gush across 13 songs about how he’s the luckiest dude in the world. Happy for ya, man! Check in a few years from now, once you’ve come back down to earth and gotten to know your new love a little better and more truthfully!

None of which means I dislike everything on the record. My favorite song is an amusingly disarming track about his first date with the love of his life—one that involved playing a game of pickleball. Hence the song’s otherwise inexplicable title. Take a listen. It’s a delight—as are … some of the other songs on the album from which it comes.

5. “Rockland County”—Brian Dunne (Album: Clams Casino)

My brother tipped me off about Brian Dunne’s new album after hearing about it on the enjoyable podcast of rock critic Steven Hyden. So take that with the weight it deserves: Three guys with impeccable taste really like Dunne’s record, his fifth. The Pitchfork review of the album (7.8) name-checks Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Petty near the top. I’d add Fountains of Wayne, both because of the infectious tunefulness of the songs and the playful references to New York-area names and places. I was reared on those artists and raised in New York City and its suburbs, so you could say my delight in Dunne’s music is overdetermined. If that list of precursors brings a smile to your face like it does to mine, give “Rockland County” a listen. It just might make your day.

6. “A Man Needs a Vocation”—Craig Finn (Album: Always Been)

I always feel like I enjoy Craig Finn’s music less than I should. People whose musical taste I respect continually sing his praises. I can grasp why they love Finn’s powerful band The Hold Steady. I definitely understand why they appreciate Finn’s talents as a wordsmith, which are considerable. (His songs often resemble densely literate short stories set to music more than what is more typical in rock and pop.) Yet I don’t have a great track record for enjoying artists who talk-sing their way through a song, and that’s definitely what Finn does. Sometimes he straight-up talks. But more often he sort-of sings something, but it’s just noodling around some pleasantly basic chords in a half-octave range. That’s usually not enough to draw me in and keep me there.

Finn’s latest album, Always Been, might not have his most inspired lyrics—it seems to be a concept album of sorts about a lost and unhappy guy who becomes a minister despite a lack of faith—but the music appeals a little more to me than usual. That’s no doubt because the album is a collaboration with Adam Granduciel, leader of the band The War on Drugs. Granduciel produced the record and his band plays on it, with Kathleen Edwards (see below) supplying backing vocals. The result is an album that sounds exactly like you’d expect: A War on Drugs record with Craig Finn singing and supplying the songs. That’s an appealing blend for my ear. Take a listen to “A Man Needs a Vocation” and see if it works for you, too.

7. “Other People’s Bands”—Kathleen Edwards (Album: Billionaire)

I’ve liked Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards ever since I was blown away by the opening track on her second album, Back to Me, which was released in 2005. That song, “In State,” has never left heavy rotation in the Linker household. I honestly think it’s the best thing she’s ever done, though I liked a lot of the album it came from, as well as most of the album that followed, Asking for Flowers (2008). Since then, I’ve been less impressed, though I continue to follow her career and give her new music a listen whenever it appears. That includes her latest album, Billionaire. I like it, though perhaps not as much as I hoped I would once I heard she’d brought in Jason Isbell (see below) to co-produce. It’s a solid collection of songs, and “Other People’s Bands” is one of my favorites. (The title track, co-written with songwriting powerhouse Dan Wilson, is another.) If you like soulful songwriters working in an Americana mode, you’ll probably enjoy Edwards as much as I do.

8. “Gravelweed”—Jason Isbell (Album: Foxes in the Snow)

No one who watched HBO’s engrossing 2023 documentary about the making of Jason Isbell’s 2020 album (Reunions) could be surprised that his marriage to musician Amanda Shires fell apart soon after it appeared. (I wrote about the film under the title, “Jason Isbell’s Struggle for Self-Knowledge.”) The documentary captured some tense moments between Isbell and Shires, along with glimpses of real creative collaboration. It was clear in those scenes that the marriage was deeply troubled and would need considerable effort to survive over the long term. And let me be clear: By “effort,” I don’t mean Isbell writing yet another song about how Shires saved him from himself and praising the enduring power of their love. Don’t get me wrong: At his best, Isbell is a brilliant lyricist, one of the very best of his generation. But he’s also a romantic who has a tendency to embellish aspects of reality he finds too difficult to face. (Don’t we all?)

I would nearly always prefer a full-band album to a stripped-down exercise in spare arrangements. (Critics who describe Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska as his best work drive me up the wall.) Yet I can appreciate Isbell’s Foxes in the Snow, even if it sounds to me like demos for the album it should have been. This is his divorce record, and it’s emotionally raw. The lyrics are sometimes a little embarrassing—enough so that I have to wonder if Shires’ editorial hand (revealed in the doc) played a bigger role in Isbell’s songwriting than most of us have assumed. Much of the album is a little too naked for my taste, but other songs are so powerful I can’t help but be drawn in. My favorite is “Gravelweed.” Placed side by side with the angry, wounded, embittered rants on Shires’ own divorce record (Nobody’s Girl), its honesty and restraint really shine. The song’s first verse and chorus show that Isbell may have learned something about himself and the perils of the romanticism I noted above.

I wish that I could be angry
Punch a hole in the wall
Drink a fifth of cheap whiskey
And call and call and call

But that ain’t me anymore, baby
It never was, to tell the truth
I just saw it in a movie and thought
That’s what I was supposed to do

I was a gravelweed and I needed you to raise me
I’m sorry the day came when I felt like I was raised
And now that I live to see my melodies betray me
I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today

It’s a song about all the half-dishonest songs he’s written about the woman he promised to love forever but no longer does. Those are hard truths, and I appreciate Isbell’s capacity to sing about them thoughtfully for us, and to offer his ex-wife an expression of regret for his mistakes. Looks like he managed to achieve some self-knowledge after all.

9. “Adeline”—Joshua Slone (Album: Thinking Too Much)

I owe this one to my son. He reached out a month or so ago to let me know about the debut album of Kentucky singer-songwriter Joshua Slone, which dropped in late October, six months after country superstar Zach Bryan gave Slone a big boost on social media and a month following his choice spot opening for Bryan’s massive, record-smashing Michigan concert in late September. The streaming numbers on Spotify (3.8 million for his top track and more than a million for the next five after that) show that he’s already big and poised to become much bigger. Thinking Too Much shows that the attention is well earned. It’s a very impressive debut demonstrating tons of talent and potential as both a songwriter and singer. If you like melodic folk-pop, you’ve got to give Slone a try.

If I have a criticism of the album, it’s that it gives us too much. At 16 tracks and 66 minutes, Slone is flooding the zone, seemingly afraid to hold anything back or make tough editorial decisions about what to leave in and what to leave out. I’ve written about this before, in the context of Taylor Swift’s notebook dump of a 2024 album release, but it’s a much broader problem in our culture today. Just about every individual song on Slone’s record is good, and some are better than that. But listening to them back to back renders the whole considerably less than the sum of its parts. Too few of the songs stand out. The listener ends up drowning in a sea of similarity. It’s one pleasant acoustic-guitar-based mid-tempo or slow song after another. A collection of the 10 or 11 strongest tunes would have been far better. Leave us craving more rather than struggling to figure out which song is which in a vast expanse of sameness. It really is possible to have too much of a good thing.

I hope you will listen to “Adeline” and dip into the album as a whole, even if it leaves you, like me, feeling a little lost. I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot from Joshua Slone over the coming years.

10. “Moon in the Morning”—Adam Melchor (Album: Melchor Lullaby Hotline,
Vol. 1, 2021)

If my son deserves credit for bringing Joshua Slone to my attention, I owe a note of thanks to my daughter for introducing me to “Moon in the Morning” by a young singer-songwriter named Adam Melchor. It’s the only song on my list that wasn’t released this year, but I only became aware of it a few months ago, and since then it’s been in regular rotation. Melchor launched his career after a brief appearance on The Voice, where he played a cover of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).” It was an apt choice, given how much his music takes from Lennon and McCartney. That influence isn’t always apparent in his work, which can be explored on three albums and numerous EPs and one-off singles, but it’s obvious on the track I’m highlighting.

I’ve found other good stuff in Melchor’s catalogue, but nothing that matches the baroque beauty of “Moon in the Morning.” Don’t let the scrawny voice that greets you at the start of the verse scare you away. The song builds to a gorgeous chorus and then breaks into an alternative section late in the song that lifts it up to an even higher level (and a different key). This is great stuff. I hope you enjoy it.

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Boy oh boy, Republicans sure did a faceplant this week, didn’t they? I expected Democrats to do well on Tuesday, but they took pretty much everything, and usually by impressive margins. I gave readers my take on the election this past Monday. Rather than writing a follow-up post that just repackages the same points with some new data from Tuesday’s results, I’ve decided to break from politics to give you a cultural post I’ve been working on for a few weeks. For those hungry for more politics, I should soon have an op-ed in another outlet that I will post here when it appears. It jumps off from the recent election to reflect on the past and future of the American right.

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I don’t know if I’m ready to describe The Leftovers, the series created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta that ran for three seasons on HBO from 2014 to 2017, as the best television show I’ve ever seen. For the past decade I’ve reserved that level of highest praise for Mad Men, a show with the psychological depth of a great novel and the vast scope of a brilliantly written, acted, and directed 72-hour film—which is what it was. I also usually put in a word of special appreciation for Breaking Bad, a much narrower show that managed to transcend its limitations with incredible acting and some of the most intense dramatic plotting I’ve ever encountered. I also loved aspects of Game of Thrones and The Americans. (The Sopranos is as great as everyone always says it is, but I hated spending so much time with such repulsive characters, so the experience of watching it was pretty unpleasant for me.)

But The Leftovers, which I didn’t see in its original run and just finished watching, belongs in its own category. What I will say about it is that it moved me more than any show I have ever watched in its entirety. Explaining why obviously requires I tell you something about the show. There will be some unavoidable spoilers in what follows, mostly from the show’s first season, though even there I will keep its most surprising details concealed.

(Yes, I know it’s more than a little absurd that I’m writing a post about a TV show that ended its run eight years in the past. The thing is, I almost never watch series when they first appear. I usually turn to them, instead, years later, after I’ve heard enough praise that I feel like their quality has been adequately verified to justify my time and attention. This way of proceeding has never let me down. And anyway, in an era of streaming, there’s nothing to keep a decade-old show from becoming someone’s big new discovery years after it drops.)

The Sudden Departure

In case you are unaware of what the show is about—and its extraordinary ambition—The Leftovers pilot episode begins with a short scene that takes place on October 14, 2011. In the space of a couple of minutes, we see a mother with a crying baby struggling in a laundromat as she talks on the phone with a company she hopes will come to fix the broken washing machine that flooded her basement that morning. All the while, the child keeps screaming, making the phone call increasingly difficult as she moves to her car, places the car seat containing the baby in the back, settles in behind the wheel, and continues the phone conversation. Then the child goes silent. After a few seconds, she turns to check on her baby and discovers he’s gone. She puts down the phone, exits the car, and moves around to the back door, repeating his name with gently rising concern and confusion. “Sam?” “Sam?”

Meanwhile, several feet away an older child of around eight years old calls out, “Dad? Where my Dad?,” as a shopping cart glides down an incline away from him and crashes into the back of a parked car. Then two cars collide violently on the street just outside the parking lot, and we notice more names being shouted in the background, and some screams, as the nameless mother we just began getting to know grows more agitated, “Sam?” “Sam?” “SAM!?” Her screams intensify until the screen cuts to back.

Then a title card informs us it is now “Three Years Later,” the time-frame for most of the rest of the first season. Over the next few minutes, we learn that on that October day, two percent of the world’s population—approximately 140 million people—simply vanished, disappearing without a trace and without anything resembling an explanation. Mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children, parents, coworkers, peers—gone, seemingly at random. Less than five minutes in, you realize you’re watching a show about “the leftovers” in the sense of those left behind after an event now universally described as the Sudden Departure.

Skepticism and Its Obliteration

I can imagine that some potential viewers, back when the show first debuted or now, finding that premise too far-fetched to accept. This kind of thing doesn’t happen in real life.

But I think the premise’s very implausibility is the core of what makes it so effective.

One way of understanding the motives of the philosophers who inspired the early modern Enlightenment is to say that they wanted to spread knowledge of the natural world uncovered by modern science to the general population in the hope that doing so would improve the human condition. The role of clerics would recede. An attitude of passivity toward misfortune—we can’t know why good people suffer; place your faith in prayer and God’s providence and He will provide—would be replaced by the conviction that human life improves when we take matters into our own hands. We could use that knowledge to develop new technologies that alleviate our struggles, lengthen our lives, lift us out of poverty, and ease our suffering, just as a modern educated populace could become capable of governing itself without having to rely on the rule of princes and priests.

To make this hope a reality, these early modern philosophers sought to sow skepticism about religious orthodoxy and those who based their worldly authority upon it. This is why influential books by Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza contain long passages of biblical criticism along with philosophical analysis of politics and morality. They wanted to encourage people to doubt the veracity of miracles, for example, which served to validate the claims of ecclesiastical authorities. Miracles reported in the Bible come from a time of prejudice, superstition, and widespread ignorance of science. How can we trust those accounts? Then there are contemporary claims about miraculous experiences. Did the person who said God spoke to him in a dream really communicate with God? Or did he merely dream God spoke to him? Which option is more likely to be true?

Note that this doesn’t refute the possibility that an apparently miraculous experience had a genuinely divine source. It merely plants the seeds of doubt about any particular claim to a divine revelation. One of the most effective ways of doing so with someone who already has received an education in modern science is to suggest that although any such claim to a divine revelation might be true, plenty of such claims made in the past turned out to be misunderstandings rooted in ignorance. People once thought solar eclipses were divine interventions in the world, for example. But now they understand their true causes in the regular, predictable motions of the sun, earth, and moon. Knowing the ease with which people in the past have made mistakes that science later corrected, we should go forward with our lives in a state of anticipatory skepticism, responding to reports of divine experiences by bracketing the claims and assuming science will eventually clear things up by finding the true cause within the deterministic regularities that prevail in the disenchanted natural world.

The genius of The Leftovers, which it takes from the novel by Perrotta on which it is based, is to propose an event so spectacular, horrifying, and inexplicable that it makes such skeptical intellectual maneuvers impossible, at least for most people. The show, like the novel, is devoted to exploring what happens to a group of characters in modern America when Enlightenment hopes for the human mastery of nature and religion is obliterated.

The Characters and Their World

But that makes it sound as if the show unfolds like a graduate seminar in political philosophy or intellectual history. It doesn’t at all. It is at once a show about Big Ideas and one that grounds those ideas entirely in the concrete lives of human beings struggling with how to go on living in the wake of profound loss. But not just loss. The death of a loved one is the worst loss most of us will ever have to endure. That’s why we have thick cultural norms, practices, and beliefs wrapped up with the wrenching experience—to make the grief endurable, to give it meaning and embed it into an intelligible human and often divine story.

But that isn’t possible for people who lost someone in the Sudden Departure. There is no body. No physical, natural cause of the event. She died in a car accident. He had a heart attack. She succumbed to cancer. As terrible as it is to utter such statements after the death of a spouse or a child or parent or friend or lover, they explain a sequence of physically explicable events that make rudimentary sense, even setting aside any larger or higher (metaphysical or theological) meaning we may discern in it. But the Sudden Departure gives those left behind quite literally nothing. She disappeared. He vanished. She was there one moment and gone the next, along with 140 million other people, for no discernible reason at all. Where did she go? Why him and not her? Why my child and not his, or hers?

As one might imagine, the consequences are enormous. Yet the world goes on. Two percent—one out of every fifty people—is a lot of people and a lot of loss, though it’s not enough to cause civilization to cease functioning or collapse. People still go to work and school, use computers and phones, drive cars, and everything else we associate with modern life. But now it’s a world in which the aspirations of the Enlightenment can no longer maintain traction. Something miraculous—rationally, scientifically inexplicable—has indisputably taken place. And that has enormous emotional, cultural, and spiritual consequences. What might you come to believe in such a situation? How would you go on living?

In the remainder of the pilot, we are introduced to a small circle of characters in the town of Mapleton, New York: Chief of Police Kevin Garvey, Jr. (Justin Theroux), is struggling to raise his troubled teenage daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley). Six months prior to the present, Kevin’s wife and Jill’s mother Laurie (Amy Brenneman) abandoned the family to join a cult called the Guilty Remnant, which has about fifty members in the town’s local branch. They live communally, dress in white, refuse to speak, chain smoke every waking moment, and act as a constant emotional irritant by showing up at public events and undertaking disruptive, hurtful acts to ensure that the loved ones of the departed, along with American society as a whole, is never permitted to move on and forget the enormity of what transpired on October 14. (The cult’s motto is “We Are Living Reminders.”)

Kevin and Laurie also have a college-aged son named Tommy (Chris Zylka) who has dropped out of school and fled out west to join another cult led by a man who lost a child in the Sudden Departure and now goes by the name of Holy Wayne (Paterson Davis Joseph). Visitors to his compound give members of his entourage large sums of cash for the privilege of receiving a long, slow, healing hug from Wayne, who promises to take on their pain and suffering in a Christ-like act of spiritual and emotional unburdening. (It usually works.) In the second episode of the first season, the compound is raided by soldiers working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, and Cults, which goes in with guns blazing, seemingly empowered by the government to shoot first and ask questions later.

Back in Mapleton, we also meet Nora Durst (Carrie Coon), well-known in the town for the dubious distinction of having lost more than anyone else in the community on October 14: her husband and two young children, leaving her alone. She now works for a federal agency called the Department of Sudden Departures, which processes benefits claims for families of the departed. (Life insurance companies won’t pay out claims on the grounds that there is no physical evidence the departed have died.)

Nora’s brother, Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston), is an Episcopal priest and Job-like figure whose wife Mary (Janel Moloney) was driving the car we saw smashed in the distance during the show’s gripping opening scene (it was struck by a car whose driver had departed seconds earlier); she suffered a severe head injury and has remained in a persistent vegetative state ever since. Matt’s parish is dying because most residents of Mapleton hate him for publishing a newsletter exposing the sins of the departed in order to demonstrate that the event was not the Rapture prophesied in the Book of Revelation and other passages of the New Testament. Like members of the Guilty Remnant, Matt responds to and finds meaning in his losses by inflicting cruelty on his neighbors and loved ones while convincing himself that doing so is good for them. Yet his own suffering and need to make some sense of what has transpired is so acute that we can’t help but empathize with him.

Kevin’s father, Kevin Garvey, Sr. (Scott Glenn), is the town’s former chief of police. Kevin, Jr. took over the job when his father underwent a psychotic break immediately following the Sudden Departure. He now lives in a local residence for psychiatric patients, continuing to suffer from a widespread malady called Post-Departure Delusion Disorder that appears to resemble schizophrenia. He hears voices that give him cryptic instructions and explanations for the Sudden Departure and other events.

Struggling with Uncertainty

I hope this sketch of the main characters introduced in Season 1 conveys the depth of the world conjured by the show. Every one of the actors listed above does an outstanding job, and the script is extremely strong, diving deep into themes of memory and forgetting, the challenge of living with uncertainty, the struggle to cope and come to terms with loss, and the desperate longing for a sense of higher purpose. They inhabit a world that’s like ours in innumerable ways, but also different in ways both subtle and profound. It’s a world in the process of becoming re-enchanted, in which old forms of religious faith spring up spontaneously in new guises to help people orient themselves in a newly disorienting reality.

(I suspect one reason the show’s portrayal of a strange post-Departure America hit me so hard is that the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, which took place after The Leftovers completed its run, demonstrated how a much less traumatizing experience could create serious sociocultural turbulence. Such turbulence would obviously be vastly more sweeping and destabilizing after an event like the Great Departure.)

In one of the most moving scenes in Season 1, Kevin, Jr. weeps while reading aloud a passage of the Book of Job (23: 8-17) about searching for, loving, needing, and fearing a God who appears to be always present and yet forever absent, just out of reach, intervening in ways that defy our understanding and frighten us.

In another haunting scene, Nora confronts her own profound brokenness, admitting to herself that her halting, tentative attempts to move beyond her wrenching losses into a hopeful future are futile. “There’s no going back, no fixing it. I’m beyond repair,” she intones in voiceover, as she describes her experience of what feels like living a post-Departure life “surrounded by the abandoned ruins of a dead civilization.”

But I don’t want to give the impression that The Leftovers is unrelievedly morose. It isn’t. (A few minutes after the dark monologue I just quoted, Nora finds new reason to hope for a happier future.) The show is shot through with sadness, but it’s also frequently funny and touching and amusing and often genuinely surprising. Like life itself so often is. And it’s often pretty spooky, too. (Think of the excellent 2016 film Arrival, but as David Lynch might have directed it.) There are frequent, disturbing dreams. The psychosis with which Kevin, Sr. is afflicted may have been passed on to his son, who begins to suffer from blackouts during which reality and dreams and hallucinations and madness interpenetrate each other. Is he going insane? Or has he inherited from his father the capacity to perceive other dimensions of reality? Is he losing his mind? Or gaining facility at serving as a prophet of God (or whatever mysterious forces we have come to describe with that term)? In a world in which the Enlightenment has been beaten back by events, such questions have become impossible to answer with any confidence or certainty.

That’s the world of The Leftovers.

I first realized the distinctive greatness of the show in the penultimate episode of the first season. We’ve come to know the characters in all kinds of ways up to that point. But then we reach Episode 9, the entirety of which is a flashback to three years in the past, beginning the day before the Sudden Departure. We see all the familiar characters, as the title of the episode has it, “at their best,” back before their world capsized. They are so familiar to us. Yet what we experience is so subtly and profoundly different from what we’ve grown used to. Matt’s congregation is thriving, his brain-damaged wife Mary happy and healthy. Kevin, Sr., is perfectly sane, playfully irascible, and wise. Laurie, who will abandon her family to join the Guilty Remnant two-and-a-half years later and hasn’t spoken a word all season, is a successful psychiatrist and loving wife and mother. By the end of the episode, we’ve learned something important about the distinctive loss she’s been silently struggling with all season, and therefore why she’s turned to a cult to keep herself together.

There’s a lightness, a happiness, a normalcy in this episode that’s been lacking in the post-Departure world—but also intimations of what’s looming ahead, signs of deeper, longer-term struggles that will surge to the surface under the pressure of the events that unfold in the final minutes of the episode, as we experience the horror of October 14 alongside characters we’ve come to love and relate to all season. It’s one of the most powerful episodes of television I’ve ever seen.

The Place of Faith in the Human Condition

I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what makes The Leftovers so special, and only with reference to the first season. I’ll merely say here that the quality of the acting and writing remains extremely high throughout, while the substance of the show grows wilder and more creative as it unfolds, with bold theological events and themes introduced and developed in quite extraordinary ways. Even if I didn’t care about spoilers, I doubt I could adequately describe most of what takes place in the second and third seasons, because the events too often defy rational summation.

I hope you’ll consider giving it a try so you can decide for yourself what to make of it. All I can say is that in attempting to come to terms with it, you might want to ponder something Reza Aslan, a religious scholar and consulting producer on the show, had to say about it. Asked in an interview to compare it to other shows that deal with spiritual themes (The Young Pope, The Path, American Gods, Handmaid’s Tale), Aslan responds as follows:

The difference between The Leftovers and those other shows is that those other shows are about a specific religion and the way those religions are enacted in the lives of individuals or in their society. The Leftovers is about what religion means, what religion is, how religion is defined in individuals, and how it gives them meaning and purpose in all of its many manifestations. I think people have gravitated toward The Leftovers … because … issues about the human condition, and the role that faith plays in that condition, are ones that people gravitate toward. There aren’t any other shows that do that.

He’s right. If that description sounds compelling, The Leftovers just might be as much for you as it turned out to be for me.

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On October 9, I reposted a lovely essay by Daniel Oppenheimer about Jonathan Lear, the University of Chicago philosopher and psychoanalyst who died of cancer on September 22 at the age of 76. When I shared it with my subscribers, I said that I might try to write something of my own about Lear and why his writing and thinking were so important to me.

This post is my attempt to do that. It is necessarily somewhat idiosyncratic to me, focusing on the first book of Lear’s that I read—because that’s the one that hit me the hardest, like a lightning bolt. He went on to write on many other topics, and I usually learned from and appreciated those. But it’s Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1990) that left the greatest mark on me, beginning immediately after I first read it, 21 years ago.

That was a rough time for me. About four years before that, I had decided to abandon the pursuit of a tenure-track position teaching political philosophy and immediately thrown myself into finding a job as a writer or editor at a center-right magazine or newspaper. I published a lot of essays and book reviews over the following nine months, but I hadn’t managed to land a position with a steady income. I’d never felt more lost and adrift. In the depths of my despondency, I woke up one morning in the early fall of 2000, dreading another day of staring at my email inbox as I waited for a job offer to materialize, and came to an absurdly impulsive decision: I would convert to Catholicism.

That came as quite a shock to my (cradle Catholic) wife, my secular-Jewish father and brother, and … myself. The mystery deepened as I went through with the conversion, was offered and took a job at First Things magazine under a prominent Catholic priest and conservative public intellectual, and then, over the next few years, found myself diverging rather sharply with the editorial stance of the journal and failing to find spiritual sustenance in my new ecclesiastical home.

By the time I bought and began reading Lear’s book (after reading a brilliant essay of his in The New Republic) in 2004, I felt even more lost and adrift than I’d been when I resolved to leave academia. Why had I converted to a religion I didn’t believe in? Why had I signed up to contribute to an ideological program about which I always felt deeply ambivalent and now increasingly opposed? I didn’t understand any of it. It was as if I’d spent years as a spectator passively observing my own life and decisions. Someone was choosing to do these things, but it didn’t feel like me.

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Reading Lear taught me many things—about the human mind and condition, and about myself. In my despair, I’d begun a course of therapy a few months before, but until I read Lear, it was going nowhere. Lear spoke the language of classical philosophy and interpreted Freudian psychoanalysis in those terms. That helped me to understand, for the first time in my life, the point of undergoing therapy—and to understand how difficult and wrenching it could be, because it’s an effort of subjectivity to grasp itself as an object of examination.

What follows in this post are a series of extended quotes from the opening chapter of the book, along with some of my own comments on what Lear has to say there. I offer them as a tribute to one of the deepest American thinkers of the past few decades, as an introduction to his thought for those who might be tempted to dive deeper on their own, and as a demonstration of how to practice humanism at a high level. Civilization always needs more of that. We may need more of it than usual today.

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I occasionally start off my posts with a short, italicized announcement. But I have more than usual to say up top today and don’t want readers to confront a wall of italics. So instead of doing that, I’m just going to make this post a little more informal than most, with this opening section devoted to some business.

I’m grateful to Sam Harris for inviting me onto his podcast for a conversation in which he repeatedly posed provocative questions and then let me respond at length. He was especially good at helping me steelman my answers by formulating his questions as if he were, if not a Trump voter, then at least a Trump-adjacent critic of the Biden administration and the contemporary center-left. I believe this link will permit access to the full 90-minute conversation for all of my subscribers.

If you’ve subscribed to this Substack after listening to me on Sam’s pod, welcome! I’m very happy to have you here. Most of my posts are paywalled, so if you don’t have a paying subscription, you’ll probably get frustrated pretty quickly. I hope you’ll consider paying to read my full posts. Aside from a handful of weeks a year when my schedule precludes it, I publish two lengthy (minimum 1,500-word, often much longer) posts per week analyzing what’s happening in our politics, usually on the right, sometimes on the left. Occasionally I write about music, television, movies, books, and broader cultural trends, as I do below in this post. Paying subscribers get access to the audio versions of my posts, an archive of nearly 450 written since June 1, 2022, and each post’s comments section, where lively and illuminating debates regularly take place among my most engaged readers.

In the spirit of encouraging people to stick around, today’s post will be open to all. But the paywall will return next week.

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New Forms of Addiction

Making intelligent and illuminating observations about cultural trends is tricky. It involves connecting seemingly disparate dots, transforming them into a coherent picture that isn’t initially apparent. But before that work of synthesis can happen, it’s first necessary to notice the dots in the first place. That’s hard for the same reason it would be hard for a fish to say something intelligent and illuminating about water: It’s everywhere; the fish is suspended within it, forming not just the background to its world but also permeating it from top to bottom.

I stumbled on one such cultural dot earlier this week when I saw a post from The Argument by Jerusalem Demsas titled “I Could Watch TikTok for 10 Hours a Day.” Demsas didn’t make an entirely novel observation, but she expressed it well: Social media platforms are addictive. Those who spend hours a day interacting with them are addicts. Maybe when a friend reaches out to say he or she just spent five hours scrolling through Instagram, we should respond as if he or she just confessed to drinking an entire bottle of vodka alone on a Tuesday night—that is, with an expression of disapproval and an offer of help and support.

Demsas is open to entertaining the passage of new government regulations to address this problem, but as a young American living in the 2020s, she’s more comfortable thinking about how to “max out our nongovernmental powers.” By which she primarily means a technical fix analogous to the way GLP-1s successfully rewire brains to help people reduce their appetites and lose weight. As examples, she tells us she uses a “dumb phone” much of the time and leaves her iPhone at the office on weekends. She also suggests workplaces banning social media. And so forth.

Now, I don’t intend this to be a post focused on social-media addiction. But something about the way Demsas talks about this problem, which is very real, and the way she thinks to address it points to something else—something deeper and more troubling—that’s going on in our culture.

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If It Feels Good, Do It

The political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed that modern commercial societies have a way of conjuring desires for things that no one longed for in the first place. Supply isn’t always generated by pre-existing demand. Supply itself can generate demand. Ooh, just look at that shiny new thing! I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s beautiful. It’s cool. It tastes great. It’s fun. It’s entertaining. It feels good. I want it. I need it.

Rousseau made his observation in the latter half of the 18th century. He saw the phenomenon quite early. It’s accelerated over the intervening two-and-a-half centuries, as a multitude of wondrous products have proliferated. Many of them have greatly improved our quality of life, making life easier, safer, and more enjoyable. They’ve “relieved man’s estate,” as Francis Bacon, an early modern theorist of technological modernity, memorably described one of its aspirations.

But somewhere along the way, mostly over the past couple of decades, capitalism has begun to do more than produce products. It’s begun to produce products that, in turn, produce experiences.

The experience of watching algorithmically curated, highly stimulating little video morsels, one after another, on a supercomputer we carry around with us in our pockets everywhere we go.

The experience, on those same devices, of easy gambling on sports and other competitive events.

The experience, on those same devices, of watching all-but-infinite amounts of every conceivable form of pornography.

The experience, soon to come on those same devices, of interacting with artificial intelligence capable of producing an incredibly realistic simulacrum of a romantic and erotic partner.

The experience of joining together with ideologically likeminded compatriots anywhere in the country and the world to do battle against political opponents and enemies. (Yes, it’s likely that a number of our political problems can be traced back to the transformation of political activity into one more mode of digitally mediated experience.)

These kinds of experiences, which create an incredibly intense link between a person’s mind and an online interactive social world of human and artificial forms of intelligence, can be incredibly addictive, precisely because they feel so real and, lacking the friction and complications of real-world physical interactions, are so psychically intense. Cognitive scientists and social psychologists are inclined to describe these experiences in terms of chemicals released in the body during these interactions: we’re getting addicted to dopamine and serotonin and adrenaline.

However true that might be at the level of physiology, I prefer to think about it in the less reductive, old-fashioned moral categories that come down to us from the tradition of political philosophy: Digital technology is giving us incredibly intense experiences of pleasure; pleasure is a powerful temptation that is extremely difficult to resist; what we often call “addiction” is more accurately described as an incapacity to achieve self-mastery sufficient to resist the siren song of pleasure.

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Resisting Temptation in a World Lacking Support for Virtue

It is darkly ironic (or perhaps extremely significant at a deep cultural level) that human beings began producing technologies capable of generating such intensely pleasurable experiences less than half a century following a decade (the 1960s) when countries around the world underwent a cultural revolution that began disassembling the complex social and ideational mechanisms that humanity long used to fortify the capacity of individuals to resist powerful temptations. Tired of feeling judged—by God, by parents, by neighbors, by our own consciences—we rebelled, proclaiming before all the world that what we choose to do with our lives is a matter of moral indifference and no one’s concern, maybe not even our own. (French novelist Michel Houellebecq is our greatest imaginative explorer of this post-’60s terrain and its myriad discontents.)

This shift has left each of us to our own devices—quite literally, it would seem. Like Demsas, most of us would rather avoid asking the government to step into the role of an objectified Superego with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. But neither do we feel capable of straightforwardly resisting temptation on our own. We can’t stop ourselves from eating a pint of ice cream or a bag of Doritos in front of the computer, but we can ask our doctor for an Ozempic prescription and then take the proper dosage. We can’t resist spending hours on TikTok or Pornhub every evening, but we can choose to leave our phones or laptops at the office so we won’t. We have will power, but we also lack sufficient will power. We can ask for help, but we can’t fully help ourselves.

Maybe there’s nothing wrong with this. Gluttony—for food, for drink, for sex, for pleasures of every variety—has long been considered a vice and a sin. In attempting to resist or moderate it, we used to rely on belief systems and a thick set of institutions and social relationships that, for many of us, no longer exists. Because of their disappearance, we instead reach for pharmacological helpmeets or little cognitive-behavioral tricks to keep us from giving into our intensely pleasurable addictions. Whatever gets you through the night.

The End of Self-Mastery

Yet I can’t help but wonder if there’s a loss involved in relying on these helpmeets and tricks instead of the old beliefs, institutions, and social relationships that existed to encourage and support individuals attempting to do the hard part for themselves.

It’s the difference between leaving your iPhone at work and bringing it home but mastering your desire to use it more than you think you should. Or between taking a GLP-1 and choosing not to but saying no to the dessert anyway, even though you want it, because you know saying yes will be bad for you and that knowledge is good enough to get you to act according to a higher notion of your own self-interest.

When we rely on a machine to do an arduous physical task for us, we avoid injury and get to enjoy greater leisure. But what if it’s physically and spiritually healthier to complete the task for ourselves, with our own hands and arms and legs? Our own muscle and bone?

Human beings are weak, needy creatures. We require encouragement and support in doing what we know is good. And yet we’ve created a world of unprecedented temptations at a moment in history when our old support systems have been dismantled. That might make helpmeets and tricks the best most of us can do.

I hope it’s enough—but I worry it won’t be. Self-mastery is good and important. And I’m not sure we’ve thought long or deeply enough about what it would be like to live in a world without it.

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To give you a sense of where I’m coming from on this topic: I’m the guy who once wrote a controversial column with the following lede:

“Star Wars? Meh.”

This was back in 2015, when The Force Awakens had just been released. It was the first sequel or prequel of the original films to appear in theaters in ten years, and Star Wars mania was everywhere.

I wasn’t impressed. I confessed that I’d loved the original two films (Star Wars, now known as A New Hope, and The Empire Strikes Back) when they were first released—respectively, in 1977, when I was 7 years old, and 1980, when I was 10. But by the release of the third film, Return of the Jedi, in 1983, when I had just become a teenager, the magic had faded.

Wooden dialogue, cardboard acting, hokey humor, and a grade-school Manichean/Gnostic metaphysics in which characters choose between darkness and light, bodies are dismissed as “crude matter,” and dead friends and teachers stand around glowing and offering portentous advice — none of that bothered the 7-year-old me. But now it began to seem silly, childish.

And that was long before the release of the prequels, the first two of which were far worse than the original three movies—indeed, two of the worst big-budget Hollywood movies I’ve ever seen. By then I was in my late 20s and early 30s and thoroughly uninterested in Star Wars for anything more than a very occasional nostalgia trip. Hence my snarky comment ten years ago, in the midst of a social-media-fueled frenzy of hype for the first of the (thoroughly mediocre) J. J. Abrams sequels, about the childishness of American (and through it, global) popular culture.

I recount all of this in order to establish myself as a longstanding Star Wars skeptic so that readers will take me seriously when I confirm the widespread assessment of the latest entry in what is now a vast franchise of lucrative spin-offs from the original films. I’m talking about the television show Andor, which recently wrapped up its two-season run on Disney+. One of its stars, Stellan Skarsgård, made headlines around the time the show’s first season wrapped up by calling it “Star Wars for grownups.” As a guy who considered that possibility an oxymoron a decade ago, I’d like to go on the record as saying that’s exactly what Andor is: The first effort to contribute to the Star Wars universe that rises above the considerable limits of the source material to approach genuine artistic excellence.

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In hindsight, we should have suspected something big and destabilizing was coming down the cultural-political pike when a sizable portion of the overwhelmingly male audience of the television show Breaking Bad (which ran through five seasons from 2008 to 2013) directed a firehose of fury at the character of Skyler White and the actress who played her, Anna Gunn.

For those who haven’t seen the show, it tells the story of a high school chemistry teacher and all-around beta male named Walter White, who responds to what he assumes is a fatal lung cancer diagnosis by enacting a Nietzschean fantasy of self-overcoming and unleashed will to power by turning himself into a drug kingpin at the center of an international methamphetamine racket. As most people who’ve seen the show will attest, it’s one of the most tightly scripted and best acted TV series in history. But, like The Sopranos before it, the show also pushes the limits of making its protagonist an anti-hero. Breaking Bad’s creator, Vince Gilligan, has said that he wanted the audience to be lured into empathizing with Walt and then be confronted with the nagging question of when they would break from him as he breaks bad and then breaks ever worse as the show unfolds.

The deeply troubling fact is that lots of (again, overwhelmingly male) viewers stuck with Walt all the way to the end, expressing fierce loyalty to the character even as he crossed every conceivable moral line and in the process ruined the lives of everyone around him, and equally fierce rage at Skyler, Walt’s wife and the show’s only major female character. For many men who became deeply invested in the show and its masculinist fantasy, Skyler was Breaking Bad’s primary antagonist, forever undermining Walt, demonstrating disloyalty, benefitting from the fortune he acquires while judging him harshly, and just plain obstructing his empire-building ambitions when he should have been free to do whatever he wanted.

I remember reading, long before I watched the show, about the abuse directed at the character and the actress who played her. I found it perplexing and disturbing, but I couldn’t really assess it until I watched the show for myself, which I only did several years later, deep into the Trump era. I didn’t know how to interpret the reaction as anything other than an expression of misogynistic rage by people who longed to live in a world dominated by immensely powerful men who unapologetically make and take what they will, while women and male weaklings suffer what they must and are expected to gaze upward in gratitude and admiration to the Übermenschen perched high above them.

Longing to be the Toughest Badass Around

I bring all of this up because this summer I’m watching Breaking Bad with my Gen Z daughter. It’s my third time through the show but her first. And seeing it through her eyes, and listening to her talk about what she’s seeing and (mostly) enjoying, has been revealing to me. She likes the show a lot and often finds it gripping. But she also points out that it constructs a world completely dominated by men, and one in which the motor of dramatic action is powered entirely by the lead character’s longing to be the toughest badass around.

That just isn’t something my daughter can relate to.

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Like millions of people across the country, and some untold number around the world, I laughed when I saw the video of Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and the company’s chief “people officer” (aka, its head of Human Resources) Kristin Cabot get caught embracing on camera at a Coldplay concert last week. But of course it wasn’t the embrace that caused the video to go viral. It was the fact that in the clip the couple quickly realize their images are being projected onto jumbotron screens around the stadium and scramble in a panic to disappear. Byron ducked and vanished to the bottom right of the frame, while Cabot simply turned her back and waited it out until the camera moved on.

Everyone—even Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin, who said as much from the stage—instantly understood an extramarital affair had been exposed. Though just how public the exposure really was wouldn’t be revealed until the next day.

I wasn’t at the concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts last Wednesday evening. Yet I first saw the video the moment I woke up and checked my phone early Thursday morning. As I said, I laughed. I may have mumbled, smiling, “Oh my god, that’s amazing” before I showed the video—now posted on TikTok and being shared by countless accounts on Twitter/X—to my wife and daughter. Something similar must have happened in households across the country, because by later that afternoon, the video was everywhere, reposted with jokes and snarky comments, turned into amusing viral memes, repurposed as online advertisements.

It felt like the whole nation, or a large chunk of it, was engaging in a collective act of schadenfreude—taking delight in the suffering of strangers. That the suffering was the result of a man and woman betraying their spouses and getting caught only made it more delightful, because the humiliation visited on both parties seemed like it was well deserved. They shouldn’t have cheated; maybe this’ll teach ’em a lesson.

This isn’t a post about how, come to think of it, we should feel bad for the couple. Though I’ll admit that I do. Byron has resigned as CEO. Cabot is on administrative leave pending an investigation. Both of their families have been terribly hurt and humiliated. There’s no telling if either marriage will survive. That’s a lot of human damage. But I’m far more interested, and alarmed, about another dimension of the event—namely that we now live in a world in which events like this are possible and bound to become more commonplace.

We understandably spend a lot of time looking for signs of incipient authoritarianism in the Trump administration’s power grabs, corruption, and malicious treatment of immigrants. But these political acts are taking place within a broader cultural context—one in which ubiquitous cameras and social media networks have facilitated the creation of a digital panopticon in which everyone in public is constantly surveilled and runs the risk of spontaneous collective punishment imposed by … all of us.

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I’ve wanted to write a post about Artificial Intelligence (AI)—specifically the Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI supposedly poised to revolutionize our world—for quite some time, probably a couple of years now. But until now, it hasn’t happened. Part of the reason is the relentlessness of the political news cycle—in the run-up to the 2024 election, and then its often-alarming aftermath—which has had me constantly concerned about keeping up with headlines.

But of course AI has been in the headlines throughout this period. I could easily have chosen a previous moment to set aside politics and reflect on the latest developments and their possible ramifications for our economy, culture, and even self-understanding as a species. But I’ve stayed mum on the topic, for complicated reasons.

For one thing, I really try to avoid getting swept up in hype—and I’ve rarely seen a hype cycle more intense than the one cheering on and raising alarms about AI. Note that the hype moves in both directions. AI boosters and its Chicken Littles agree about one thing: the new technology, just a few short years away from reaching a standard of “superintelligence,” is going to be momentous—it will transform life and work in unprecedented ways or it may even produce the destruction of the human race at the hands of its own creation. I’d like to see both sides taken down a peg, and my instincts tell me that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

But the truth is I don’t know enough about AI to make the case with any kind of authority. I mean both that I know next to nothing about how it works under the hood and have spent remarkably little time working or playing on the front end with the various generative AIs currently available. I’ve done a bit of that and find it mildly interesting and impressive, but not something I’m especially excited about. Other than interacting with Google’s AI by posing research questions in search queries and sometimes appreciating the results, I’ve never used AI in any serious way to write a post, craft a lecture, or construct an exam or paper prompt, let alone do anything else.

Why would I? I do what I do—write and teach—because I love, and am good at, doing both. I don’t want or need an artificial mind and digital helpmeet to do it for me. Yes, I do this work to make money, and I guess it would be nice, in a way, to earn that income while having to spend less time working. But the work isn’t drudgery from which I long to be liberated by technology. On the contrary, the work—producing the essays and lectures—is the primary means whereby I figure out what I think about the world. I need to do the work myself in order to make sense of what’s going on around me.

I don’t normally consider myself—my distinct set of talents, my distinct blend of money-earning activities—exemplary in any way. It’s very hard to generalize from my idiosyncratic career-path to anything or anyone else. Yet from the standpoint of the looming AI revolution, the work I do is indistinguishable from other cognitively sophisticated forms of what sociologists call “knowledge production”—which AI seems poised to “disrupt,” as the gurus of Silicon Valley like to put it, though it’s probably more accurate to say “render superfluous.”

Skeptical about that being possible? Consider this: A few weeks ago, Rod Dreher started a post about an angry column David Brooks wrote about something Patrick Deneen published more than a decade ago. (I know, it’s kind of ridiculous that I’m now adding yet another layer to this series of writers talking to and at each other: Damon Linker on Rod Dreher on David Brooks on Patrick Deneen….) Anyway, after producing a couple of lengthy quotes from the Brooks column, Dreher block-quotes from what he describes as his own eight-paragraph response. It reads as a typical Dreher post in both substance and style. Only at the end of the long quote does Dreher reveal the truth:

One of this newsletter’s readers asked ChatGPT to come up with a Rod Dreher response to the Brooks column. That’s what it produced. It is eerily like what I would have written, had I set out to do so.

This is more than a little unnerving to me.

You and me both, friend. Which is why I’ve penned this post—to make sense of that unnerved feeling, identify its sources, and explain why I come down where I do on the value of AI. I realize the topic is vastly bigger than the cross-section I examine in this post. I’ll undoubtedly return to write about different dimensions of the subject in the future.

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Today’s the Fourth of July
Another June has gone by
And when they light up our town I just think
What a waste of gunpowder and sky

Those lovely, downcast lines come from one of the many great songs on Aimee Mann’s fabulous solo debut, Whatever, from 1993. (I wrote about my enduring love for Mann’s music here.) The song is about a relationship, but I’ve quoted from it as a way of conveying my conflicted feelings about celebrating Independence Day six months into the second Trump administration.

My love for my country has always been a complicated love—like the love for a parent who sometimes acts stupidly or irresponsibly. The love is always there, because the parent is one’s parent, and love for one’s own isn’t conditional on the object of affection being worthy of love. But the love can be mixed with disappointment and even anger when the parent’s behavior falls short of standards one strongly believes should apply to all decent people.

The rise of Trump—not merely his fluke 2016 win, but far more so his re-election by a wider margin in 2024—has created a much bigger problem. And to make matters even more fraught, this past week has been overflowing with stories seemingly meant to drive home the point that the United States is evolving in an ominous direction that I personally find pretty repulsive. Let’s just say it doesn’t put me in the mood to salute the flag or pay homage to the country and its 18th-century origins.

Bad Moon Rising

Here are just a few of those news stories:

• The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. CASA, which I wrote about a few days ago, appeared to grant a wayward and even lawless executive greater short-term freedom of action in return for a vow from the Solicitor General that the president would abide by the high court’s “judgments and opinion” when it rules against the administration at some indeterminate point in the future. (Will Donald Trump feel bound by what that Solicitor General said in oral arguments before the court? Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the other members of the majority in Trump v. CASA seem to assume so. If only I were capable of such faith!)

• The president and other Republicans are insinuating that Zohran Mamdani, the naturalized American citizen who won the Democratic primary in the race for mayor of New York City, should be arrested, stripped of his citizenship, and deported from the country. And as Jonathan Last explained in a powerful post for The Bulwark that has haunted me over the past few days, there are laws on the books dating from the McCarthy era that just might make such an appalling series of events possible. (This week John Ganz also wrote a powerful post, to which Last links, that really brings home the insidiousness of the push to strip political enemies of their citizenship, effectively turning them into stateless people beyond the protection of any country’s laws.)

• Paramount/CBS News reached a $16 million settlement with Donald Trump over his thoroughly frivolous lawsuit because the former feared the latter would use his power as president to scuttle a corporate merger. The implications of these events—the lawsuit and then the capitulation to it in order to avoid presidential retribution—are grave.

• Meanwhile, my employer, the University of Pennsylvania, reached its own agreement with the Trump administration over having allowed a transgender woman—Lia Thomas, now graduated—to compete on the women’s swim team at a time when Title IX rules suggested this was the proper course of action. I have no objection to the university conforming to the Trump administration’s revised guidelines going forward, but forcing Penn to apologize for its past actions and applying current rules retroactively by stripping Thomas of titles she earned under the old rule, is appalling, gratuitously cruel behavior. (In other words, standard behavior for the second Trump administration.)

• Then, last but not at all least, there’s the fiscally disastrous (and absurdly named) “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which throughout the week slowly worked its way through the constipated bowels of Congress like a toxic turd destined to be left in the center of the sidewalk of American democracy. People talk a lot about the Democratic Party being a coalition of interest groups clamoring for goodies, and so it is. But how to describe the GOP, which combines an enduring faction of legislators tirelessly devoted to cutting taxes for rich people with another faction primarily motivated by hatred of providing access to health care for the poor and then attempts to conceal the greed and cruelty under a cloak of talk about the need to address the country’s unsustainable debt—when the end result will actually make the country’s fiscal situation vastly worse than it already is?

(That was a rhetorical question—though by all means offer suggestions in the comments.)

Politics and Precarity

In any event, those are the stories that have competed for my attention over the past week as I’ve been trying to make some headway on my book about Leo Strauss and the American right in the run-up to the Independence Day holiday weekend.

These various threads came together as I read Strauss’ letters with scholar Gerhard Krüger during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Strauss had never completed his “Habilitation”—the second dissertation that German universities require before aspiring professors can land a long-term academic position and take on regular teaching duties. So his situation as an itinerate Jewish scholar was pretty tenuous through the waning years of the Weimar Republic.

His main perch was at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, a rabbinical seminary, in Berlin. But in a letter dated October 3, 1931, Strauss wrote to Krüger in an anxious tone: “I am in great difficulty: my institution is under threat of dissolving. I have to be prepared to have nothing as of January 1.” And indeed, at the start of 1932, with fundraising for a Jewish institute in an increasingly anti-Semitic Germany becoming impossible, most of the staff, including Strauss, was let go. (The institute limped on until 1942, when it was finally closed down by the Nazi government.) With the help of a small circle of friends and supporters, Strauss managed to apply for and receive a grant from the Rockefeller Institute that enabled him to continue his various scholarly projects, first in Paris, and then at the University of Cambridge in England before he finally settled for the rest of his life in the United States.

Reading about Strauss’ precarity in these years through the lens of his letters has really helped me to understand what it feels like, from the inside, to be truly imperiled by politics—during the rise of European fascism a hundred years ago, and at the present moment, during whatever one wants to call our time of ascendent authoritarianism.

American Tune

So celebrating the Fourth of July this year will feel different, and be more troubled, than usual.

That’s why I’m going to leave you with a special performance of what has long been my favorite, deeply ambivalent song about our country. The song is “American Tune” by Paul Simon—though describing it that way is a little deceptive. The lovely vocal melody and accompanying harmony is cribbed from J.S. Bach’s setting of the hymn “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” from the St. Matthew Passion, which is itself a resetting of an earlier piece of music by Hans Leo Hassler titled “Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret.”

So Simon can’t take primary credit for the music, though the song’s lovely bridge is his alone. But he wrote the lyrics himself, and what lyrics they are. Written in the early 1970s, they perfectly capture the listless spiritual confusion of that moment, with the Vietnam War limping to an ignominious end, the counterculture exhausted and its extravagant hopes coming to naught, and the storm clouds of Watergate just beginning to gather. The song has so many wonderful, moving lines that I won’t even bother to highlight any of them and simply urge you, instead, to listen to, read, and ponder them as a whole on your own. (You’ll find the lyrics reproduced under the link below.)

Simon’s original version is delicate and beautiful. But the one I’m sharing with you today—by a postmodern cabaret singer named Cecile McLorin Salvant—is sublime, the song’s baroque chord progression crossed with quiet jazz piano improvisation that give the impression of listening to something old and well-ordered that’s been smashed and is breaking down. Come to think of it, that works remarkably well with the lyrical emphasis on being “battered” and “shattered” by events. It’s a truly great song—and this is a truly great rendition of it that speaks directly to my battered and shattered American heart. I hope it does something similar for you.

I wish you all a contented and restful Independence Day, however you choose to celebrate or mourn. I’ll see you next week, on the other side.

@cecilemclorinsalvantAmerican tune #americantune #paulsimon @sullivanfortner

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American Tune
By Paul Simon

Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken
And certainly misused

Oh, but I’m alright, I’m alright
I’m just weary to my bones
Still, you don’t expect to be bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home

And I don’t know a soul that’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that's not been shattered
Or driven to its knees

But it’s alright, it’s alright
For we’ve lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
Road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly

And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea

And I dreamed I was flying
We didn’t come here on the Mayflower
We were dragged on a ship under a blood-red moon
[[Orig.: We come on the ship they call The Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon]]
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune

Oh, but it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all, I’m trying to get some rest

American Tune lyrics © Sony/atv Songs Llc

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In a moment overflowing with intimations of political and cultural dystopia, including outright attacks on universities, we don’t acknowledge enough how delightful it can be to live the life of the mind—and how it is still possible to do so, and sometimes more easily than ever before, right now, in the present.

Allow me to explain what I mean by way of an example.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my favorite podcasts, Eminent Americans by author Daniel Oppenheimer, released an episode devoted to a conversation with Jon Baskin, co-founder and co-editor of The Point, one of the most impressive and consistently excellent English-language intellectual journals founded in this century. I’ve read pieces from The Point down through the years since its founding in 2009, and I met Baskin at a conference in Vienna back in 2019.

All of which means you’d expect me to be firmly within the target audience for this particular podcast discussion. And so I was—though even I wound up surprised by just how perfect the match turned out to be. Because, you see, I didn’t just find the conservation engaging. I found it incredibly stimulating, in multiple respects and in ways I suspect will prove long-lastingly fruitful for my intellect.

And therein lies the delight I mentioned above: The fortuitousness of Oppenheimer interviewing Baskin at length on a podcast to which I happen to subscribe has sent my mind down unanticipated paths that may well contribute in a vital way to my own thinking and writing over the coming weeks, months, and maybe even years. That’s something wonderful and rare that’s facilitated by the strange technological landscape in which we now live and think, read and write. This post is a tribute to what I got out of listening to this specific conversation, and thereby also a kind of tribute to the digital world that makes such an experience possible.

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We want to know, we want not to know. We accept truth, we resist truth. Back and forth the mind shuttles, playing badminton with itself. But it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake. And they are.

That’s a quote from my old teacher and dear friend Mark Lilla, found in the introduction to his latest book, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, which was published last month. It’s also quoted in italics at the top of the front flap of the book jacket. I hope it grabs people’s attention when they pick it up while browsing in bookstores. It should. If it does, it might prompt them to buy and read the book. And if they do that, they may well learn something of enduring importance about what it means to be a human being, both individually and collectively.

For that as well as other reasons, I find it hard to imagine a book more out of step with the times.

While our public life is shrill, polarized, and clamorous, with our skittering attention driven continually on from one widely proclaimed crisis or emergency to the next, Lilla’s voice is calm, measured, and playfully ironic. While our public debates are fixated on the present, with little patience for the perspective gained from the careful study of the past, Lilla roams freely, with ease, and with uncommon erudition, throughout the literature of millennia, searching for insight on his theme wherever he can find it. While we crave easy solutions and pat answers, Lilla poses open-ended questions and puzzles for us to ponder.

A Book for Today—and All Times

Yet in another sense, the book is very well suited to our moment.

A major worry on the center-left over the past decade has been “disinformation.” Liberals are haunted by a fear that the internet, and social media in particular, is spreading lies and falsehoods that fuel political extremism—and an accompanying anxiety about whether an open society with a free market of ideas is capable of combatting these lies and falsehoods. (President Biden expressed a version of this lament in his farewell address on Wednesday night.)

Some liberals have responded to this problem by encouraging the building of new forms of regulation to sort truth from untruth, with “fact-checkers” empowered to do the work for us. Lilla’s book doesn’t address this directly. (He began pondering its themes long before such anxieties preoccupied us.) Yet it does speak to the topic in the profoundest of ways, asking us to reflect on the possibility that our attachment to truth is much less unambiguous than we like to believe. It’s not so much that people want to know the truth and acquire knowledge but are hoodwinked by malign actors as that our attachment to truth and knowledge is conditional—and not just among “them.” Among us, too.

If you doubt it, consider one of the dozens of rancorous debates that have been roiling our politics over the past year: Joe Biden’s ill-fated decision to run for a second term and his staff’s denial of the president’s age-related debility, despite an abundance of polling data showing American voters didn’t buy the administration’s confident assurances about the president’s mental and physical acuity. This denial became impossible to maintain after Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump late last June. Yet the denials continued for weeks, until finally, with maximal reluctance, Biden relented, allowing Kamala Harris very belatedly to take over the presidential campaign for the Democrats.

Those enraged by this series of events have tended to take a rather simple line on it: Biden was lying, and his staff was lying. They knew he was incapable of leading a presidential campaign, let alone winning one and governing competently for four more years, and yet they deliberately said the opposite, intentionally spreading a falsehood.

This might be true of some, but I also think these kinds of accusations, which are heard all the time in our politics—truth has a liberal bias, for example, or the right and its media enablers are inveterate, shameless liars—are in many cases far too simple. In the case of Biden, I think it’s much more likely that the president himself and many members of his family and his closest advisers deceived themselves about his capacities. They lied, yes, but to themselves more than they did to the rest of us. Believing otherwise—that the president and his administration knew the truth and intentionally misled the country about it—is useful for the president’s political enemies, because it casts Biden and his team as maximally culpable and thus the justified object of righteous rage for their acts. But the truth is more likely to involve a more complicated and mysterious psychological process—one less deserving of indignation and calls for the infliction of just punishment.

We do it to ourselves all the time: I know something to be true. But facing it would be too painful or too disadvantageous; I don’t want it to be true. So I tell myself it isn’t true and act on that self-deception. But of course, I’m the one who is both concocting the lie while at some level knowing the truth and also believing the lie I know to be untrue. How is this possible? Lilla’s book is, at bottom, an extended reflection on this question. It shines a bright, revealing light on—it seeks knowledge about—our tendency to resist knowledge and deceive ourselves.

Or put in slight different terms, Lilla’s book is about “the power of ignorance.” Just as the desire to know how the world works or why the world is the way it is can be powerful, so can its opposite—the desire to remain in the dark, as it were, for fear of what the light would reveal. Lilla explores this impulse in a multitude of times, places, and works of art—“ancient myths, religious scriptures, epic poetry, plays, and modern novels.” Though he spends time looking at the explicit case for ignorance as a human good, Lilla is less interested in those rare people who are driven entirely by the will not to know than in the subtle and complex interplay within most of us between the desires to know and not to know.

He describes the resulting book as “an intellectual travelogue retracing my own circuitous and somewhat episodic excursions in reading and thinking about the will not to know.” The form of the book is unusual: Clustered into five thematic chapters, with each broken into titled aphoristic passages of a few pages or paragraphs each, with those, in turn, interspersed with epigraphs—quotes from other authors that illuminate the ongoing discussion in unpredictable ways, “sometimes supporting, sometimes contradicting, sometimes mocking” Lilla’s own thoughts.

There’s so much intelligence, good judgment, and humor in this book that I almost don’t know what to highlight. Lilla quotes and delves (with a light touch) into passages from Sophocles, Plato, Freud, Virgil, Augustine, Cervantes, the Books of Genesis and Job, Aeschylus, Elias Canetti, Saint Paul, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Graham Greene, Dostoevsky, Homer, and many other thinkers, writers, scriptural texts, and myths.

The Example of Nostalgia

I especially appreciated the final chapter, on nostalgia—the intense longing for a lost world, one we imagine to be simpler and happier than our own. This seeking flight from the present in favor of a future modeled on a vanished past is also, at bottom, a longing to escape from the knowledge that there is no going back in life, only forward. It would be hard for me to think of a more fitting and illuminating topic in our moment, awash as it is in this peculiar and perennial human pining for an innocence, strength, and greatness we feel we once possessed but that we have foolishly allowed to slip through our fingers.

Instead of trying, somehow, to convey the whole of this richly textured chapter, let alone the whole of this fertile book, I’ll simply quote a single paragraph that gestures toward an explanation for why our contemporary world seems to be skidding sideways into the ditch of a thoroughly nostalgia-infused politics.

One of the ironies of modern living is that the ideal of a better future can induce an ache for the past in anyone. The creative destruction that brings us ever flatter liquid-crystal television screens flattens and liquifies everything else in its path. The Maoist dream of permanent revolution is finally being realized—in politics, economics, technology, science, medicine, culture, family life, intimate relations, and personal identity. There is nothing new about passing through a historical period, even a very long one, of great disruption. What is new in the last half century is the nagging sense that accelerating disruption has become a permanent condition of human life—that to be human is no longer to plant oneself in the earth as Odysseus did, but to surf on a choppy sea and struggle desperately to stay upright. The shock of the new has been replaced by the shock of the ephemeral. Even if material and social conditions of life improve over time, those improvements cannot but seem just as improvised and tentative as what preceded them. All this can leave us feeling like exiles without our having crossed a single border, without even walking out the front door. But how to adjust? We know that a failure to mourn a single loss can wreak havoc on an individual’s psyche. We have no idea what it means to mourn when we wake up every morning in a different Potemkin village. That reactionary politics are flourishing in our liquid world should surprise no one.

A few short pages later, readers encounter one of the many enigmatic epigraphs Lilla sprinkles throughout the book. This one, from Miguel de Unamuno, is worth quoting along with the passage above:

‘Light, light, more light!’ they tell us that the dying Goethe cried. No, warmth, warmth, more warmth!—for we die of cold and not darkness. It is not night that kills, but the frost.

I hope these two passages manage to convey a bit of what this wonderful book, animated throughout by humanistic empathy, is like—and also give an inkling of all you can acquire from it.

Know thyself proclaimed the Delphic Oracle. In helping us to confront our own deep-seated ambivalence about knowledge, Mark Lilla’s richly philosophical book helps us (somewhat paradoxically) to achieve greater self-awareness and self-understanding. I now know more about myself—including how conflicted I am about the effort to achieve knowledge—than I did before reading. Which means the book has helped me become wiser.

Read it yourself and come to know the delights of making progress in wisdom.

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Confession: In recent years, when I read year-end lists from music critics my eyes glaze over. Who are all these artists? Which means that, yes, I’m getting pretty old.

But that doesn’t mean I’m a fuddy-duddy who spends all his time listening to music from the years of my youth (the 1970s and ’80s). The list Apple Music shared a week ago with the 15 artists I listened to most often this past year showed that four of them started their careers in the 1970s, one in the 1980s, three in the 1990s, three in the 2000s, and four in the 2010s. Not too shabby for a 50-something, I’d say. Yet it’s also true that I miss an awful lot of new music—and the new music I end up hearing and liking is often a function of serendipity. By which I mean it’s usually a function of what one algorithm or another suggests to me based on what I already like and listen to.

With that in mind, this post lists the ten “new” songs that meant the most to me this year. The first six really are new, released in 2024. The next three were released in 2023 but didn’t come to my attention or make an impact on my ear until more recently. And the final selection actually dates back to 1982 but was released in October 2024 on a “Deluxe Edition” of an album that first appeared 42 years ago.

1. “Mahashmashana”—Father John Misty (Album: Mahashmashana, 2024)

Father John Misty is the stage name for a singer-songwriter named Josh Tillman, who released seven acoustic folk albums under his birth name between 2006 and 2010 before joining the indie band Fleet Foxes and serving as its drummer for a few years. After leaving the band, Tillman restarted his solo career in 2012 under the ironic clerical moniker and with a radically different sound.

No longer a full-time folkie, Father John Misty blends a variety of styles, including indie folk-rock, elaborately arranged chamber pop, psychedelic rock, and pre-rock ballads, with occasional forays into nightclub jazz and even (on one memorable occasion) mariachi. Paired with these musical experiments are bold and brashly eyebrow-raising lyrics about his personal life and the state of the world. For my money, he’s one of the strangest and most artistically rewarding musicians to emerge over the past decade or so. But he isn’t for everyone.

One sign that he’s for me is that the title cut and lead track from his sixth studio album, Mahashmashana, is probably the song that’s moved me more than any other this year. Clocking in at a little more than nine-minutes long, the track resembles the best music on George Harrison’s classic 1970 album All Things Must Pass, with a slow, dirgy beat undergirding a rich wall-of-sound arrangement and pleasingly melodic vocal line. (Misty is an excellent singer.) The lyrics, including the Sanskrit title (meaning “great cremation ground”), also evoke the spiritual themes of Harrison’s songwriting in the early ’70s, but with one important difference. Whereas Harrison at the time was exploring Hinduism and eager to express his fulfilled longing for the divine (the unironic “My Sweet Lord” was the album’s hit single), Misty is doing something like the reverse: sublimating the anti-religious ire and misanthropic contempt that sometimes suffuses his lyrics into a comprehensive acceptance of unfulfillable spiritual longing.

I won’t quote or attempt to paraphrase what Misty is getting at in the highly poetic and evocative first two verses and choruses of the song. But it’s the final verse and chorus that touch me most of all, expressing with great clarity and brevity a form of disappointed resignation about the fate of truth in the world. The result can only be described as a kind of counter-gospel.

A perfect lie can live forever
The truth don't fare as well
It isn't perched on lips mid-laughter
It ain't the kind of thing you tell

Like there’s no baby in the king cake
Like there’s no figure on the cross
They have gone the way of all flesh
And what was found is lost

Yes, it is; yes, it is
Yes, it is; yes, it is
Yes, it is; yes, it is
Yes, it is; yes, it is

2. “Broken Keys” (feat. Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs)—Ed Harcourt
   (Album: El Magnifico, 2024)

I stumbled upon Ed Harcourt’s second album, From Every Sphere, shortly after it was released in 2003, and I’ve been a fan ever since, even as his career in the United States has moved from respectful treatment on alternative radio to thoroughgoing obscurity. These days, he has a small following in the UK and a few northern European countries, and that’s about it. The British singer-songwriter has been called England’s answer to Tom Waits, and I can see why—limited abilities as a singer, romantic melodicism, lots of gorgeously sad piano ballads, and experiments with non-traditional arrangements—though like all such comparisons, this one shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Harcourt is very much his own man.

El Magnifico is Harcourt’s twelfth album or EP and a welcome return to writing standard songs after two records of instrumental music. It’s a strong record filled with many powerful and moving songs, though it also has the boutique and slightly claustrophobic feel that’s common among small, low-budget indie artists who record their music by overdubbing and stacking tracks in living rooms using Pro Tools. Very little on the album sounds like the work of a band performing as an ensemble in real time—though the song I’ve chosen is a partial exception.

“Broken Keys” is an upbeat, ramshackle tune with a gothic bridge and winning chorus. Its soaring melody could almost make it a radio hit if arty British songwriters had any prospects for such a thing in 2024. Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs sings the second verse and joins Harcourt on the later choruses. He brings some brash energy to the track, though his voice manages to make Harcourt sound like a gifted vocalist in comparison. I’ve defended imperfection in rock music before, so you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the limitations captured here don’t diminish my love for the song one bit. I hope you’ll give it—and the whole album—a listen.

3. “Worst Case Scenario”—Katie Pruitt (Album: Mantras, 2024)

Mantras is Katie Pruitt’s second album, and it shows even more promise than her very strong 2020 debut, Expectations. Raised in a conservative Catholic family in the suburbs of Atlanta, the 30-year-old Pruitt is a lesbian who writes psychologically astute (and therapeutically informed) songs about the emotional struggles of thoughtful and empathetic people like herself. “Worst Case Scenario,” one of the strongest tracks on the album, explores her tendency to catastrophize about her life and the world around her. (The lyrical subject is quite similar to one my own brother wrote about on his most recent album. You can listen to his take on the topic here.)

4. “Capricorn”—Vampire Weekend (Album: Only God Was Above Us, 2024)

One of my favorite albums of the 1980s is Paul Simon’s Graceland. No wonder, then, that I enjoy the music of Vampire Weekend, since the indie-rock band very clearly grows out of and develops the harmonic and sonic palette of Simon’s classic record. Only God Was Above Us is their fifth album since 2008, and it continues in a similar vein while adding in postmodern production tricks on top of the highly melodic, acoustic-guitar-based folk songs. The song I’ve chosen to share, “Capricorn,” is my favorite on the album. It also does a good job of showing you what I mean by “postmodern production tricks.” The arrangement incorporates various sounds and noises, and it evolves radically over the course of the track, adding a fascinating, dynamic swirl of textures to what would otherwise be a pleasantly tuneful acoustic singalong, which is precisely how I’d describe most of Vampire Weekend’s work prior to this record.

5. “Front Row Seat”—Dawes (Album: Oh Brother, 2024)

Long-time readers know how much I love the California-based band Dawes. Their songwriter, lead singer, and lead guitarist Taylor Goldsmith is an incredibly talented guy, and at their best, the band is pretty great, too. With their previous album, Misadventures of Doomscroller (2022), Dawes veered away from the Jackson Browne/Laurel Canyon-inspired vibe of much of their previous work in favor of a jammier approach that called to mind Steely Dan, Manhattan Transfer, and other experiments with jazz fusion that were more common in the late 1970s. Suddenly they were writing long, riff-heavy suites. I appreciated some of them, but I preferred the sound and songwriting approach of their previous seven albums (especially Stories Don’t End [2013] and Passwords [2018]).

Thankfully, their latest record, Oh Brother, is a return to form on the songwriting front that also successfully incorporates some of the structural experiments of the previous one. The result is a strong album with several excellent songs. “Front Row Seat” is one of the best. During the instrumental break, you’ll hear what I mean about blending in some of the riff-focused textures of their last album.

6. “28”—Zach Bryan (Album: The Great American Bar Scene, 2024)

I’m going to admit that I don’t really hear the greatness so many claim to discern in the work of the prolific 20-something country artist Zach Bryan. Part of that might be the result of my lukewarm feelings for country music as a genre. Yet that hasn’t gotten in the way of me greatly appreciating the country-adjacent songs of Jason Isbell. So I’m inclined to say the bigger problem is that Bryan is overrated.

Except for this song from his most recent album. It paints a vivid portrait of an intense and emotionally eventful week, leading up to the singer’s own 28th birthday, spent in Boston and Brooklyn with an old friend, just as love blooms between them. It’s a lilting waltz with a lovely, wistful chorus. If this is a glimpse of Bryan’s future as a songwriter, I could easily see myself becoming a fan of far more than a single song.

7. “Coffee”—Chappell Roan (Album: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, 2023)

Thanks to my 18-year-old daughter’s impeccable musical taste, I was introduced to Chappell Roan a few months before she exploded in popularity. Right around the time I began hearing her music being played in my house, in late 2023, Roan played a modest-sized venue in Philadelphia where I had recently seen Dawes, a band with 460,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Today, by contrast, 41.1 million people listen to Roan every month. Not bad for an artist who burst on the scene a little more than a year ago.

I could tell immediately upon hearing her songs and her singing that she was an incredible talent. But I was also impressed with the way the album sounded. I didn’t warm to the ’80s-style synth-pop arrangements right away, especially on the upbeat, dance-oriented songs. But I could tell, even amidst all the keyboards, that I was hearing something more organic than has been typical for pop music over the past decade or so. Most of the credit for that goes, I later learned, to Dan Nigro, the man who produced Roan’s debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, and co-wrote most of its songs with her. As he had on both of Olivia Rodrigo’s albums, Nigro opted for a live-in-the-studio sound that is warmer and less synthetic than the norm today. I suspect that has something to do with Roan’s meteoric rise over the past 14 months.

But the far bigger elements, I think, are the quality of the songs and Roan’s distinctive voice and over-the-top glam-pop persona. She sings bold tunes with raunchy lyrics about the realities sex, love, dating, and relationships in the early 21st century—and she does it with greater flair, intelligence, and humor than anyone else I’m aware of. To get a sense of what I mean, take a listen to “Casual,” a song with brutally honest (and vulgar) lyrics about the challenge of finding one’s way in a world where people will engage in the most intimate of acts with one another, all the while pronouncing it “casual.” The song is hilarious, sad, sexy, and extremely catchy.

But the song I’ve highlighted here is a different sort of statement. “Coffee” is one of several beautiful ballads on the album that haven’t gotten much notice in the swirl of attention that’s engulfed Roan since late last year. I could have shared any of them, but I opted for “Coffee” because, like John Mayer, I think it’s pretty close to being a perfect song. The melody, singing, and arrangement are impeccable, and the lyrics are very finely crafted. The song’s protagonist is planning on getting together with an ex-lover, but doing so is dangerous because she knows (from past experience) that if they go somewhere from their shared past, or they end up in a park after dark, let alone if they get a little drunk, they’ll end up sleeping together—and she knows that would be a mistake. So she settles on them getting coffee, the only thing that seems safe. But even that could end up with them falling into bed, because that’s what she wants, even as she doesn’t. That ache of self-thwarted longing suffuses the song and gives it pathos, wisdom, and gravity.

It’s a 3-1/2-minute masterpiece—and proof positive that Chappell Roan has an extraordinary career ahead of her.

8. “Evicted”—Wilco (Album: Cousin, 2023)

When Apple Music sent that list of the artists I’d listened to the most over the past year, I was surprised to see Wilco at the very top. But on a moment’s reflection, it made sense. I’d been a big Wilco fan during the era of Summerteeth (1999) and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002), but beginning with A Ghost Is Born (2004), I began to move onto other artists. Over the intervening years, I’d occasionally hear a new Wilco tune that I liked, but nothing moved me enough to inspire an effort to become reacquainted with the band.

Until late this last summer, that is. Due, once again, to the vagaries of one algorithm or another, I heard a song from the band’s 2022 album Cruel Country that I loved. That inspired me to dip into that record and then to move backward, to their 2019 album Ode to Joy and then forward to their most recent album Cousin (2023). Much to my surprise and delight, all three albums were full of great songs. From there I moved backward into their by now very deep catalogue (Cousin is their thirteenth album), finding good songs all along the way. And as Apple Music has now shown me, I ended up doing a lot of listening! (Since Wilco is very much Jeff Tweedy’s band, I listened to his solo albums, too, and read his very enjoyable memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back).)

Choosing a song to share from all of that was a challenge. But I settled on one of several strong songs on Cousin because I’m especially fond of Cate Le Bon’s production on that album—and I chose “Evicted” because it may be the catchiest on the record. Now that I’ve learned Wilco is still doing top-level, vital work as they enter their fourth decade as a band, I can’t wait to hear what they do next.

9. “Easy Now”—Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds (Album: Council Skies, 2023)

I was never the biggest Oasis fan in the world, and I won’t be spending obscene amounts of money to see them live on their much-hyped reunion tour. But there’s no denying Noel Gallagher is an incredibly gifted songwriter. I’m also in the minority of people who prefer his voice to the attitudinal sneer of his brother Liam Gallagher. That means I usually opt to listen to Noel’s work outside of Oasis. I started to appreciate his most recent album, Council Skies, about nine months after it was released (in June 2023), and it became one of my favorites of the year. “Easy Now” is a lovely track that showcases his undiminished talent as a pop songsmith.

10. “Never Be You”—Tom Petty & and the Heartbreakers (Album: Long After Dark, Deluxe Edition; originally recorded in 1982, first released in October 2024)

Over the past few months, I’ve gone through a phase of listening to and really enjoying the late Tom Petty’s 1994 album Wildflowers in the & All the Rest (Deluxe) version that was released a few years ago. In many ways, that album was Petty’s creative peak as a songwriter. But I nonetheless consider the run of three albums he and his spectacular band put out between 1979 and 1982—Damn the Torpedoes, Hard Promises, and Long After Dark—to be his greatest work. In my view, Jimmy Iovine’s production on those records marks an enduring high point in the recording of rock music, especially on the first of those three albums. The band was at its peak then as well, with drummer Stan Lynch doing his best work, guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench blending their instruments in a truly transcendent way, and Petty’s voice displaying a lacerating aggression that would recede on his later work.

How wonderful, then, that the third of those albums was re-released two months ago in a deluxe edition that includes very strong archival material. The best of these gems—apparently the only song Petty ever co-wrote with Tench—was covered by Roseanne Cash in 1985. But now we get to hear the original version of “Never Be You” that was left off of the album—and it sounds so damn good.

I began this post by denying I was a musical fuddy-duddy stuck in the past. But there’s no denying my taste was shaped in a big way by these Petty records—enough so that hearing this new/old track for the first time a few weeks ago gave me chills, just as I would feel discovering buried treasure. That makes the song an excellent choice to round out this list.

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With Labor Day on Monday and the American Political Science Association meeting starting on Thursday in Philadelphia, there will only be one post from me next week, probably on Wednesday. I’ll be back to regular, twice-a-week posting the week of September 9.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when I longed very deeply to be religious. And for a brief time, I nearly achieved it. But that was a long time ago. My tepid faith waned slowly over years until going to church with my family left me feeling like a blind man feigning appreciation of a widely admired painting of purported beauty. I would nod reverently, go along with the motions at Catholic Mass, drop my kids off to “church school” on Sunday morning, but inside I felt nothing. Or rather, I felt like a fake.

I’m no longer pretending.

During the period when my faith was fading, I wrote an article for The New Republic, and then expanded on it for a book chapter, lambasting the so-called New Atheists who got so much attention in the decade following the September 11 attacks. My take on Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens wasn’t so much that their affirmation of godlessness was wrong. It was that their proselytizing, bullying style of atheism was dogmatic—and that this kind of dogmatism is incompatible with intellectual and political liberalism.

I still believe that. I never describe myself as an atheist, because that term conveys objective certainty—that I know there is no God. But I know no such thing. I could die tomorrow and wake up to find myself confronting the creator of the universe, having to defend the way I lived my life in order to justify my eternal reward (or, perhaps, to ward off eternal punishment). But I don’t think that’s at all likely. I think it’s far more likely that when I die, I will fall into the dreamless sleep of oblivion.

The story of how I got here is very much my own—a product of my upbringing, my psychological disposition, my education, and my distinctive experiences. Yet I think those who struggle with religion—who feel a stirring in themselves when encountering genuine piety, while finding it difficult or impossible to affirm the reality of what the pious presume about the nature of existence—may find something useful in the story of my journey toward, and then away from, faith. Whether it proves to be more useful as a guide or, instead, as a cautionary tale conveying how not to respond to the question of God—well, that’s something you, Dear Reader, will have to decide for yourself.

Learning to Long for God

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I’ve never met Martin Peretz. Now that he’s 85 years old, I suspect it’s unlikely I ever will. That’s unfortunate, given how much The New Republic, the magazine he purchased in 1974 for $380,000 and owned and oversaw for the better part of four decades, has meant to me.

Some small part of that affection follows from the fact that I wrote three cover stories for TNR and ended up being asked to serve as one of its contributing editors for a few years in the early 2010s. But those happy things happened because I loved what Marty had done with the magazine long before I worked up the nerve to pitch an essay to one of his editors. That prior love is why I resigned my honorific title as quickly as I could once Silicon Valley simpleton Chris Hughes actively destroyed what Peretz had painstakingly built. That was in the final days of 2014. A magazine called The New Republic continues to be published today. It has little if anything in common with what it used to be.

What TNR Was

I first became a TNR subscriber in 1992, when one of my teachers in graduate school told me it was required reading for anyone aspiring to be an intellectual—someone who devotes himself to ideas, thinking, and the life of the mind. He was right. The magazine—especially the back of the book overseen by Leon Wieseltier—provided an education to rival the one I acquired in my graduate studies in history and political science over the next six years. (You can read my tribute to Leon and his enormous contribution to American culture in the essay I wrote shortly after he resigned from the magazine in protest of Hughes’ (and his team’s) ambition to break shit.)

This means I began reading back during Andrew Sullivan’s tumultuous but incredibly fruitful editorial oversight of the magazine, from 1991 to 1996. These days, know-nothing critics on the left would have you believe Sullivan (with Peretz’s backing) turned TNR into a right-wing rag during these years because in 1994 he published an excerpt of The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein (alongside nearly two dozen essays, many of them severely critical of the book, its argument, and its methods) and a handful of other articles considered heterodox for a left-of-center magazine.

The truth is Sullivan continued and deepened what Peretz started during the 1980s, when he began gathering together a fractious group of brilliant editors and writers, ranging from the left to the center-right, to wage intellectual battle with each other as well as conventional wisdom in Washington. There was Mike Kinsley, an all-purpose skeptic. And Rick Hertzberg, a refugee from the Carter administration and the irascible house lefty. And Charles Krauthammer, another former Carter administration staffer whose hawkish views on foreign policy placed him closer to Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party than to the Democrats of the time. And Wieseltier, a stunningly erudite and combative editor and writer who took his intellectual cues from Isaiah Berlin and Lionel Trilling—the great pluralist liberals of the postwar decades.

It was quite a group, eager to make a big splash in the normally placid and chummy wading pool of the nation’s capital. And that’s exactly what they did—with Peretz himself serving as editor-in-chief while maintaining a multi-decade-long perch in the interdisciplinary Social Studies program at Harvard University, where he served both as a charismatic undergraduate teacher and a gifted talent-scout for the magazine.

The number of prominent writers and editors who either started out working for the magazine or cycled through it early in their careers is astonishing. Fred Barnes, Mort Kondracke, Michael Lewis, Ann Hulbert, Dorothy Wickenden, Tim Noah, David Samuels, Richard Holbrooke, Samantha Power, Emily Yoffe, Bart Gellman, Larry Grafstein, Jason DeParle, James Bennet, Dana Millbank, Anthony Blinken, Jonathan Chait, Jonathan Cohn, Christopher Orr, Michelle Cottle, Judith Shulevitz, Jeffrey Rosen, John Judis, Julia Ioffe, Jed Perl, James Wood, Adam Kirsch, Michael Kelly, Charles Lane, Peter Beinart, Frank Foer, Richard Just—those are just some of the names. Many came through Peretz’s Harvard connections. The rest were friends or students of his many friends around the country and the world.

The result, verified in issue after issue, year after year, was nothing less than the best weekly magazine in America.

A Project for a Lifetime

But what made it great—and distinctive? Peretz’s title—The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left, Right, and Center—doesn’t help answer those questions because it lacks specificity. Peretz didn’t start and sustain arguments for their own sake without regard to what each side stood for. On the contrary, he was out to defend something substantive. But what?

We get a decent answer about a hundred pages into the book, when Peretz recounts getting into a bit of a public tussle with sociologist Daniel Bell at a conference in 1968, shortly after student protesters took over the campus at Columbia University, where Bell had taught for a decade but would soon depart for Harvard. The details of the disagreement are less important than a few sentences Bell uttered in the midst of their back and forth.

If there is a problem for the intellectuals, it would seem to me a double one, which is part of the role of the university in a postindustrial society. It’s how you humanize the technocracy and how you tame the apocalypse. Having seen some of my students attain the apocalypse, I would submit that it is much easier to humanize a technocracy.

Though Peretz appears not to have recognized it right away, Bell had provided him with the project of a lifetime. Over the coming years, Peretz would use the considerable resources made available to him by his marriage (in 1967) to Anne Devereux Labouisse, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, to humanize the technocracy—meaning those college graduates who hold top public and private jobs in the professional-managerial class as “knowledge workers” or “symbolic analysts.” The New Republic would be Peretz primary vehicle for pursuing the task of humanizing them.

Peretz’s vision of humanism was somewhat similar to the one that animated the early neoconservatives who gathered around The Public Interest, the influential quarterly journal of public policy co-founded in 1965 by Irving Kristol and Bell himself. Like Kristol and Bell, Peretz came to dissent from the left’s turn away from liberalism and open embrace of anti-American ideologies in circulation during the late ’60s. But unlike Kristol and his allies at Commentary magazine, Peretz never moved all the way over to the right. Instead, he attempted to keep alive a distinctive vision of liberalism that made its home just to the left side of the ideological center while inviting a wide range of reporters, writers, and thinkers further to his left and somewhat to his right to engage in a broad-minded conversation and argument about the country, its culture, and the wider world.  

This meant that Peretz would sometimes publish essays that poked holes in various left-wing shibboleths or took Republican policy proposals seriously. But the magazine never carried water for the GOP and it never hesitated to criticize conservatives in lacerating terms, especially when they transgressed fundamental liberal principles and commitments (as Peretz and his handpicked staff discerned them).

Against “One World”

For me, the most illuminating passages of the book are those where Peretz describes how he understands his own distinctive, combative, and embattled form of liberalism. Few will be surprised that it grows out of a dispute with his fellow Jews, many of whom, then as now, embraced homogeneous universalism—or what Peretz dismissively refers to throughout the book as “One Worldism.” This is the view that morality demands the overcoming of all particularistic attachments—religious, cultural, and political—that make the world heterogeneous and conflict-ridden.

The most insipid and facile version of this outlook can be found in John Lennon’s hippie dirge-anthem “Imagine.” Imagine no heaven, no hell, no countries, nothing to kill or die for, no religion, no possessions, no greed or hunger, just “a brotherhood of man.” Imagining these things “isn’t hard to do,” Lennon assures us. And once we imagine them, they can be made real.

Such sentiments were widely shared during the late 1960s and ’70s, affirmed by many on the antiwar left. It was both possible and desirable to jettison all particularistic attachments, many believed. In fact, it was the key to world peace, which was within reach, just over the horizon or around the bend.

For many Jewish leftists, such convictions grew out of personal discomfort with their own particularism—a discomfort that mirrored the unsettled feelings of non-Jews about whether and to what extent Jews would be willing and able to fit in among the Christian and post-Christian majorities that dominated the nations of the West. The uncomfortable topic wasn’t limited to Weimar-era anti-Semites on the far right. It’s obviously a major theme in the origins of Zionism. Variations on it also come up often in the myriad tributaries and backwaters of the Marxist tradition, and in Marx’s writings themselves. It can even be discerned as far back as the late 18th-century debate between Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn over the proper scope of the Enlightenment and its political, cultural, and religious implications for Jews.

Peretz staked out a strong position in this debate against universal homogeneity. His liberalism was distinctive in permitting and encouraging an appreciation and respect for particularistic attachments. In this, his outlook resembled that of Isaiah Berlin, whose liberalism emerged in dialectical conversation with and criticism of those (like Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamman, and other members of what Berlin called the Counter-Enlightenment) who dissented from the most universalistic and cosmopolitan strands of enlightened, liberal thinking.

Unlike Berlin, however, Peretz had deeper and more passionate attachment to one specific form of particularism: Zionism. (Berlin’s appreciation for Zionism has aptly been described as “modest.” No one would describe Peretz’s stance toward the Jewish state using such a lukewarm term.) The intensity of Peretz’s Zionism has shaped just about everything else about his journalistic, moral, political, personal, and professional commitments.

That very much includes the distinctive way he attempted to humanize the technocracy with his magazine. His vision of humanism included universalistic values and aspirations along with a great appreciation for specific cultural inheritances and traditions, which he usually strove to treat with respect. That combination of commitments—and the deep tensions between them—proved intellectually fruitful, opening up space for broad disagreements and contestation among contributors over big questions of policy and political philosophy. It also pointed toward a wise appreciation for the hard and possibly immovable obstacles to anything resembling a true “end of history” or the creation of a smooth, homogeneous world of soft edges and easy solutions to (often ineradicable) problems.

The Big Blind Spot

Note the words “pointed towards” (rather than “helped him achieve”) in that last sentence.

Looking back at the trajectory of TNR over the course of his ownership in light of the way he tells his life story in The Controversialist, what strikes me as most peculiar is the way Peretz’s criticism of “One Worldism” and openness to the hard claims of particularism sat side-by-side all those years with an unwavering faith in the ability of American military power to serve as a means to champion universal-humanistic moral idealism around the world.

To say that faith stands in tension with his skepticism about the capacity of the world’s rivalrous and often hostile groups to transcend particular attachments is a major understatement. That tension has (at least) two dimensions. One wonders, first of all, why he was so sure American military might could be successful in playing such a humanitarian role (in Central America during the 1980s; in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s; in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in the years following 9/11) when, according to his own assumptions, the humanitarian impulse is so very weak in the world and the human heart. And then there’s the domestic side of that very same point: What made Peretz think the American people were eager or even reluctantly willing to serve in the role of a humanitarian policeman over the long term?

Don’t both presumptions stand in rather stark contradiction with his bedrock convictions about human beings and their tendency to prioritize more local or tribal attachments?

In this respect, I find something fittingly ironic about Peretz getting booted in 2010 from his own magazine (after first selling and then becoming once again its partial owner) for an undeniably bigoted attack on Muslims in the unedited blog he had begun publishing at the TNR website. Not that I took or take any joy at his humiliation. (He was canceled long before it was cool.) But those unfortunate events were nonetheless a kind of unintentional vindication of his own longstanding skepticism about humanitarian impulses in the world—a skepticism that should have played a bigger part in a number of his past editorial decisions on coverage of and pronouncements about foreign policy. This is most glaringly true about the Iraq War. But it also applies to the muscular, crusading moralism that animated the magazine’s defense of numerous ill-fated adventures around the globe before and since 2003.

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A Life Well Lived

When Peretz’s book approaches the present in its closing pages, he claims to be unsurprised by the GOP’s turn toward Trumpism, and I believe him. Not that Peretz supports the man and his political movement. But his lifelong awareness of the power of the particular in human life—of attachment to and love of this party, this religion, this people, this nation—should serve as an inoculation against shock that someone, somewhere would eventually rise up, even in a United States founded on a cluster of ringing universal ideals, in explicit defiance of the impulse toward the cosmopolitan, the humanitarian, the global.

Peretz ends his book by expressing distaste for Trumpism as well as contemporary progressivism. Believe me, I get it. The question remains, though, of how to understand what lies between those poles. Is it merely a negation of the extremes on either side? Or is there a positive outlook distinct from the left- and right-wing alternatives? A substantive liberalism that can guide us through the narrow ideological straits while also humanizing the technocracy?

Even with its blind spots, TNR under his leadership did an extraordinary job, measured in decades, of cultivating just such a humanizing liberalism. For that, liberal humanists everywhere owe Martin Peretz an expression of sincere gratitude and thanks. There are many measures of a life well lived, and this is surely one of them.

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Well, those drifter’s days are past me now
I’ve got so much more to think about
Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in, what to leave out
—Bob Seger, “Against the Wind”

I don’t want to join in the critical pile-on against Taylor Swift’s new 31-song double album, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. I’ve listened to the album and find a lot to like on it, with a heavy emphasis on a lot and like (as opposed to love).

Years ago, Rolling Stone assigned a star rating to every new album it reviewed: Five stars was something approaching perfection, while one star was reserved for foulest garbage. The new Swift album sounds to me like it’s jam packed with three and three-and-a-half star songs, one after another after another for just over two hours. That means: Hardly any junk. But also: Hardly anything great. But then again, I could be wrong. I’ll need at least a few weeks to form firm judgments of all this new material. It’s going to take a good bit of work.

And that’s part of the problem: The burden of judgment—separating out the great from the good from the mediocre—falls to me and Swift’s countless millions of fans because she has opted against doing that work herself. She’s hardly the only artist in recent years to do the same.

Writing Under Constraint

You’ll hear aging rock stars talk about it in interviews—how back in the first decades of the rock-album era, the constraints imposed by the medium helped to ensure quality control. Vinyl LPs could fit only a bit more than 20 minutes of music per side. That meant a new single-album release would add up to, at most, 42 or 43 minutes of music. Any longer and sound quality would quickly begin to degrade from having to compress the grooves carved into the surface of the vinyl.

Want to squeeze a lot of songs onto your album? Then they need to be short. (In 1980, Elvis Costello released an album with twenty two-minute songs.) Writing long? Then you’ll have to limit yourself to a small handful of songs. (I’ve just described almost every prog-rock record ever released.) The only other option was to put out a double (or triple) album, if the record company would go along with it—which it might not, given the added expense of pressing two records instead of one, designing and printing a gatefold album jacket, and shipping a product twice as heavy as a single album. The biggest acts were permitted the occasional double-album indulgence, but less successful artists weren’t.

That’s where editing came in.

“Editing” can mean many things: streamlining individual songs (cut this guitar solo; get rid of that uninspired verse) or adding embellishments or adjustments (let’s try a string arrangement on this; I wonder how this one would sound in 6/8 time; this song would be better if we repeated the chorus once more at the end after a key change). This is the kind of editing a record producer typically brings to a project. It’s a blend of what, on an essay or book, is called developmental editing and line-editing: the first looks at the overall structure of a piece of writing; the second streamlines and cleans it up at the level of the word, sentence, and paragraph.

But there’s another kind of editing that’s more like curation—deciding what to include and exclude in putting an album together. If a band records twenty songs for a project, but only has room for 12 on the final album, decisions need to be made. Which are the 12 best songs—not just in absolute terms, but in terms of the whole (the album) being constructed out of the parts (the songs)? What kind of statement are the artists trying to make? What kind of sound and mood do they want to become immortalized at this moment in their career? Which of these songs do they want to play live dozens of times on their upcoming concert tour? Which song would make for the best opening track, and which the best closer? And how about pacing? How many upbeat tunes, how many ballads, and in which order?

Bob Dylan is one of the greatest curatorial editors in rock history. He frequently recorded multiple, radically different versions of each song on every album, along with many songs that ended up on the cutting-room floor and were only compiled and released decades later in outtakes collections for the most obsessive fans.

Bruce Springsteen gave Dylan a run for his money as a curatorial editor, especially in the years when he was most prolific. The Boss reportedly recorded as many as 70 songs for his fourth record, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978). The final album included 10 of them. Springsteen gave away several songs to other artists, held onto others for his next album, and left the overwhelming majority of them in the vault. When 20 or so of them were released in a few batches decades later, fans were shocked by how many of the abandoned songs were gems. But Springsteen considered them either too derivative of other artists or too overtly commercial to fit his stark, uncompromising vision for the Darkness album.  

The same thing happened with his next album, The River (1981). Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded something on the order to 50 songs in several sessions. One version of the final album included ten songs. Then Springsteen changed his mind and expanded the project into his first and only double album of new material. The final version included 20 songs, which meant another 30 were left behind. Once again, the extraordinarily high quality of the abandoned songs thrilled his fans when many of them were released a number of years later.

Now imagine Springsteen’s early career took place in the streaming era, without the constraints imposed by vinyl pressings and the need to produce and ship a physical product. In this alternative timeline, the Boss puts out almost everything. In addition to the 30 songs he actually released in those years, he releases 40 more. That could have meant four more single albums of new songs from the Boss in these crucial years of his career. As I’ve noted, there’s an abundance of great material there. Many fans would have been ecstatic. But what would have been the artistic consequence of flooding the market in this way?

Most likely, Springsteen and his fantastic band would have come to be known as prolific craftsmen of highly enjoyable pop songs and expert musical ventriloquists capable of mimicking the sound of a 1950s ballad on one track and the amped-up punk aggression of The Clash on the next. They might have sold a lot more records, but they also might have sold fewer, as Springsteen lost much of his distinctiveness as an artist, and his universe of fans was kept fat and happy with a steady diet of new material and never left hungry for more.

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Good-Enough Songs

The past five years have been a period of mind-boggling productivity for Taylor Swift. By my rough count, she has released 138 “new” songs since August 2019. (This includes the track listings of the new studio albums Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights, and The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, plus the vault tracks/outtakes/b-sides included on the re-recordings of her albums Fearless, Red, Speak Now, and 1989.)

In terms of quantity, that’s an extraordinary songwriting accomplishment. But I wonder if the volume of output—especially with her latest release—speaks to a failure or disregard of curatorial editing. It’s one thing to release 17 songs on Folklore and then another stylistically similar 17 on Evermore five months later. It’s a lot, but at least listeners had some time to digest the first batch before the second was dropped into their laps. But now imagine she combined the two albums into a single record with only the very best songs from each included, holding the rest for release years or decades from now. Wouldn’t that have been better, elevating this imagined single album above the extremely accomplished records she actually did release?

What happened on Friday of last week is as far away from such an approach as one could imagine. That’s when the previously announced 16-track new album was released but then became a 31-track magnum opus two hours later. This is a bigger version of what happened when Midnights was released in October 2022 with 13 tracks that became 20 later that night, when then the “3am Edition” dropped.

At this point, I can’t help but wonder if Swift is holding anything back. If she writes a song with a serviceable tune, does she just automatically put it out, even if it’s the 13th song in a row to reflect on some aspect of her latest failed romance and sounds remarkably similar to the last couple dozen songs she’s co-written with collaborators Jack Antonoff or Aaron Dessner?

Speaking of Dessner, his indie rock band The National put out a decent album with 11 songs on it in April 2023. Then the band released another decent album with another 12 songs five months later. The albums are sonically interchangeable. If you put on any song from either record at random, I’ll probably enjoy it. But put on either album from the beginning and let it play through and I’ll quickly become a little bored, as the songs start to blend into each other, with one solid but undistinguished atmospheric mid-tempo track following another, and another, and another.

Wouldn’t it have been better to do the work of curation and put out a single album with the very best tracks instead of putting all of them out and thereby diluting the band’s art? Can the members of The National still hear and judge, or reach agreement on, the difference between a good-enough song and a great song? Do they still have a vision of the kind of band they want to be, and the kind of music they want to put out into the world—a vision that can be used to hone their public presentation? Or have they now reached such a high level of professionalism that nothing they produce is bad, and all of it is good enough that they see no reason not to release it?

I wondered the same thing in listening to the two albums pop songwriter Ed Sheeran released in May and September of 2023. (Once again Dessner was deeply involved in both records as co-writer and co-producer.) With bonus tracks, the two albums together add up to 32 songs. Many of them are good. Few, if any, are great.

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Avoiding Notebook Dumps

Journalists have a name for an article written and published without the necessary curatorial oversight. It’s called a notebook dump. The reporter does research, conducts interviews, jots down thoughts, talks to some more people, reads some more on background—and then just pours it all into a long, sprawling mess of a draft that includes everything. A master prose stylist like Tom Wolfe at his youthful best could make a notebook dump work, just as a master songwriter like Swift can sometimes pull it off (as she largely did with Folklore and Evermore). But most cannot. In most cases a skilled editor will have an enormous amount of work to do in cutting, organizing, and shaping that draft into a whole vastly greater than the unwieldy sum of its possible parts.

What to leave in? What to leave out?—Those are the curatorial editor’s guiding questions. They imply that leaving everything in—putting everything out for the public to consume—isn’t always, or even usually, better. Less can be more. The clay needs to be sculpted. The fat trimmed. Distinctions made. Decisions rendered.

In writing this post, for example, I decided to limit myself to a few contemporary examples (Swift, The National, and Sheeran) and a few contrasting examples from the past (Dylan and Springsteen). I also decided to focus exclusively on music when I might have brought in many more examples from other genres—like the proliferation of overly long, undisciplined 3-hour Hollywood films; flabby, overwritten novels and biographies; and self-indulgent TV series filled with red herrings, extraneous characters, and unresolved plot points. But I thought readers would be better off making those kinds of connections on their own rather than piling up too many examples from too many forms of popular art that might lead the post to become repetitive, boring, or self-indulgent. I know music best, so that would be the genre I’d write about to make a broader point about the importance of editing and its waning place in our culture.

That was my curatorial decision, and I think it was the right call.

Note, though, that unlike Dylan and Springsteen putting out vinyl LPs in the 1970s—or a long-form journalist writing for a print magazine or newspaper during that same era—I am not constrained by physical limitations in writing this Substack. Instead of this being the roughly 2,300-word essay it is, it could easily have grown to 4,000 or 6,000 or 10,000 words if I allowed it to. Nothing’s preventing me from putting out a journalist’s equivalent of 31 new songs all at once for my subscribers to read, adore, revile, argue about, or nod-off over. Except that I’ve opted to impose some discipline on myself—and in the process to make the essay better than it likely would have been at longer length.

It's an old modern story: As external, received constraints on our choices are removed (through political reform, moral and theological liberalization, or technological advances), we are left with the burden of imposing constraints of our own choosing on ourselves—or else opting to give up on limitations altogether. I fear some of our greatest popular artists are showing signs of taking the latter path, and with less-than-entirely-positive results.

Editing isn’t just about fiddling around the margins with something already great. It’s the process of finding what’s potentially great amidst the merely good or even pedestrian and refining it until it achieves its highest potential. Without it, we run the risk of drowning in a sea of the merely “mid.”

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Last week, my wife and I went to a (very good) Jason Isbell concert in Philadelphia. Long-time readers know I’m a fan of his. But this show was special because his opening act was Aimee Mann, who’s been making music for a lot longer than Isbell—music I’ve been listening to for nearly 40 years. That made the show a full-fledged double-header for me, and one that stirred up a lot of feelings—about aging, about the place of music in my life, and in particular about the place of Mann’s music in my life.

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Origin Stories

Growing up in the southern Connecticut suburbs of New York City in a broken home—my mother disappeared after she suffered a mental breakdown in 1978, when I was eight years old, leaving my younger brother and I to be raised solely by our father—I was often miserable. By the early ’80s, I was spending hours a day watching music videos on the recently launched MTV. I’d been obsessed with rock music since I was introduced by my parents at a very young age to Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and other artists of the 1970s. After my parents’ divorce, withdrawing into an imaginative world of songs and concept albums and rock personas was a kind of balm for my lost and wounded soon-to-be-adolescent soul.

I never much liked the synth-pop that enjoyed heavy rotation on MTV in its early days. Still, the video for “Voices Carry” by the band Til Tuesday caught my ear and eye. The verse was weirdly creepy and unsatisfying. All tension, no release—the kind of verse that makes you think, if this song doesn’t have a great payoff in the chorus, I never want to hear it again. But then the chorus hit. This wasn’t a Thompson Twins knock-off. This was The Beatles refashioned for post-New Wave tastes.

As for the video itself, it was awkward and pretentious, like much of what appeared on the channel in that era. But the lead singer of the band was striking—a waif-like woman with spiked punky-blonde hair and enormous eyes who acts out the lyrics in a powerful and memorable way. The protagonist is involved with a man who abuses her and insists she never express her emotions, especially in public: “Hush hush / Keep it down now / Voices carry,” the chorus repeats over and over. By the end of the song and video, the woman breaks free of the demand for silence while facing a barrage of verbal abuse for her insolent defiance.

It was striking. But also, to my 15-year-old self, forgettable. I didn’t buy the single or the album it came from. For all I knew, the band with its noteworthy lead singer would be a one-hit wonder, never to be heard from again.

But that proved to be wrong. The following year, Til Tuesday was back with a follow-up, and its lead single grabbed me the moment its chorus began. “Coming Up Close” has one of the loveliest chorus melodies I had ever heard up to that point in my life. To this day, it gives me chills. It was around this point that I learned the lead singer and songwriter of the band was named Aimee Mann. I was definitely intrigued. But I also continued to dislike the group’s typically mid-80s synthetic sound. (I preferred REM and The Smiths.) So once again, I didn’t purchase the single or the album—or the third and final record Til Tuesday released two years later, by which time I was in college, distracted by a million people, experiences, books, and bands. If Mann hadn’t launched a solo career a few years later, I may never have thought about her again.

Launchings

In the 31 years since Mann set out on her own with the enduringly great album Whatever, I’ve been pretty busy.

In 1993, I was a 23-year-old graduate student finishing up an MA in history at New York University and transitioning to Michigan State, where I was beginning a Ph.D. in political science. I had been dating on and off for the previous 2-1/2 years the woman who would become my wife two years later. Mann’s solo debut was one of a handful of soundtracks to that moment of my life.

All the promise I’d heard on those early Til Tuesday songs finally reached full flower on the record. The melodies and lyrics were now far more accomplished and mature. The thin and sterile synth-saturated sound was gone, replaced with a movable feast of alternative-rock arrangements, each song living in its own aural universe perfectly crafted to suit its needs.

I loved the album and lived with it almost exclusively for months. To this day, putting it on both plunges me back to that specific time in my life—before marriage, before kids, before mortgage payments, before a steady career—and reminds me of what a powerful statement Mann made right out of the gate.  

But that doesn’t mean I proved to be the most loyal fan. Mann has had a rocky career, marked at first by rancorous public clashes with her record companies, who expected her to sell more records than she did and responded by being difficult and unsupportive. That led to some long gaps between releases, and then to muted promotional campaigns for her albums and singles. This became the norm once she went fully independent with her third album—the magnificent Bachelor No. 2 (2000)—and lacked corporate backing to help get the word out.

My life has also seen rocky patches, both at work and at home—and times when I haven’t paid close attention to new music. I’d always notice at some level of awareness that Mann had a new album coming or freshly released. Usually I’d buy and make an effort to listen to it, but often the effort was half-hearted and fleeting. In most cases, one or two songs made a lasting impression; occasionally it was three or four. As the years and the decades flew by, that added up to a decent-sized list of songs that meant something to me. But they never seemed to really shake me awake, or demand my full attention. Mann was mainly supplying background music to the episodic unfolding of my life.

Renewed Appreciation

This finally changed a few years ago, when my brother (my closest musical confidante and a talented singer-songwriter himself) began raving about Mann’s 2017 record, Mental Illness. This was the first of her albums, released five years after the previous one (Charmer from 2012), that really hadn’t registered with me at all. I heard my brother’s praise and made note of it. But it took several more enthusiastic comments from him over the next few months to convince me to take a close listen.

When I finally did, I was blown away.

In many ways, it was like what I remembered from all of her previous records: intricately crafted, melodic songs wedded to deeply thoughtful, meticulously constructed, and sadly sardonic lyrics. But something had also subtly shifted. Most of the songs were now ballads, quiet, reserved. There was little electric guitar. The arrangements beautifully embellished the folk-based songs by blending acoustic guitar, piano, rich vocal harmonies, and a small string section.

It was an album of stunning beauty, emotional intimacy, and vulnerability. And I couldn’t get enough of it. I craved more. So I did something that, for me, is pretty unusual: I went deep-sea diving back into Mann’s career, paying special attention to the albums she had released since my attention had begun to flag. What I discovered is that, although her art had indeed reached a new standard of refinement and excellence on Mental Illness, she’d consistently been operating on a much higher level for a much longer time than I’d realized.

Every album contains treasures, with gems scattered across its distinctive musical landscape. Yes, she takes her time—in the old days she took three years between releases; over the past decade it’s become four or five—but the results always display songwriting craftmanship on the highest levels.

In my research into Mann’s past, I also learned more about her personal life than I’d ever known, including her recurring struggles with serious anxiety and depression. And how both were made worse by those early conflicts with record companies. And how the roots of these difficulties could ultimately be found (as they usually are) in childhood traumas, including her parents’ rancorous divorce, which led to an episode well summarized in an LA Times story from three years ago:

Her parents divorced when she was 3, after which Mann’s mother and her new boyfriend kidnapped Mann. They took her to Europe and traveled around. Mann’s father was searching for her via a private detective for nearly a year when she was found in England and returned home.

“By the time I saw my father again, it was like he was a stranger, and then I didn’t see my mother again until I was 14,” she says. “I think having two parents where you spend so much time away from them, and then they just don’t seem like parents anymore—that lays the groundwork for later problems.”

Given my kindred childhood traumas—including maternal abandonment and, before that, my mother’s own hapless attempted kidnapping of me and my brother—reading this account was a revelation. It also allowed me to see that Mann’s songs can be understood in part as chronicles (in the form of telegraphic short stories written in verse) of her own path across the same scarred and cragged emotional terrain over which I have stumbled all my life.

How could I not feel a special bond with Mann and her work?

Gratitude

There are any number of possible entry points to Aimee Mann’s remarkable body of music. One great place to start is her most recent album, Queens of the Summer Hotel (2021), a baroquely orchestrated song cycle inspired by the novel Girl, Interrupted. (Given the subject matter—a teenage girl’s experience in a psychiatric hospital—the album might have been titled Mental Illness 2.) It’s an exquisite piece of work, filled with dark beauty and wisdom, showing that Mann, now in her 60s, continues to work at the top of her game. Here’s “Burn it Out,” one of my favorite tracks off the record.

I also remain especially fond of Bachelor No. 2 and the songs she contributed to the soundtrack of the P.T. Anderson film Magnolia from 1999. The latter songs have since been added to the track listing of the former album, which was originally released the year after the film appeared, so focusing on that 2000 release now opens up a rich world of eighteen 4-minute masterpieces.

There’s “Red Vines,” which I fell in love with the moment I first heard it. In a just world, it would have been a Top 10 hit and widely known by everyone who appreciates good music. Mann herself had commercial ambitions for it while she was recording the album, but her label at the time (Geffen Records) seemed intent on proving their cluelessness, and it went nowhere on the charts.

There’s also “Save Me,” a tightly coiled track that has become one of her most popular songs on streaming services. It has some of the most efficient and powerfully suggestive opening lines I’ve ever seen:

You look like
A perfect fit
For a girl in need
Of a tourniquet   

But all these years later, I think the song on the record that hits me the hardest in emotional terms may be the closing track, “You Do.” By all means, read the lyrics I’ve pasted in below, but I hope you’ll also listen to Mann sing them accompanied by the hauntingly beautiful music, which fit the words perfectly.

The song is so deceptively simple. Just three short verses and a chorus, with a one-line bridge, all sung from the standpoint of a woman listening to and observing her friend desperately hoping for love from a man the narrator bluntly pronounces a “jerk.” There are hints that this is a pattern for this friend—and maybe has been for the woman singing the song, who has learned hard lessons about the futility of seeking fulfillment in trying to become what she imagines will make her worthy of love from someone incapable of giving it. Apart from potential abuse and painful disappointment, it can lead a person to lose herself, which might be the most heartbreaking possibility of all.

Nearly two and a half decades since I first heard this song, I still feel a trap-door open up beneath me every time Mann reaches the final chorus to once again sing the title line, which, following the set-up of the third verse, hits with incredible power, like a ball-peen hammer to the heart.

“You Do”
Artist/songwriter: Aimee Mann

You stay the night at his house
With no ride to work
And I’m the one who tells you
He’s another jerk
But you’re the one who can succeed
You’ve only got to prove your need,
And you do
You really do

The sex you’re trading up for
What you hope is love
Is just another thing that
He’ll be careless of
But though there are caveats galore
You’ve only got to love him more,
And you do
You really do

Even when it’s all too clear

You write a little note that
You leave on the bed
And spend some time dissecting
Every word he said
And if he seemed a little strange
Well, baby, anyone can change
And you do
You do
You really do

Lyrics © Downtown Music Publishing

Aimee Mann’s catalogue is filled with songs of that quality—and she played several of them opening for Jason Isbell last Friday in Philly. Now in my mid-50s, I look back at the life I’ve lived up to this point and realize I’ve had companions on the journey. Not just family, friends, and professional colleagues, but also artists, like Mann, who have touched me deeply with their work down through the decades.

Thank you, Aimee, for being there and for sharing your art with us for all of these years. May there be many more still to come. I’ll be listening, as I so often have, and still do.

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Since I started teaching at Penn this past August, I’ve written fewer cultural (Above the Fray) posts than I did before that, and fewer in total than I expected to. I feel bad about that and have wanted for some time to make up for it by doing a big year-end post listing my cultural high points of the year.

No surprise that what I’ve written is very heavily weighted to music, the art form that touches me most deeply, and the one I am most knowledgeable about, both as a fan and as a performer. (I play piano and guitar, sing, and have a mid-level knowledge of music theory.) On that note (pun intended), I wanted to acknowledge that Chris Cillizza, who has a very good Substack to which you should all subscribe, posted his own music list for 2023 that reveals that he and I have very similar taste. Lots of overlap! I just wanted to highlight that so anyone who already subscribes to his Substack and mine didn’t conclude I’d just cribbed from his list. I assure you, we come at this from different starting points but end up in much the same place wholly by chance (and no doubt partly because of the fact that we’re both middle-aged white guys who make our living as what the sociologists used to call “symbolic analysts.”)

Anyway, you’ll find a list of ten songs below, followed by some comments about films, TV shows, books, and essays that stood out this year. I hope you find it worth your time. Happy New Year to all. See you 2024 (aka, next week)!

(One final introductory note: I’m not doing an audio version of this post. It’s just too choppy and includes too many links for a recording to do it justice.)

Ten Songs that Meant a Lot to Me in 2023

1. The National, “Eucalyptus”

The National, my favorite band at this moment in my life, released two albums this year, First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track. Like rock critic Steven Hyden, I think it would have been better for them to pare back both, consolidate the songs, and release one excellent album (which Hyden fittingly titles Frankenstein Laughs) than do what they did instead, which is release two solid but bloated records that feel filled with lots of very similar (good but not great) songs. (I endorse Hyden’s idea but disagree with several of his choices for inclusion on the imagined combined album.)

This isn’t to say there aren’t some top-notch songs on the albums. There are, and this is my favorite of the bunch, and the song that hit me with the biggest emotional wallop of anything released this year. I wrote a stand-alone section of a post on “Eucalyptus,” so if you’re a long-time paying subscriber, you’ve heard about it already. If not, I suggest skipping back to what I wrote then and then watching the video for the song there or below.

2. Ruston Kelly, “Michael Keaton”

I’ve become a big Ruston Kelly fan over the past several years. His first full-length album, Dying Star from 2018, was one of the best released that year, with nearly every country-inflected folk song a beautiful expression of longing and self-loathing. It was a record devoted to self-examination and regret over addiction, the damage it does, and how its allure can be so difficult to shake. I give it my highest recommendation. Released two years later, Shape & Destroy was more mixed—its musical highs higher and its lyrical lows less compelling than his debut LP. His third record, The Weakness (2023), is similarly mixed, at least to my ear. But boy do I love some of its songs.

My favorite may be this peculiar single, about a guy who goes on a date, tries CBD, and ends up getting far higher than he expected to, which inspires some truly wild (and darkly hilarious) speculative thoughts, like the one partially captured in the song’s title, “Michael Keaton”: “What if Michael Keaton killed himself in multiplicity: Would that be genocide?” Musically, the song is vintage Kelly, with an indelibly tuneful melody conveyed via Kelly’s multitracked harmony vocals. I hope you’ll check out the song, and the artist more broadly.

3. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, “Save the World”

4. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, “Cast Iron Skillet”

As with The National, I shared a Jason Isbell song earlier this year, at the conclusion of an essay inspired by an HBO documentary about his life, career, and marriage. That was just a couple of months before Isbell released a new album with his band (The 400 Unit). I had a mixed reaction to the new collection of songs, loving a couple of the songs, liking about half of the rest, and responding with indifference to the others. My favorites are the two below.

The first, “Save the World,” marries a tense, workhorse verse to a rousing chorus with a glimmering guitar solo added in for good measure—all as a vehicle for conveying Isbell’s anxieties about and struggles with raising a child in a country permeated by senseless, random acts of gun violence. Man, do I get it—and feel it. This kind of song is really hard to pull off without sounding preachy and narrowly political. But Isbell manages it because he’s such a master lyricist—easily the most gifted of his generation, in my view.

That lyrical talent is shown off to chilling effect in the second selection below, a quiet ballad titled “Cast Iron Skillet,” which ventures deep into a small town in the South to record the little snippets of folk-wisdom and bigotry its residents trade amongst themselves to make sense of and simplify a harsh and confusing world.

5. boygenius, “Not Strong Enough”

6. boygenius, “True Blue”

Is boygenius really a “supergroup,” as so many music journalists and publicists insist they are? I’m not sure I buy the hype, since the supergroups of the past were comprised of artists who were already superstars in their own careers, whereas the members of boygenius (Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker) are indie-folk critics darlings but hardly household names. Bridgers, whose last album (Punisher) I named the best record of 2020, comes closest, especially since serving as the opening act for part of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in the U.S. and completing guest appearances on just about every indie album released over the past two years. But Dacus and Baker? I don’t see it.

But it doesn’t matter, because they put out a damn fine record this year. (Titled, with deadpan false modesty, The Record.) I don’t love all of it, but I’ve already played its best tracks to death without growing tired of them. Best of all is the song I consider the single of the year, “Not Strong Enough.” Bridgers and Baker each sing a verse, and all three harmonize beautifully on the soaring chorus. But what raises the song to the highest level is the final restatement of the chorus, when Dacus takes the lead vocal for the first time and alters the melody in ways that mine it for even more beauty. What a fabulous song.

The second track I’ve included here is a moody, mid-tempo track that Dacus dominates. I first took note of it while waiting around with my daughter for the Taylor Swift show to begin in Philly last June. “True Blue” came on the PA, I recognized it as one of the songs on the boygenius record, but for some reason in that context I heard it with fresh ears. “Hey, this is a great song,” I said out loud at one point. And so it is.

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7. Glen Hansard, “There’s No Mountain”

I’ve been aware of Hansard for a long time without ever taking much of a liking to his music. But I love this song from the album he released this year, All That Was East Is West of Me Now. I first encountered it on Reels, where a snippet of this performance from an appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel show was circulating. I immediately took notice and sought out the song. It’s a great one.

8. Peter Gabriel, “Playing for Time”

I’ve loved Peter Gabriel since my early teens, a few years before he became a superstar with the So album in 1986. The four solo studio albums that followed his 1975 departure from Genesis and preceded his commercial break-out were “difficult” in the best way, combining beguiling melodies with compelling lyrics and genuinely bizarre, pathbreaking arrangements that heavily emphasized rhythmic experimentation. On So he pulled back on the arty approach, sold a helluva lot of records, and left me kind of cold. I liked his follow-up, Us from 1992, much better.

I also liked his next album, 2002’s Up, but that was 21 years ago. When I began to hear a year or so ago that Gabriel was preparing to release his first album of new material in two decades, I wasn’t expecting much. The man is 73 years old, and he’s among the least prolific artists in rock history. Could he still sing? What would his songs sound like after so much time?

The album Gabriel released this past year, I/O (pronounced Eye-Oh), is actually very good. I can’t think of a rock singer whose voice has been better preserved into old age, and he retains the ability to craft a touching and powerful melody. Lyrically, his vaguely pantheistic New Age-y preoccupations on many of the tracks leave me cold, but that can’t keep me from enjoying a good tune. “Playing for Time,” a meditation on aging, is one of my favorites from the album, both lyrically and musically. Make sure to stick with it until the final minute or so, when it undergoes a dramatic shift in sound and mood from the muted and mournful piano ballad that takes up the bulk of its run-time.

9. Manchester Orchestra, “The Way”

I’ve really come to love Manchester Orchestra over the past few years. Their last two albums (A Black Mile to the Surface [2017] and The Million Masks of God [2021]) were filled with highly melodic prog-rock-influenced songs. (Come to think of it, they’re one of the few bands working today seemingly to take inspiration from the pre-So Peter Gabriel.) This year, they released a six-song EP titled The Valley of Vision. The songs were outtakes from the sessions for their previous LP, but they were solid, if a little subdued. “The Way” is one of the best and will give you a good sense of what they sound like and help you to decision whether to take a deeper plunge.

10. Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neill singing “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues at the funeral for the band’s lead songwriter and singer, Shane MacGowan.

I wasn’t a big fan of the Pogues, but I love “Fairytale of New York,” which may be the saddest and most beautiful Christmas song I’ve ever heard. (It’s even been called the best Christmas song of all time.) The original recording remains my favorite version, for several reasons: the lovely string arrangement; the fabulous performance from the band; and Kirsty MacColl’s hilarious duet with MacGowan. (I’m a huge MacColl fan, but that’s a topic for another post.) But the version led by Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neill at MacGowan’s funeral earlier this month gives the original a run for its money. What an incredible song. What an incredible performance.

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A Few Words about Films

Movies used to matter quite a lot to me—almost as much as music. But that hasn’t been true for a long time. At some point over the past couple of decades, I began to lose interest. Some critics would say this is because movies began to suck. But I wouldn’t go that far. Some good and great films are still getting made. The problem is they aren’t getting made and promoted in a way that puts them on my radar. What does get my attention are comic-book inspired blockbusters, about which I couldn’t possibly have less interest. Finally, there’s been the collapse in my trust in critics to single out the best films for attention and praise. I can’t tell you how many times over the past two decades I’ve gone to see an awful mess of a movie because “all the critics” assured me it was a masterpiece.

So I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about film here. I saw and liked Oppenheimer, and I wrote about it here. I also recently saw Maestro and hated it. Really thought it was appallingly bad. It took an incredibly interesting man (Leonard Bernstein), reduced his entire private and public life to his sexuality and marriage, and then did an atrocious job of telling even that incredibly narrow story. So much creativity and effort wasted.

Did I see any other movies this year? I don’t remember. Which maybe tells you all you need to know about me as a film critic in 2023.

Always Late to the Television Party

I’m usually far behind on what everyone is watching on television and talking about at the digital water cooler. Succession was an exception. I actually watched that show in real time and wrote a mixed response to the final season midway through its run. I should add that the show’s conclusion was extremely well done and quite satisfying. Though I think my exploration of the show’s limitations stand regardless.

But as I say, my solicitude with regard to Succession was quite unusual. What’s more typical? Only getting around to watching Breaking Bad this past year, a full decade after the show’s finale transfixed its audience. Yes, it’s true: I only verified this past summer and fall that the show really is as great as everyone said it was back during the first term of the Obama administration. I still think Mad Men is the greatest television show in history, but Breaking Bad comes pretty damn close. (I continue to side with the former in large part because it deals with a wider range of human types and a broader cross-section of American life during a crucially important decade in our recent history. Breaking Bad’s focus is much narrower, but it sure does excel in exploring it with single-minded ferocity.)

I’m afraid I can’t say the same about Better Call Saul, which I watched in its entirety immediately after completing Breaking Bad. I know a lot of people who declared Saul to be “even better” than the show that spawned it, but I find that inexplicable. The best parts of Saul, for me, were those focused on the character of Mike Ehrmantraut, his family, and his “business” dealings with Nacho, Hector, Lalo, and other members of the Salamanca drug cartel and its rivals, including Gus Fring. That part of the show was a fitting and worthy spin-off/prequel to Breaking Bad.

But the parts about Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman, his brother Chuck, and his girlfriend/wife Kim Wexler? I’m sorry, but much of that left me completely cold. The actors did the best they could, but I found the characters pretty thoroughly unsympathetic and inscrutable. Maybe I just don’t get, or care about, the psychology of conmen and those who love them. (And maybe this explains some of my struggles to comprehend American politics over the past eight years.)

Best in Writing (Books and Essays)

I spend the bulk of my reading life these days focused on journalism. That leaves me little time for book reading. But I did read a few books this year that I can recommend.

Best Political History
That would be Nicole Hemmer’s Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. (The book came out in 2022, but I read it this year and then assigned it to my class at Penn this past fall.) Anyone who likes to tell themselves that the conservative movement was thoroughly Reaganite from the 1980s on down to Donald Trump’s sudden hostile takeover of the GOP in 2016 needs to read this book and its lively account of just how Trumpy the Republican Party started becoming immediately after Reagan departed the White House. That faction only took over entirely with Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries eight years ago, but its members were there making trouble and pointing the way toward the future for a long, long time.

Best Intellectual History
I really loved Jerry Z. Muller’s Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes, which also came out in 2022 and I only managed to finish this year. (At more than 600 pages, it took a while!) Taubes’ life intersected with so many aspects of 20th-century culture that the book serves as a powerful and engaging introduction to numerous dimensions of Jewish, continental European, and American high culture. I highly recommend it.

Best Biography
McKay Coppins’ Romney: A Reckoning is easily the best biography I read (or attempted) this year. The author, whom I used to work with at Newsweek and the Daily Beast, does a really fabulous job of telling Romney’s story. That’s in part because the Republican senator gave Coppins extraordinary access. But it’s also because Coppins is such a gifted storyteller—and the story he has to tell, which is as much about the GOP’s evolution over the past couple of decades as it is about Romney himself, is very much worth thinking about.

Best Novel
J.M. Coetzee is my favorite living novelist. That’s a judgment based largely on three books he published between 1999 and 2005: Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and Slow Man. I like and admire several of his earlier novels as well as his series of fictionalized autobiographies (especially Summertime from 2009), but many of his novels since 2007 (above all his three books focused on a young man named Jesus) have really failed to hold my interest or stimulate my imagination.

Thankfully, the novel (really a novella) he published in 2023, The Pole, is a return to form—or rather, a return to a form I prefer. It tells the story of a reluctant love affair between a middle-aged Spanish woman and a much-older pianist from Poland. The story is minimal, as is the eroticism. As usual in his best work, the novella acquires and maintains its gravity due to Coetzee’s writing, which is spare, tightly coiled, psychologically astute, emotionally restrained, and alive to existential questions while never veering into philosophical pedantry. When it comes to style, imagine a blend of Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett.

My only regret about the book is that Coetzee’s American publisher diverged from his publishers in Canada, the UK, and Australia in opting not to include five additional short stories in the volume—four of which involve the character of Elizabeth Costello, who was the main focus of his 2003 novel and also appeared in Slow Man. I have no idea why this decision was made, but it irritates me. I can only hope these five stories will appear in the U.S. at some point in a separate volume.

Best Essay
It’s possible I’m forgetting a stellar essay I read last winter, but from the perspective of the final days of the year, I’m prepared to say the best, and deepest, piece of nonfiction writing I read in 2023 was Leon Wieseltier’s lengthy, erudite reflection on storytelling and argument in a time of stark partisan and ideological polarization. Wieseltier’s title is “The Rise of Narrative and the Fall of Persuasion,” and he’s trying to understand the former as a function of the latter. His conclusion is an impassioned defense of what he calls “hold[ing] strong beliefs undogmatically,” and that’s how I understand my own thinking and judgment—which isn’t surprising, since Wieseltier’s work has influenced me greatly, especially when it comes to my self-understanding as an intellectual.

You might not be able to read the essay without subscribing to Wieseltier’s quarterly journal Liberties, but either way you should join me in doing so if you can afford it. There’s nothing else like it today, and no other intellectual endeavor more worthy of your support.

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