There are a lot of us who wish we could just give something to the supremacists and it would be enough to satisfy them, and then we could go back to whatever it is we liked doing back in more peaceful times. A prominent example of this worldview is the podcaster and writer Ezra Klein. He’s an incredibly influential voice—several close family and friends are on a first-name basis with “Ezra.” Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, this New York Times columnist is willing to trade away, you know, the rights of trans people to exist or women’s bodily autonomy, in the hopes that it might mean electoral gains for democrats and a return to a fantasized state of harmony. This is “enlightened centrism.”

If you’re having some doubts after the last heel turn from the wonk himself—a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”—the best piece of writing I’ve seen on it is A. R. Moxon’s “Eventually You’re Going to Have to Stand for Something.” Moxon’s essay focuses on this telling exchange from Klein’s follow-up conversation with Ta-Nahesi Coates:

Coates: Would you define for me how you see what your role is?

Klein: I don’t know what my role is anymore. I’ll be totally honest with you, man. I feel very conflicted about that question. The role I want to have is a person curiously exploring his political and intellectual interests in political peacetime. And the role I somehow have is sometimes that. But I’m a political opinion writer and podcaster and so on, and I’m in the business of political persuasion.

Political peacetime sounds great, man. But appeasement ain’t getting us there.

Roxane Gay has a great essay about how “civility—this idea that there is a perfect, polite way to communicate about sociopolitical differences—is a fantasy.” I especially love this part:

They will tolerate a protest but only if you congregate in an orderly fashion, for culturally sanctioned causes, and if you don’t raise your voice or express anger or overstay your welcome.

Within this framework, incivility is refusing to surrender to hatred, refusing to smile politely at someone who doesn’t consider you their equal, refusing to carve away the seemingly unpalatable parts of yourself until there is nothing left.

New Craig Mod “pop-up walk” is nearing its conclusion. He’s walking “100 kilometers south-north along the Kiso-ji in Nagano, and then turning around and walking 100 kilometers back, north-south along the same route.” And he’s sending out a fresh newsletter about every single day of the walk. I’ve followed along on so many of his Japan walks, slurping down his pictures and stories from the day over my morning coffee. (Time zone magic!) This walk has so far been equally great and escapist and fun. Here are the rules he sets for himself, like some sort of newsletter-slinging Marina Abramovic:

As usual, the usual rules will be in place to not “teleport,” to be present:

• No news

• No media

• No podcasts

• No SNS (aside from, perhaps, the members-only The Good Place)

And, of course, every night:

• Collate what we saw that day

• Turn the notes into narrative

• Publish before bed

You can sign up to catch the last handful of installments here.

Promising news from Gen. Z: across the country, college radio stations are overwhelmed with students wanting to get involved. Here’s one station:

Demand for on-air slots is out-pacing “hours in the day” at WEGL (Auburn), GM Rae Nawrocki says. The station has grown from roughly 30 members four years ago to 120 students and 60 on-air shows today.

I’m so happy for these kids, and happy for our culture. Live radio rules, and helping make it can be so fun and rewarding. And what a great antidote to the ways capitalism keeps trying to consolidate music and power.

(I was a jazz DJ in college, and unlike my Slavic major, it actually prepared me for my day job, where among other duties I host a podcast that’s about to turn five.)

Some hopeful policing news out of Baltimore. The city has seen multiple years in a row of stacking 20+% declines in homicides and non-fatal shootings.

‘What Baltimore did that’s so impactful is really invested in a whole ecosystem of community–oriented interventions,’ the Vera Institute for Justice’s Daniela Gilbert told Popular Information. Under Scott, Baltimore has fought violent crime not only through policing but through a network of programs that provide support for housing, career development, and education.

In today’s political environment, these approaches are frequently derided as “woke” and “naive.” But the dramatic decline in violent crime in Baltimore over the last few years suggests that there is a better word to describe its holistic strategy: effective.

Our country’s typical approach to policing, on the other hand, reminds me of the saying, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

The other day, Apple Music gave me a notification about a new EP: Promises by Lissie. I started listening, predisposed to like it—I must have listened to her 2016 song “Wild West” 100 times. And I did like it. For me, the standout track was “Everywhere.” I liked Lissie’s version a lot, but after playing it a few times, what I really wanted was to listen to the Fleetwood Mac original again.

It turns out “Elsewhere” is off their final album, 1987’s Tango In The Night. Who knew? Not this millennial. Nonetheless, I know the track so well. I must have heard it a thousand times on the radio. Or maybe I once owned their Greatest Hits? Either way, I became interested in knowing more about this album and immediately read the little blurb included in Apple Music. Here are the last two sentences of the first paragraph:

As a great pop band, Fleetwood Mac has never been ahead of the times—if anything, they’re always just behind them enough to serve as a kind of summary or reflection. Where Rumours feels like mid-’70s pop-rock, Tango feels like the late 1980s: the synthesizers and drum machines (“Everywhere”), the gauzy surfaces (“Seven Wonders”), the sense of everything being suspended in pink perfumed mist (“Little Lies”).

How great is that!? Especially the phrase, “…the sense of everything being suspended in pink perfumed mist”! I love it!

But who wrote it? Apple Music never lets the authors sign these blurbs, and there’s no trace of these phrases on the internet, beyond a few search results from Apple Music / Shazam. Some anonymous music writer wrote this précis just for the streaming service. Like an unsigned letter in a bottle. For what, fifty bucks? It all makes me a little melancholy.

The other day, taking a bath, I perched my laptop on the toilet seat and watched “The Hand,” an 18-minute stop-motion animated film about a sculptor being menaced by a white-gloved hand. I highly recommend watching it—it’s available for free on YouTube (update: it got pulled down)—and also reading the Animation Obsessive essay that discusses not just the film but also its director Jiří Trnka, the conditions of both its creation (in communist Czechoslovakia), and the general reception it received when it was released (as a one-dimensional Cold War parable).

We recently visited family in Chicago. Flying out, we had a clear view of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mohave Desert.

It’s made up of the three glowing pillars out in the desert. They’re very much relics from a lost civilization. Hardly a decade old, the three towers and the 347,000 mirrors that make their water boil will close next year. They were built in a very different economic moment, when solar panels were exponentially more expensive than they are today.

Back to music: why can’t the various streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) show liner notes? I’ve written in the past about how the streamers push you away from deep connection with the music. But after getting a record player a year ago and returning to vinyl, a further loss has come into focus for me: many (most?) albums throughout history have included not just lyrics and personnel credits but also essays, letters, art, photos, and other notes to the listener. These are such cool ways for artists to add extra layers beyond the recordings that make up the album. But the digital age, and now the age of streaming, have meant, poof, all of that is just gone. WTF?

(I’m currently on a deep dive into the music and world of Alice Coltrane; both she and John Coltrane made extensive, creative use of liner notes; these are strangely hard to access.)

I enjoyed Benn Jordan’s latest video, about creating “adversarial” music designed to trip up AI training models and degrade their outputs. He’s developed a technique of adding inaudible-to-human-ears sounds that confuse the algorithms. If our government won’t protect artists, maybe artists need to get aggressive in trying to outwit these AI capitalists who think it’s okay to steal our work as “training data” without permission or compensation.

(I love that this YouTube channel, which I started watching mostly for the synth reviews, has become a locus of anti-Spotify agitation and now anti-AI creativity.)