Project Hail Mary's most dangerous idea (which reminds of how often science fiction puts down the debates and human rights in favor of the swashbuckling hero.)
“The federal government should be the institution most devoted to the rule of law in this country,” said David Super, a constitutional law scholar at Georgetown University. “When it ceases to feel itself bound, respect for the rule of law is likely to break down across the country.”
The title sums up my day. Lioturgy, reading my email and writing a few blog posts, a nap for two hours around 6 PM thinking I would just call it day, a trip to the convenience store for Coke Zero, and a drive through Muncie. All was quiet in town. We have gotten too old for being out at 10 PM.
Few albums have been so appropriately named as Aerosmith's 1976 classic Rocks. Despite hard drug use escalating among bandmembers, Aerosmith produced a superb follow-up to their masterwork Toys in the Attic, nearly topping it in the process. Many Aero fans will point to Toys as the band's quintessential album (it contained two radio/concert standards after all, "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion"), but out of all their albums, Rocks did the best job of capturing Aerosmith at their most raw and rocking....
I saw Aerosmith once in concert (they used to be a staple in Indianapolis), but never bought any of their albums. TJ was quite the fan, though. What they did after regrouping pretty much sucks.
Pitchfork reviewed Fanny's Fanny Hill. This was a band that I had of over the years, never heard, never saw an album, but found in my sixties on YouTube. They were a great band.
But of course, all of it is true: Fanny deserve to be celebrated because
they did what no other women had done before them; they deserve to be
celebrated because they made great music; they made great music that’s
inseparable from their experience as outsiders, as subjects of
harassment and underestimation, as artists dreaming of something better.
Even if just briefly, they made that dream real—it led them to their
“sorority” in the Hollywood Hills and the album that bears its name: a
radical act of sisterhood and creative freedom smuggled inside a classic
rock’n’roll dream.
The review does not mention this song, a cover of my favorite Cream song, and it is so impressive catching something that was not in the original.
The review does mention this song:
I also created a playlist for J and T2, Big Voiced Brit Singers For Your Listening Pleasure:
American Library Association most challenged books of 2025(NPR) lists several books of which I do not know the author or the work. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is the only book I have read, and although I know the name of Malinda Lo, I have read none of her books. They mostly seem to be Young Adults books about sexual orientation. Considering all the emotional turmoil of adolescence and the suicide rates of those with doubts about their sexual orientation, positive examples of gay life seem like a good idea. Which may be why they are banned - better to torment the tormented. As for A Clockwork Orange, I can't recall exactly when I did read that novel, but I am certain I was under 22, and it was a book I bought at a used bookstore (I may have had it for years before reading).
We’ve just seen an example in the administration’s propaganda about the murder of Renee Good. “Don’t believe your lying eyes”– believe the “revised” reality we offer instead. But that example is a small part of a sustained assault.
Join MPL and the BSU Art education students for a step by step lesson in watercolor painting. A fun watercolor workshop in the Maring-Hunt Gardens. At the end you will have a one of a kind watercolor painting to take home!
I put together this post on February 3, meaning to do more with what I had found on these sites. Work, illness, recuperation kept me from doing more. I added some brief notes today.
Want to write a movie and want to see real scripts. Rian Johnson has posted his at rcjohnso / scripts.
“Murder Most Foul” is, first, the story of a killing, which Dylan
depicts as an execution, and, then, a catalog of the plangent
reverberations for a nation—as he later sings—in “slow decay.” Dallas
strictly speaking was dark when Kennedy arrived, rainy and
gray, and from the outset Dylan embeds the assassination inside prior
American cataclysmic cruxes: Native American ethnocide (referencing the
Oglala Lakota saying, “a good day to die”) and Pearl Harbor, via
Franklin Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech. But 1941 was also the year
Dylan was born, and his song is just as cannily personal as it is
historical. His memoir Chronicles recounts his mother’s avid
response to a Kennedy campaign visit to Hibbing, Minnesota, six months
after Dylan left for Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota. “He
gave a heroic speech, my mom said, and brought people a lot of hope,”
Dylan wrote. “I wish I could have seen him.” Kennedy also figured into
one of Dylan’s first public controversies when, on December 13, 1963, he
ruffled his Emergency Civil Liberties Committee hosts in New York after
they bestowed upon him their annual Tom Paine Award—for civil rights
efforts—by remarking that “I saw some of myself” in Lee Harvey Oswald.
More recently, Dylan included paintings of Oswald and Jack Ruby in his
“Revisionist Art” series (2011-2012), both modeled after reconfigured Life magazine covers. On his twenty-first-century albums, “Love And Theft” (2001), Modern Times (2006), and Tempest,
Dylan circulated several conspicuously political songs, among them
“High Water (For Charley Patton),” “Cry a While,” “Sugar Baby,” “When
the Deal Goes Down,” “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Ain’t Talkin’,” “Scarlet
Town,” “Tin Angel,” and “Tempest.” During an interview with novelist
Jonathan Lethem, he might jest, “You know, everybody makes a big deal
about the sixties. The sixties, it’s like the Civil War days. But, I
mean, you’re talking to a person who owns the sixties. Did I ever want
to acquire the sixties? No. But I own the sixties—who’s going to argue
with me?” Still, on “Murder Most Foul” Dylan thwarts readymade
nostalgia, an easy revisiting of the storybook sixties and his golden
“spokesman” moment. Instead, mixing and juxtaposing voices, lingos, and
tones, he traces the decline of America over the trajectory of his own
lifetime through the kaleidoscope of the Kennedy assassination.
Hoodox is a nonprofit organization on a mission to support and share stories that connect Hoosiers, spark conversations, and inspire positive change in Indiana.
We believe Indiana’s future can be bright, and that amplifying true stories told by and for Hoosiers is one of the most powerful ways to help us get there.
The Musical Family Tree archive was started in 2004 and serves as a crowd sourced archive of the Indiana music scene with a focus on the late 1970s through the 2010s. The MFT archive contains 1,720 musical artists and 22,311 recordings, almost none of which are found on traditional streaming services. Please explore the archive and contact us at team@musicalfamilytree.org with any questions.
(Muncie bands - most of whose names I do not recognize, but Faith Band goes unmentioned. Indianapolis bands - too many to look through - but looking through the listing by name, I found my favorite Indy band from the early Eighties: The Future! No entries for Anderson. No Pedlar?)
Now, Hoodox has created a new opportunity for Indiana filmmakers, in partnership with Indiana Humanities, Free Press Indiana and Heartland Film. LIFT will give five filmmakers $5,000 awards to help them create short nonfiction films “to raise the spirit of Indiana,” Walls said. The films will premiere at the 2026 Indy Shorts International Film Festival in July.
“But a big part of this program is also the mentorship opportunities. We don’t want to just throw out an application and then give five filmmakers $5,000 and hope that it all works out,” Walls said. “We want the entire process, starting with the application, to be an opportunity for filmmakers to learn and grow.”
Social media encourages us to experience our lives not as they happen, but as they will be presented. Moments are filtered through the lens of potential content. Emotions are evaluated for shareability. Experiences are edited into arcs: struggle → insight → growth. In this environment, the self becomes a story rather than a state. And stories demand consistency.
The problem is that real people are not consistent. We contradict ourselves. We regress. We behave badly for reasons that aren’t flattering. We want things we’re not proud of. But social media trains us to hide these fractures, to smooth them over, to rewrite ourselves in real time.
Over time, this produces a subtle psychological shift. We don’t just lie to others—we start editing our own memory. We remember the version of events that performed best. We forget the parts that didn’t fit the narrative. Like classic unreliable narrators, we come to believe our own omissions.
LOA:The short story emerged as a distinctive
American art form in the nineteenth century. What factors propelled its
rise and development?
JS: The nineteenth century was marked by tremendous
change and innovation in American writing, and the short story was at
the center of that creative and intellectual ferment, fueled by the
evolution of new printing technologies, the rapid growth of periodical
literature, and rising literacy rates. Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
(1819), a collection of essays and short stories, became the United
States’s first literary bestseller, offering a rebuttal to British
critics who had long laughed at the paucity of US cultural achievement.
Looking backward at the accomplishment of the American short story in The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story
(1962), the celebrated Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor
remarked, “Americans have handled the short story so wonderfully that
one can say that it is a national art form.”
Yesterday, it was to the dentist and Walmart, and then the remainder was trying to stop hurting.
I think I got about 4 hours of sleep all told.
Today was moving slowly in the morning; it was gloomy and cold, and the group session, and then back here, where I started revving after 5 pm. Submissions were made, and a revision started. I put off other blog posts.
I meant to have photos, but I cannot figure out how to get them from the camera to the computer.
Today's big post was inspired by Do Liberals Want a Beautiful World? from The Point Magazine. It impinges on many ideas I have had about my writing, about constitutional law, and politics. A grab bag, I know.
I generally dislike writing inspired by interviews, and this piece was like an interview, being a symposium. I have quoted what caught my attention, what made me think, and what showed me something I did not know. Please bear with these selections and read the original in full.
The topic is defined, always a good place to start.
I’m going to begin by summarizing the arguments of the piece, and I’m going to conclude by raising a few questions that I’ve been brooding over since it came out, and there will be another Trilling quote. But before I get into the weeds, it’s important to begin with a terminological note. What we on this panel mean by “liberalism” is not what is meant by, say, political commentators in the Opinion section of the New York Times. We do not mean the Democrats. We are referring to a political philosophy that arose in the seventeenth century as an outgrowth of Enlightenment moral philosophy and various Enlightenment-era conceptions of the nature of the self. Its hallmarks are an enthusiasm for autonomy, a propensity for diversity and a commitment to egalitarianism. I’ve offered a vague characterization of liberalism rather than a more concrete definition because the specifics are very much up for debate, and there are as many accounts of liberalism as there are liberal theorists. What matters for our purposes is that what we are talking about here is very much not the historically particular political orientation of the Democratic Party, much less in 2026 when it is peak listless; rather, a much broader political philosophy that has developed over the course of at least two centuries.
When the Republicans railed against liberals, they omitted that in the fuller world of political sides, they were also liberals. Now, it seems that with Trump, they have decided they oppose the ideas of equality of all persons and their inalienable rights.
I never knew of the distinction between perfectionist and non-perfectionist thinkers.
An important divide among liberal thinkers is this: Some of them are perfectionist—that is to say, they think there is a substantive liberal conception of the good life, of the way that we ought to live. Their aim is to construct a political formation that reflects, protects and gives rise to this privileged form of life. Some liberal thinkers, however, are non-perfectionist. That is to say, in their view, it is the job of a liberal state to enable citizens to devise and realize their own conceptions of the good life. This doctrine, according to which the liberal state should not favor or disfavor a particular conception of the good is called the “doctrine of neutrality.” Here is an example of what I mean. Christianity takes a controversial and substantive stance about the nature of the good life. Christianity asks its adherents to believe certain contentious things about the world, for instance, that Jesus is the son of God, and thus asks his adherents to believe certain controversial things about how humans ought to live. For instance, that we ought to worship Jesus or emulate him. A non-perfectionist liberalism permits its citizenry to be Christian, but it remains neutral only insofar as it does not compel them to be Christian. The most prominent liberal thinker of the past century is my other patron saint, John Rawls, who embraced a non-perfectionist liberalism, as do I.
I side with the non-perfectionist. Work and life left Rawls mostly undread by me. Where I got the most food for thought that made me anon-perfectionist liberal came from studying Article I, Section One of the Indiana Bill of Rights:
WE DECLARE, That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that all power is inherent in the PEOPLE; and that all free governments are, and of right ought to be, founded on their authority, and instituted for their peace, safety, and well being. For the advancement of these ends, the PEOPLE have, at all times, an indefeasible right to alter and reform their government
What I saw was a space for people to operate as they wanted to fulfill themselves without government interference, so long as their fulfillment did not injure other people.
Which I think applies to aesthetics. The symposium worried that fascism expresses politics through aesthetics, and with liberalism's laissez-faire attitude toward what people do with their freedom, it was losing to fascism.
To come back to the question of what the good life has to do with aesthetics, one of the things I’ve been asking myself is: What creates a powerful aesthetic? It comes from a very convincing way of seeing the world, a very convicted way of seeing the world. I don’t think it necessarily needs to come from a vision of the good life. It could come out of a vision of how bad life is. We certainly know artists that have had aesthetics that arose from either side. But I think there is a question whether liberalism can provide something like this at all. Even in some of the higher points of what I might call “liberal art,” what you tend to find is a portrayal of society as good enough—not exactly beautiful or deeply meaningful in the sense that we often think of when we think of a strong aesthetic. And this problem is particularly acute at a time when liberalism is challenged by actually possible alternatives. So I think one of the things to discuss is whether we might need to reconnect with the imagination, even if it makes us uncomfortable, at a moment when liberals are being challenged politically.
***
This goes to what Becca just discussed, with regard to the Sontag and Trilling quotes about the great works of liberal society often being illiberal. This was one of the lessons of the 2010s, when progressivism did try to extend into the culture and make liberal art, in a sense: I don’t think the results were impressive. And so I don’t think the answer can be that liberals need to politicize art, but rather to make sure that we provide institutional structures and social arrangements that allow for the free development of art and ideas as much as possible. Another way of putting it would be to say that it is especially important for a society that does not offer a fully substantive vision of the good life politically, to create a public culture where we can work out our ideals and values for ourselves, including through art.
***
There’s one answer, let’s call it the “head’s answer” to Becca’s challenge, which is that liberalism allows for and realizes the aesthetics of freedom, pluralism, separation of powers, democracy and the rule of law. But in the end, the liberal commitments aren’t aesthetic commitments. They say, Everyone in this room, go for it. Whatever your conception of the aesthetic is, liberalism says, that’s yours. Make it yours. Exercise your agency. That’s the head’s answer.
The heart’s answer is that liberalism’s peak aesthetic is when Bob Dylan went electric—do you know this reference, even? This was like the most important moment ever, in the world. He played “Maggie’s Farm”: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more”—a song of liberty and pluralism. And he also sang “Like a Rolling Stone,” converting the state of rootlessness and of separation and exclusion into a song of freedom, a new national anthem. “How does it feel to be on your own / With no direction home, like a complete unknown? / Like a rolling stone”—sung with joy and celebration. When he was booed in England for not doing folk music, he said to his band, and it’s recorded on tape, “Play It Fucking Loud.” That’s a liberal aesthetic. That’s liberalism’s Riefenstahl.
I can go along with those ideas. I would add The Clash's Complete Control. But what of the effects of capitalism in centralizing the arts? Maggie's Farm may have had that in mind, too. We have more people creating, more things being written than ever before, but they are all subjected to the rule of the algorithm.
But the essential idea feels too right. Pluralism need not mean tribalism. In The Rebel, Albert Camus distinguished between unity (good) and totality (bad). Tribalism that communicates between tribes creates a pluralism; tribes that do not communicate lead to a social/political Manicheanism. The former promotes growth, the other dies shivering in a dark bunker.
I disagree with mandating beauty. Where I prefer Shakespeare, someone else might prefer Edward Albee. If I mandate Shakespeare, have I not imposed upon the Albee fans? Or vice versa.
But mandating beauty seems too much like mandating religion. Nothing has crippled religion more than mandating a state faith. A legal standard of beauty would be stultifying; I can imagine it dulling any sense of beauty in people.
Becca Rothfeld: I guess the original way you were posing the question made me think that it’s about the relationship between the content of policy and the aesthetic results of policy. And I think that the right-wing has no problem answering, Yeah, we should mandate beauty. We should mandate, like, neocolonial architecture and bad lip filler or whatever. I have strong disagreements with them about what they think is beautiful, but they don’t have a problem with that. A liberal obviously would have a problem with that. You can’t mandate beauty for various reasons, even if justice permitted it, it doesn’t seem like it would be effective. But what I think you can do is have policies that at least permit the pursuit of beauty. Another thing that you can do that Trilling gestures at in various ways, is have policies that are founded on an anthropology that, in turn, is the basis of good art production. What I mean by this is that one of Trilling’s criticisms of what he calls bureaucratic liberalism—what we would call technocratic liberalism—is that it has a really impoverished account of what people are like. He really likes Freud, not necessarily because he thinks that Freud is even correct, but because he thinks that Freud provides us with the resources to create better novels and such. And so I think that you could at least be careful to sort of write policy in a way that doesn’t assume an impoverished anthropology.
I find the thousand-flowers-bloom metaphor congruent with my ideas. It fits within my ideas of pluralism.
So what can be done? One Battle After Another is a liberal cri de coeur. It wasn’t produced by politicians. If politicians tried to produce a movie like that, it would be didactic and wouldn’t be very human. If you look at texts, either literary texts or not, that are part of our culture, they’re frequently liberal in character, and they gave rise to, you know, the civil rights movement, the movement for same sex marriage—a thousand things like that. What I’m saying now has a thousand-flowers-bloom quality, but we find that not exciting only because we’ve heard it so many times. And the challenge, I think, for this generation, is to find a conception of liberalism that celebrates and doesn’t nod bored at the relevant commitments and makes them new and real. Making something new and real is going to make them different.
There is much I found needing unpacked and considered in this paragraph:
To attribute social terribleness to liberalism is reckless. Liberalism isn’t a force in history. It’s not Voldemort. It’s not whispering behind married couples saying, sleep with your neighbor. It’s not telling fathers don’t pay attention to your kids. It’s not saying to people of faith, you should stop believing in God. This is recklessness. And I’d say exactly the same thing, if I may, about capitalism. Capitalism means people get to own things. So you get to own that green shirt and those blue jeans. Some of you probably own laptops; they can’t be taken from you because there’s private property. To believe in capitalism is to believe in something which is an engine of freedom from fear, which is a defining liberal ideal. The idea of post-liberalism, at least in some forms, is a recipe for subjection to fear, because freedom of speech starts to get smaller, and freedom of religion might get smaller too.
Unlike Marxism, liberalism does not think it is ordained by history. It turned out that Marxism was not, either. I consider liberalism to be an environment within which we get to figure out our purposes in this life.
Inducing fear and hate has been the mark of Trumpism. I have a sister who fears the coming of Sharia law. She has not explained to me how this is to occur in a country where Muslims are a distinct minority. The tech bros also seem ready to propagate fear. Musk, with his pro-white supremacy talk, comes to mind here.
Ignorance breeds fear. I did not see anywhere in this article any mention of education. Political education seems to me the balance to ill-liberal thinking. If we are looking for a liberal aesthetic, then education is the tool for its advancement.
The closest approach I found to education was in this paragaraph:
Becca Rothfeld: Can I answer more tyrannically? So I was just thinking like when Jon was talking about how liberalism and criticism have some natural affinity. Actually, I could not disagree more. The greatest tension in my life is that, as a critic, I am constantly making judgments of taste, and it’s a presumption of my vocation that other people should agree with me; I’m inegalitarian. I think that there’s a hierarchy of taste, and I presume to have a kind of authoritarian status when I’m writing a book review. I’m trying to persuade you; I’m trying to get you to agree with me. But I also think that you should think what I think. So, this is only a limited answer about what the good life looks like—I’m not taking a stance about what you should eat or whether you should stay married. (I don’t think you should stay married if your marriage is unhappy.) But my positive view is: beauty is good. The pursuit of beauty is something that you should spend your life doing. You should devote at least some part of your life to the consumption of difficult and important works of art. That’s a substantive commitment about the good life that I have and that I am willing to express.
Finally, it is up to us to fight for our freedom. Here is one way to fight: create art that springs not from political mandate but from the anarchy of real life.
