An Open Letter to the London Review of Books
I did write this as a more “normal” letter to the editor, but evidently they were more interested in using their page space to let Emily Wilson nuke her own credibility for no good reason, so I'm putting it here instead. It's about Afghanistan.
Why Do We Write about Asia LIke This?
In the 22 January 2026 edition of the London Review of Books, to which a close friend got me a year’s subscription as a Christmas present, Tom Stevenson reviews three recent books dealing with Xi Jinping, le famuex dictateur chinois. I have not read any of the three books—The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping by Jospeh Torigian; The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China by Michael Sheridan; and On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd—myself. Stevenson’s analyses of them seem evenhanded to me. I regret to say that he does not make The Red Emperor sound very good. From its title on down it comes across as a hurricane of Sinological clichés (“[t]he early party was merely a conquering army and ‘slave to the doctrines of a foreign ideology’”; “[i]n 1953, the year of Xi’s birth, many Chinese apparently ‘lived in a daze’ and ‘discontent ebbed and flowed’”). Why, one must ask, are we still writing about a rising great power like this?
Kristi “The Body” Noem
Kristi Noem, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, has had so much plastic surgery and wears such heavy makeup that she no longer even looks like the same person as the Kristi Noem who first entered the House of Representatives fifteen years ago. She gets a lot of attacks and mockery for this, especially from the political left. I think there is a distinctly misogynistic tone to a lot of these attacks and a lot of this mockery, as is the case with other women in Trump’s orbit like Melania Trump and Karoline Leavitt. Yet the kind of hyperfemininity that people are reacting to when they launch sexist broadsides against the women of Trumpworld is off-putting for legitimate reasons. There is something Dorian Grayish about “Mar-a-Lago face,” in the sense that it is an active decision to physically, visually, outwardly represent the inward condition of the soul, only unlike Dorian Gray these people have to wear the portrait over and within their actual faces at all times.
Calvin Coolidge and the Power of Kroll
This summer I’m working as a caretaker and docent at the Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Vermont; Coolidge is one of two American Presidents born in Vermont and is the one more closely associated with the state, although his political base was in Western Massachusetts (which is culturally, economically, and demographically tied to Vermont and has a closely linked political history). He was a small-government right-winger of the old school, albeit one of the least racist Presidents of the first half of the twentieth century; he is known as a man of few words, “Silent Cal,” although he was capable of holding forth at length in settings like formal speeches and the writing of his autobiography. The autobiography is very good; Coolidge is one of about half a dozen Presidents whom it’s possible to assess as a capital-W Writer, along with the Adamses, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, and arguably Obama. (Other countries have these as well; isn’t it interesting, and revealing, that although the Academie Francaise has had plenty of former Presidents of France on it, the two Writers who have held that office in living memory, De Gaulle and Mitterrand, were not among them?)
An Open Letter to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the Impending Return to Power of Donald Trump
“…I ask that the USCCB not become régime stooges like the bishops did with people like Franco in Spain and Duplessis in Québec…”
Indigenous Religion in Popular Fiction: The Case of Yellowjackets
Note: This essay is, I hope, to be run eventually in some more “august” format such as a journal focusing on theology, on popular culture, or on both; however, the slow pace of publication in many such outlets, in combination with the fact that a third season of the show is currently in production, made me believe that time was of the essence when it came to getting this out in some form or another. Thus I am running it here first.—Saint John’s Eve 2024
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The wildly popular (in some circles) television show Yellowjackets, which so far has two seasons out of a planned five and airs on the American cable channel Showtime, tells the story of a turf war between a Francophone demon and an albino moose for the souls of a team of ambiguously lesbian soccer players.
I hope that the rhetorical strategies I am employing in saying so—attention-grabbing overstatement, deliberately strange wording of concepts that are in fact more ordinary, leading with an extremely confident assertion of a view my actual grounds for holding which are more tenuous—are clear to most readers. I also hope, however, to make it clear that this is a genuinely held interpretation of the program. Not only is it a genuinely held interpretation, it is an eminently defensible one based on Yellowjackets’s style and tone, narrative conceits, and genre antecedents.
Another Autoflorilegium
The foregoing is a collection of my further thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, and mostly from recent months. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.
Greetings from the Peacock Room
Recently I undertook a solo road trip to Washington, DC, one that I think aided my understanding of the country, of many things of deep importance to me, and, least importantly, of myself.
An Autoflorilegium
The foregoing is a collection of my thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, over the past five or so years. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or microblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.
The Last True Conservatives
The very-online extreme right, in addition to its many other faults and failings, tends to have a crass, self-conscious masculinity to it. Either in the “pure” form of jacked douchebags who like yelling slurs or in the “inverted” form of resentful Shiraha-from-Konbini-ningen-type evolutionary-psychology-obsessed incels, an enormous proportion of the online rightosphere consists of people with heavily masculinity-inflected beliefs and concerns. I have not experienced this for myself because I only date women, but I’m told that in some quarters the synthesis of “masculinity in crisis” and far-right channer politics is so advanced that women who are interested in men date seemingly normal people whom they realize only later get their views on the great issues of the day from people with handles like “Bronze Age Pervert” posting screeds in the already-unfortunate “Twitter thread” format all day long. It goes without saying, at least among those in the know, that there is usually something homoerotic about this as well; witness the fixation on the deceased Japanese novelist, bodybuilder, and right-wing political commentator Mishima Yukio (whose output of novels and short stories, if nothing else, deserves better than being associated with these people), or the tendency to idolize early periods of Western cultural development in which many or most literate men were either so misogynistic they wrapped round to being gay or so gay they wrapped round to being misogynists. A recent article in The Atlantic about Bronze Age Pervert—a real person or, to make a distinction that Mishima himself would readily understand, at least a real persona, not just a name I made up as a stick to beat an ideal-type with—addresses this directly and at some length. According to Richard Spencer, the infamous former neo-Nazi leader who these days is happy to go on the record for essays in liberal newsmagazines, Bronze Age Pervert is obviously gay; the article’s author describes Spencer himself as a “homoerotic fascist” as well. But what if there were a distaff counterpart of sorts to all of this, a fringey rightist current heavily laden with lesbian cultural signifiers and preoccupied with the idea that femininity, rather than masculinity, is in crisis in weak, enervated, effete, androgynized modernity? I am not happy, but not not happy, to report that such a current does or did exist, and that it has or had surprising links to several other people, places, and things about which I have written before.
Some Aphorisms
Massachusetts politics from the beginning has drunk deep of the belief that an objective moral law exists and that Massachusetts voters, perhaps only Massachusetts voters, can be trusted consistently to know what it is. It is only the contents of that moral law that, to the minds of the state’s body politic, have changed.
Polemic on the Rectification of Names
It is said that when Confucius was asked what he would do if he were appointed a governor, he said that he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. This (to English-speaking ears) unusual expression, written 正名 and pronounced zhèngmìng in Chinese and seimei in Japanese, is important in Confucianism and other East Asian philosophy and provides for some interesting harmonies and counterpoints with concepts in Western thought as well, such as direction of fit and disputes concerning linguistic prescriptivism. Unfortunately, the main setting in which one sees the term employed in non-specialist English is the so-called “intellectual dark web” and related far-right online environments—a milieu in which “rectification of names” is used both insufficiently and inaccurately.
Patriots in Control
A specter is haunting the American left, the specter of “America Bad” thinking—not “America Bad” in the sense that America is flawed and most Americans are not willing enough to recognize those flaws, but “America Bad” in the sense that we are both the villain and the main character of current world history, a sort of Walter White or Patrick Bateman of the international arena. This is the tendency that Jeane Kirkpatrick attributed to the “blame America first crowd”—unhelpfully, because Jeane Kirkpatrick did not actually know who was and wasn’t in the “blame America first crowd,” or, if she did, she pretended not to for the sake of the cheap seats.
Who Said It: God-Emperor Leto II or Greta Thunberg?
One is a visionary who thinks in the long term about the future of the humanity but often stakes out incendiary or extreme-seeming positions on here-and-now issues that some argue damage the credibility of the overall cause. The other is a climate activist. Can you tell who said what?