“Fascism is the term that is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary political discussions. We can talk about right-wing populism — but the type of politics they share with classic fascism is what I call red pill politics.” — David Ost

 

Please don’t use the F-word. At least to describe the politics of Trump, Orbán, Meloni, Netanyahu, Modi, Farage et al. Rather than fascism, the best way to demystify far-right populism is via the movie The Matrix through its idea of “red pill” politics.

 

David Ost [https://thenewpress.org/books/red-pill-politics/]’s new book, Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today’s Far Right [https://thenewpress.org/books/red-pill-politics/], argues that to grasp the threat we need to stop stepping out of the Third Reich and into The Matrix. The red pill, borrowed from the 1999 dystopian classic, has been appropriated by the far right as a metaphor for seeing through the liberal hegemony they claim distorts reality. Popping a red pill himself, Ost argues that while today’s far right shares the essential DNA of classical fascism, it nonetheless operates in a world in which outright dictatorship isn’t viable. Mussolini, Ost warns, didn’t become totalitarian until four years after taking power. Fascism, then, is a process. It takes time. Even dystopias require patience.

 

The book is also a manifesto for left counter-politics. Yes, Law and Justice in Poland and Orbán in Hungary have both been voted out, Ost acknowledges. But in Poland, he warns, the Tusk government won power in 2023 and then governed timidly, afraid of alienating the center, failing its own base on abortion and LGBT rights, and then losing the presidential election. So the lesson from Eastern Europe is that economic left populism, not liberal caution, is the best antidote to red pill politics. Mamdani not Starmer. Otherwise the F-word will once again become a reality.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The F-Word Has Become Meaningless: Every application of “fascism” to Trump, Orbán, or Meloni is immediately met with the counter: “Are we killing you? Are we throwing you in jail?” And seemingly the matter is put to rest. Ost’s argument: the f-word has become a conversation-stopper rather than a conversation-starter. It lets the far right off the hook by setting the bar at Nazi-level violence. The actual threat — the delegitimisation of institutions, the treatment of opponents as traitors, the erosion of democratic norms — is already underway, without the gas chambers that the f-word implies.

 

•       Opponents vs Traitors: The Defining Distinction: In a democracy, you have opponents. You disagree with them, you campaign against them, you try to vote them out. In far-right politics, you have traitors. People who disagree with you are not legitimate participants in a political contest — they are enemies of the nation, people who do not belong, people who are working against the interests of the real people. This distinction — not violence, not the gas chambers, but the redefinition of legitimate opposition as treachery — is Ost’s clearest marker of the transition from normal democratic politics to something else.

 

•       Mussolini’s Four Years: How Long Before Dictatorship? When Mussolini first came to power, there were still elections. He tried to rig the game — to gerrymander, to use contemporary parlance — and institutionalise his authority. He only turned to outright dictatorship after four years in power. That was a different time. But the pattern — of coming to power through elections and then slowly making it impossible to be removed through elections — is not unique to Italy. Ost argues we may currently be in the equivalent of Mussolini’s first four years in several countries simultaneously.

 

•       What

Don’t Use the F-Word: David Ost on Why the Red Pill, Not Fascism, Demystifies the Far Right

“Retirement is a false construct created a hundred years ago by the government. It was basically created when Social Security was born. Prior to that, people worked until they died — because they didn’t live as long.” — Michael Clinton

 

At the ripe young age of 70, Michael Clinton [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Longevity-Nation/Michael-Clinton/9781582709628] hiked nine days to Everest Base Camp and ran the Tenzing-Hillary Marathon down. Now 72, he is president of his own longevity consultancy, a columnist for Esquire and Men’s Health, a private pilot, part-owner of a vineyard in Argentina, and the author of Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Longevity-Nation/Michael-Clinton/9781582709628] (Atria/Beyond Words, May 5, 2026).

 

Rather than about living forever, Longevity Nation dares us to redefine what the second half of our lives can look like. And Clinton wants us to reinvent society accordingly. A hundred years ago, he reminds us, only seven million Americans were over 65. Today there are 62 million, which will quickly grow to 80 million. The whole world is aging, and its institutions are not keeping up. Retirement, Michael Clinton explains, is a false construct invented a century ago by industrial age governments. Rewire, the septuagenarian marathoner says. Don’t retire.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       This Is What 72 Looks Like Today: Clinton’s opening provocation: at 70, he hiked to Everest Base Camp and ran the marathon down. He’s visited 125 countries, run marathons on all seven continents, holds two master’s degrees, and is a private pilot. His point is not to brag. It is that the cultural image of what 70 or 80 looks like has not caught up with the reality of what a subset of 70 and 80-year-olds — and, increasingly, a growing proportion of 70 and 80-year-olds — actually look like and are capable of. When he was 40, 72 seemed ancient. Now he is 72. It doesn’t.

 

•       GLP-1: Hotel California or Longevity’s First Democratised Drug? The sharpest exchange in the interview. Andrew’s framing: GLP-1 is Hotel California — you can check in but not check out. Stop taking it and the weight and inflammation return. Clinton’s response: yes, that seems to be the story right now, and nobody knows the long-term play. But GLP-1 is coming to Medicare this summer, price cut in half, and it may become the first truly democratised longevity drug — reducing obesity, inflammation, and cardiovascular risk across the income spectrum, not just for the wealthy. Exciting and uncertain in equal measure.

 

•       Retirement Is a False Construct: Social Security was created at a moment when most Americans died before collecting it. Life expectancy was 62. The retirement age was 65. The construct was built for a world that no longer exists. Clinton’s prescription: don’t retire. Rewire. You don’t have to do the same thing, but do something. Stay engaged. Stay purposeful. If you’re 65 and live another thirty years, the retirement construct — move to Florida, play golf, wait — is not merely insufficient. It is actively harmful to cognitive and physical health.

 

•       Longevity Nation vs Gerontocracy: Andrew raises the counter-argument: is longevity nation actually gerontocracy? Trump, Biden, Trump. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Nancy Pelosi. A class of elderly people who won’t step aside, hoarding power and preventing generational renewal. Clinton’s response: he is opposed to formal retirement ages for anyone. His answer to the political hoarding of power is not age limits but engagement — people need purpose, and purpose should be redirected, not cut off. Andrew’s unspoken counter: this is easy to say when you’re no

Don't Retire, Rewire: Michael Clinton's Longevity Nation

“Soccer matches are poorly designed experiments — you don’t necessarily find out which team was better. But any soccer fan will tell you that. Oftentimes, the better team does not win.” — Nick Greene, via a NASA scientist

 

On June 11, the World Cup comes to North America. Fifty-six years ago, I watched the searing injustice of Johann Cruyff’s Holland getting robbed in the 1974 final by Germany. Today I talk with someone who explains how this kind of injustice is built into the game’s DNA. Nick Greene [https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/how-to-watch-soccer-like-a-genius_9781419777172/] — long-suffering Newcastle United fan and author of How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius — has a new book, How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius [https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/how-to-watch-soccer-like-a-genius_9781419777172/], which tells us what architects, stuntwomen, paleoanthropologists and computer scientists tell us about the beautiful game.

 

What they tell us is that the game isn’t fair. One NASA scientist tells Greene that soccer is a “poorly designed experiment” because the low-scoring nature of the game means results don’t reliably identify the better team. Thus the dark fate of the free-scoring, brilliantly inventive Hungarians in 1954 and the Dutch in 1974. So if you want to watch the World Cup like a genius, don’t expect the best team to win the tournament. Which may explain why Greene suspects that England — where the pain of World Cup injustice is a national fetish — will win in 2026. On penalties probably. Arsenal style. After 120 minutes of goalless football.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Soccer Is a Poorly Designed Experiment: A NASA scientist published a peer-reviewed paper concluding that soccer is a “poorly designed experiment” — the low number of goals means results don’t reliably identify the better team. Greene’s observation: any soccer fan could have told him that, and saved the journal space. But this is also what makes the game what it is. Unlike basketball’s seven-game playoff series — which gives the best team enough chances to emerge on top — a single World Cup match, in a single-elimination tournament, means one error can have outsized consequences. The imperfect and the human are inseparable.

 

•       Justice Has Nothing to Do With It: The 1974 Dutch vs 2004 Greece: Andrew’s most painful memory: the 1974 World Cup final, where the magnificent Dutch side led by Cruyff was beaten by the Germans. The Dutch didn’t win, but they are remembered as one of the greatest teams in history. The 2004 Greek side, which won Euro 2004 by parking the bus and grinding nil-nil victories, actually won — and are remembered as a fluke. The lesson Greene draws: the shared understanding built into soccer watching is that winning is only one metric, and often not the most important one. It is an imperfect and profoundly human enterprise.

 

•       How to Appreciate Defense: The cliché American complaint about soccer is the low scoring. Greene’s response: this is partly a failure to appreciate defense, which in soccer can look like the absence of good offense. He discusses Italy’s history of outstanding defensive play — the Catenaccio system, Paolo Maldini, Beckenbauer — and the intelligence required to prevent goals. Andrew’s contribution: his wife, who watches American football, taught him that defense is where the sophistication lives. The same is true of soccer. The genius watcher watches the defenders.

 

•       VAR: Too Much, Going in the Right Direction: Greene’s measured verdict on VAR — video assistant refereeing. His worst case: when it ruins a goal celebration. The player scores, the crowd erupts, the flag goes up, three minutes of review, okay everyone start celebrating again. That destroys the ca

How to Watch the World Cup Like a Genius: Nick Greene on Why the Best Team Doesn’t Always Win

“The dangers are human, not AI. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what the AI does itself. In fact, even the idea that there is such a thing as the AI in itself is a mistake.” — Keith Teare

 

I’m in Korea this week. So rather than doing a traditional one-on-one That Was the Week [https://thatwa.st/] tech summary, Keith Teare [https://thatwa.st/] and I are trying something different. We invited Jonathan Rauch [https://www.brookings.edu/people/jonathan-rauch/] — Brookings Institution senior fellow, serial author and one of the most rigorous minds in Washington — onto the show to discuss AI.

 

Rauch had a simple mission. He wanted to find out why Keith Teare is just about the only person in the universe who believes that AI is benign. Jon had five buckets of doom to dump on Keith: labour market disruption, political upheaval, mental health and cognition, malicious actors, and the biggest daddy of all — AI developing consciousness, setting its own agenda, and killing everyone (even Keith).

 

But Keith maintained his Yorkshire stoicism under intense scrutiny from the analogue Rauch machine. AI is a word-counting machine, he explained. Large language models train on words, not experience. They split words into a probabilistic graph of correlations. When you ask a question, a large statistical engine fires, word by word. In that sense, he says, AI is no cleverer than a calculator. The idea that it has awareness, consciousness, or a plan is mythological. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what AI does itself. The dangers, he says, are human.

 

Jon wasn’t entirely reassured (his Brookings brand is scepticism, after all). What worries him most is that humans will handle these technologies irresponsibly. On that, he and Keith agree. The short-term labour disruption will be significant. White-collar service provision — legal, accounting, junior consulting — is already going. Jobs will go too. Work, Keith insists, will not. But nobody in politics is having the conversation about what comes next. Not JD. Not AOC. Only Keith and Jon.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       AI Is a Word-Counting Machine: Keith’s Core Argument: Large language models train on words and only words. They split those words into a probabilistic graph — how close is word A to word B? When you ask a question, a large statistical engine fires, producing output word by word. There is no awareness. There is no consciousness. There is no plan. The idea that such a system could develop its own agenda is mythological. It’s no cleverer than a calculator. It’s just a very big, very fast calculator. Rauch’s counter: the brain is also just dumb neurons. We get emergence from dumb neurons. Keith’s reply: what the AI can do is constrained by what humans allow it to do. The agency is human.

 

•       Doomerism as Business Model: Before engaging with any specific AI doom argument, Keith signals a prior: whenever there is ambiguity in a major technological change, a business model emerges to monetize doubt. It was true of nuclear power. It was true of climate change. It is true of AI. This doesn’t mean the fears are groundless — they wouldn’t sell if they weren’t reasonable. But it means they should be approached with prior scepticism. The doom argument works precisely because AI genuinely contains possible negative outcomes. The business model packages and amplifies those possibilities beyond their actual probability.

 

•       The Guardrails Are Human: Keith’s metaphor: AI sits in a prison where humans decide what the doors are. If you give it access to email, it can email. If you don’t, it can’t. It cannot take actions it has not been permitted to take. The word “guardrails” is commonly used, and it’s apt: the constraints on what AI can do ar

Can Keith Teare Convince Jonathan Rauch That AI Is Benign? That Was the Week, Special Edition

“History is really interesting because it’s about people. And people are interesting. So there are plenty of different ways of doing this, and I think there’s room for everybody.” — Adrian Goldsworthy

 

The greatest rivalry in antiquity is also uncomfortably relevant to us today. In Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adrian-goldsworthy/athens-and-sparta/9781541619982/], the classical scholar Adrian Goldsworthy [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adrian-goldsworthy/athens-and-sparta/9781541619982/] covers the long fifth century BC, from the Persian Wars that forced Athens and Sparta into alliance, through the Peloponnesian War that set them against each other.

 

The parallels of the rivalry between Sparta and Athens are uncannily relevant today. Goldsworthy traces the NATO-like structure of the Athenian alliance, with its familiar complaint that the allies weren’t paying enough. He notes that Athens, which outgrew its ability to grow its own food, had to secure its grain supply from the Black Sea — in the same way as closing the Straits of Hormuz has disrupted modern supply chains. And he observes that the Spartans won the Peloponnesian War by getting Persian money — while the Athenians were doing exactly the same thing. Persia, he notes, is always lurking in the background. There would be no “west” without it.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Athens and Sparta: Two Experiments, One Greek Longing: Both city states were driven by the same competitive Greek impulse — the desire to excel, to be the best. But they ran radically different experiments in how to achieve it. Athens: radical democracy, open society, maritime empire, philosophy, drama. Sparta: apartheid military state, in which a tiny Spartan elite was freed from all labour by a vast population of helots, so that they could devote their entire lives to being warriors and citizens. Two models for a polity that still structure political argument today.

 

•       Thucydides: Essential but Embittered: The History of the Peloponnesian War is the essential source — and the problematic one. Thucydides was an Athenian general who failed to save a city from a Spartan-led force and went into exile as a result. He is analytical and apparently balanced in ways that seem modern. But he cannot hide his biases: the demagogue Cleon gets speeches written for him that make him look like a self-interested buffoon. And his silences are as revealing as his words — large events, including an Athenian disaster in Egypt, are mentioned only vaguely. He tells us what he wants to tell.

 

•       The NATO Parallel: They Weren’t Paying Enough: The Delian League — the Athenian alliance that emerged after the Persian Wars — has a structural similarity to NATO that Goldsworthy notes carefully. Athens, like the United States, is the dominant naval power that has mobilised for a great threat and then chosen not to demobilise. The allies, like European NATO members in successive administrations’ complaints, weren’t willing to send ships or men. They’d just send a bit of cash. The Athenian fleet ends up overwhelmingly Athenian. As the threat recedes, the other states increasingly resent the protection they’re receiving from it.

 

•       Persia Is Always There: The Spartans won the Peloponnesian War by securing subsidies from the Persian Empire. The Athenians were doing the same thing. The irony: both sides of the Greek world’s greatest internal conflict ended up funded by the barbarian power they had united to defeat a generation earlier. Goldsworthy draws the modern parallel delicately: America is now fighting a war in Iran, once known as Persia. Europe chose not to join. The question of who Persia is in any given age is

Athens vs Sparta: Adrian Goldsworthy on the Rivalry That Made the West

“We need to develop better theories of why the other side believes what they do. Having an accurate theory includes recognizing if somebody is a psychopath — but also recognizing that psychopaths are rarer than we think.” — Audun Dahl

 

If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no head. While this sounds like an annoying cliché (especially to people under forty), it does recognize that our moral views change. But, as the Cornell psychologist Audun Dahl [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674292086] argues in his new book Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674292086], the most interesting question is why our moral principles always seem in flux. Why people who say cheating is wrong cheat. Why people who say violence is wrong turn a blind moral eye to their own insurrections.

 

Dahl is a psychologist, not a moralist. He is not interested in what we should believe, but in what we think we believe. His central finding is that human morality is neither fixed nor fickle. People change their moral views when they believe they have good reasons to — reasons they can, indeed, articulate. The problem isn’t hypocrisy per se. It’s that we struggle to understand why the other side believes what it does. In morally polarised societies like contemporary America, we over-attribute psychopathy to political opponents. Most Republicans and most Democrats do have genuine moral commitments. But they are just different principles, applied to parallel moral hierarchies. Rather than morality perhaps, we need more empathy. Don’t judge. Understand.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Two Kinds of Moral Change: Dahl identifies two forms of moral change that should trouble us. Situational moral change: people espouse one principle and act against it in a specific situation — the person who says cheating is wrong and cheats on an exam, the January 6th rioter who says violence is wrong. Historical moral change: the same principles coexisting with practices that contradict them — Thomas Jefferson proclaiming inalienable rights while enslaving hundreds. Both are not simply hypocrisy: they reflect the genuine messiness of moral life, where competing principles create constant conflict.

 

•       Morality Emerges in the First Three Years of Life: Dahl’s most striking empirical finding: by around age three, virtually all children develop an intrinsic concern with how we ought to treat other sentient beings. It is not taught as an external rule. It emerges. A three-year-old will say: it’s wrong to harm others, you shouldn’t steal. No other animal acquires this. It is a uniquely human characteristic. The question is not whether people have moral commitments — almost everyone does. The question is how those commitments interact with other concerns, pressures, and competing principles.

 

•       We Over-Attribute Psychopathy to the Other Side: One of the most robustly documented findings in political psychology: Republicans and Democrats don’t merely think the other side is wrong. They think the other side is evil — likely to condone things they would never condone. Research shows both sides significantly over-estimate the other’s extremism and moral depravity. Dahl’s prescription: develop better theories of why the other side believes what it does. An accurate theory includes recognising genuine psychopaths and bad actors when they exist. It also includes recognising that they are rarer than we think.

 

•       Jefferson, Epstein, and the Exceptions: Two historical anchors. Jefferson: the author of the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights, who enslaved hundreds. The question is not whether he was a hypocrite — he clea

Sometimes Fixed Sometimes Fickle: Audun Dahl on Why Our Moral Judgements Are Always in Flux

“Being a father is probably one of the toughest and most rewarding jobs I’ve ever had. A lot of the principles I used to teach snipers apply to kids: dealing with negativity, replacing negative self-talk, learning that well-meaning adults can say terrible things — and you don’t have to take that on as baggage.” — Brandon Webb

 

Brandon Webb [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Puddle-Jumpers/Brandon-Webb/9798893311884] defines himself as an author, entrepreneur, Navy SEAL sniper, and father. But not in that order. The first three he leveraged into a series of bestselling books about the art of sniping. The fourth — the art of being a loving father — he dodged and ducked for years.

 

But fatherhood might be Webb’s real calling. People regularly pulled him aside after meeting his grown children to ask him about his “secret” for being an effective dad. His kids were making eye contact, they were asking good questions rather than staring at their phones. Most astonishingly, they seemed happy.

 

Webb’s new book, Puddle Jumpers: Simple and Proven Ways to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Puddle-Jumpers/Brandon-Webb/9798893311884], reveals his secret of parenting. It applies the positive performance psychology Webb learned as a Navy SEAL sniper instructor — how to redirect negative self-talk, how to deal with well-meaning adults who say damaging things, how to build mental toughness without destroying connection — to the work of raising children. It outlines his parenting philosophy of both high expectations and high support. Think of Puddle Jumpers as simultaneously the manual for tiger and the bunny parenting.

 

Brandon Webb’s ultimate calling in life is as a parent. Father, author, entrepreneur and Navy SEAL sniper. In that order.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Sniper Instructor as Parenting Coach: Webb was running the Navy SEAL sniper program at 27 years old. The psychology they taught there — positive self-talk, replacing negative internal narratives, dealing with adversity without being broken by it — is what he applied to parenting. The connection is not as strange as it sounds: both sniping and parenting require performing under pressure, dealing with failure without catastrophising, and building confidence that is genuine rather than brittle. The difference is that the stakes in parenting last a lifetime.

 

•       High Expectations, High Support: Webb’s alternative to the false choice between permissive parenting and authoritarian discipline. Permissive parenting replaces preparation with protection. Authoritarian discipline breaks connection. Puddle Jumper Parenting holds both simultaneously: clear expectations and emotional safety. Kids need to know what’s required of them. They also need to know they won’t be abandoned when they fail. Webb’s word for children raised this way: puddle jumpers — kids who leap into life’s messy moments with full-hearted abandon, not because they’re fearless but because they trust themselves to recover.

 

•       The Credit Card Lesson: Don’t Bail Them Out: Webb’s son Jackson managed a self-storage facility through college and ended up with a $25,000 ownership payout as a sophomore at St Andrews. He spent it like a drunken sailor on shore leave, got a credit card, ran up $12,000 in debt at predatory interest rates, and called his father for help. Webb’s response: you remember that conversation we had? Figure it out. He let his son suffer. Jackson’s girlfriend hated Webb for two years. At the end, Jackson paid off the debt with a new business and told his father it was one of the best lessons he’d ever been taught. It would have been easy to bail him out. The suffering was the lesson.

 

•       Purpose and the

From SEAL Sniper to Puddle Jumper: Brandon Webb on How to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids

“As recently as the mid-seventies, under 5% of Ivy Leaguers are headed to Wall Street. It’s actually not that attractive. But as Wall Street’s deregulated, it changes the incentive structure — it makes it much more profitable and demands this huge labor force.” — Dylan Gottlieb

 

They stalked the sidewalks of Manhattan in button-down shirts embroidered with the names of investment banks. They jogged. They drank Beaujolais Nouveau. They gentrified neighborhoods. They were the Yuppies — and with the Boston-based Dylan Gottlieb [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248977], they’ve found their young urban professional biographer.

 

In Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248977], Gottlieb offers both a social history of financialization and a collective biography of the professional class that came of age in the Reagan years. Rather than a passing 1980s stereotype, Gottlieb argues that the Yuppie is a phenomenon that remade the American economy, city, and political class. As recently as the mid-1970s, under 5 percent of Ivy League graduates went to Wall Street. A decade of deregulation later, banks were recruiting a third of graduating classes from top universities. The sweatshop of the meritocracy was born. Most of us are still sweating.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       From Yippie to Yuppie: The Word’s Origins: Yuppie resonates with Yippie — the iconographic late-sixties radicals of the New Left, for whom Jerry Rubin was the signifier. The word first appeared in a Chicago alt-weekly in the late 1970s to describe highly educated young people trickling into gentrifying North Side neighbourhoods. It didn’t achieve full cultural dominance until 1984, when it became the frame for supporters of Gary Hart’s presidential campaign — a prototypical Yuppie candidate who stormed the Democratic primary and represented a new professional vanguard within the party. The word named something that was already happening. It didn’t create it.

 

•       The Incentive Structure Changed: Under 5% to One Third: As recently as the mid-1970s, under 5 percent of Ivy League graduates went to Wall Street. It was seen as the preserve of WASPy children who used family connections to get a bank job. By the mid-1980s, banks were recruiting roughly a third of graduating classes at top universities. What happened: deregulation made finance enormously more profitable; finance demanded a large educated labour force to do the work of putting finance at the centre of the American economy; and the most talented students — those who might have become poets or public servants — followed the money. At mid-century, the most prestigious option for a Princeton graduate was middle management at a Fortune 500 company. By 1985, it was Wall Street.

 

•       Democratization and Distinction: The Double Movement: Gottlieb’s central thesis is a double movement. The Yuppie era brought genuine diversification to America’s elite: Jewish lawyers could now make partner at firms previously closed to them; women entered investment banks in numbers that would have been inconceivable in 1965; Black and Asian Americans got at least a foot in the door. This was new, and it mattered. Simultaneously, that newly diversified elite pulled further away from the rest of America, extracting profits from companies being financialized and rents from communities being gentrified. Democratization and distinction in constant tension. The elite became more diverse and more remote at the same time.

 

•       The Pyramid to Cylinder Shift: AI is about to do to the Yuppie what the Yuppie did to everybody else. Gottlieb spoke recently to an HR representative at an investment bank — name and bank withheld — who

The Sweatshop of the Meritocracy: Dylan Gottlieb on How the Yuppies Conquered America

“All the warnings were there. It was almost a carbon copy — the same warnings that were ignored before Paradise, ignored again before the Palisades. And nobody was held accountable.” — Jonathan Vigliotti

 

On January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire ignited in Los Angeles. Over the first few hours of the fire, the second-largest city in America had no firefighters on the front lines and no coordinated evacuation. Residents fought the flames with garden hoses.

 

“Where are the firefighters?” somebody, running from the fire, screamed into a live television shot.

 

Where, indeed, were Los Angeles firefighters? Jonathan Vigliotti [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Torched/Jonathan-Vigliotti/9781668219034] — CBS national correspondent, Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award winner — was there from the beginning. His new book, Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Torched/Jonathan-Vigliotti/9781668219034], is the searing firsthand account of the tragic failure of the Los Angeles authorities to respond to the fire.

 

The story Vigliotti tells is not new. In some ways, it is a carbon copy of the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise in Northern California. First as tragedy then as farce: inadequate evacuation routes, uncleared fuel loads, officials who failed to act were repeated almost exactly in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. More than eighty people died in Paradise and more than thirty in the LA fires. The economic damage in LA will likely make it the costliest natural disaster in US history. And when the LA mayor and the Californian governor appeared in the first press conference after the fires broke out, Vigliotti reports, all Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom were talking about was the 2028 Olympics.

 

The political reckoning has not happened, Vigliotti warns. Bass is still mayor and Newsom is a Presidential frontrunner for 2028. California’s current governor’s race is dominated by homelessness and crime. Wildfire — the existential threat to the state, the one where more than $2 billion in taxpayer money was pumped into agencies over several years with more than half a billion unaccounted for — is barely mentioned.

 

The fires will be back, Vigliotti warns. Maybe this year for the World Cup, maybe in 2028 for the Olympics. So where are the firefighters?

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Where Are the Firefighters? The Central Question: Vigliotti was on scene from the first moments of the Palisades Fire. What struck him was not the scale of the flames — he’d seen wildfires before — but the absence of any official response. No firefighters at ground zero. No coordinated evacuation. The traffic gridlock that formed within an hour of ignition blocked fire trucks from getting through. Residents fought embers with garden hoses. A man running from the hillside screamed into Vigliotti’s live shot: “Where are the firefighters?” That question became the question of the disaster — and the book.

 

•       A Carbon Copy of Paradise: The 2018 Camp Fire destroyed the Northern California town of Paradise. More than eighty people died. Before it happened: weeks and months of warnings about inadequate evacuation routes, uncleared fuel loads, and officials who failed to act. The same warnings, in almost identical form, were issued for Pacific Palisades and Altadena before January 7, 2025. They were ignored in the same way. The LA fires killed more than thirty people and will likely be the costliest natural disaster in US history. Nobody has been held accountable. Nobody has been fired.

 

•       The Olympics Come First: Vigliotti’s most damning reporting: in the first press conference after the Palisades Fire broke out, Mayor Karen Bass and Gove

Where Are the Firefighters? Jonathan Vigliotti on How Los Angeles Was Left to Burn

 

“They’re all me. Every single one. I see them almost as if they’re inoculated on various petri dishes, and the petri dishes are all put into this pressure-cooker situation — that of a missile alert.” — Vincent Yu

 

So what would you do with the last 19 minutes of your life? That’s the question Vincent Yu [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250410122/seekimmediateshelter/] plays with in Seek Immediate Shelter [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250410122/seekimmediateshelter/]. Triggered (so to speak) by a 2018 Hawaii missile alert of an apocalypse that fizzled, Yu’s novel is about a false alarm that sent Asian-American residents of a small Massachusetts town into 19 minutes of existential panic. Seek Immediate Shelter really starts after the fictional all-clear. Because now everyone has revealed their cards. The real games begin.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. Seek Immediate Shelter is really a novel about third acts, not second. The first act is normal life. The second is the nineteen minutes of terror. The third — the one that really matters — is the reckoning: the mother who used the alert as an excuse to cruelly insult her daughter; the man who hit the gas and sped away from his family; the woman who confessed her unrequited love. So all clear does not mean all right. The missile alert strips away all the lies of daily life. What’s left is a truth as explosive as any missile.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Third Act, Not the Second: F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives — and Yu’s novel is a direct argument against that claim. But the book’s real focus is the third act: not the nineteen minutes of terror (the second), but the aftermath. The mother who used the alert as permission to say something cruel. The man who sped away from his wife and child. The woman who confessed her love. These are the decisions people made when they thought it was the end. Now they have to live with them. All clear does not mean all right.

 

•       The Petri Dish Method: Yu has a background in biology and no formal training in fiction. He approaches writing scientifically: characters as specimens on petri dishes, a missile alert as the experimental conditions. The pressure-cooker situation strips away the social armour and reveals the character beneath. His goal was not cruelty but pressure — there’s a difference. He feels profound empathy for every character. When asked if any are based on real people: they’re all me. Every single one.

 

•       Asian American Silence and the Langston Hughes Principle: Yu originally wrote the characters without race. But honesty required him to make them Asian American — citing Langston Hughes’s argument that a Black poet cannot write outside of race even if he wants to. Asian American fiction has long focused on immigrant trauma and the difficult parent-child relationship. Yu wants to push beyond that: third- and fourth-generation stories, people who are simply American. The missile alert forces the silence of striving and quiet excellence to break. What’s underneath is the novel’s real subject.

 

•       Can AI Write This Kind of Novel? Yu has never used AI for his writing and — he admits — hasn’t been curious enough to try. His verdict: AI is nowhere close to writing a novel like this. Some genres, with more uniform rubrics, are more vulnerable. But the distinctive cadences of AI writing are currently easy to detect. He is, however, optimistic: the proliferation of AI-generated plots may make readers more discerning, better at recognizing tropes, more hungry for genuinely fresh storytelling. AI might, paradoxically, sharpen the audience for literary fiction.

 

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What Would You Do With the Last 19 Minutes of Your Life? Vincent Yu on an Apocalypse that Fizzled

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