“You can do as many brain scans as you want, but you’ll never be able to distinguish an impulse that wasn’t resisted from one that’s irresistible.” — Sally Satel on why social media addiction can’t be proven in court

 

When Meta and YouTube lost the so-called landmark social media addiction trial back in March, there was jubilation inside and outside the courtroom. Finally, Big Tech seemed a bit less big. Justice, it seemed, had finally been done.

 

Or maybe not. (Full disclosure: my wife is head of litigation at Google, so I might be a bit biased). But today’s guest, the psychiatrist Sally Satel [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/839111/not-a-disease-by-sally-satel/], doesn’t have a dog (or husband) in the fight, and she’s a skeptic of the trial’s outcome. A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the medical director of a Washington methadone clinic, Satel argues that the concept of addiction — her clinical specialty — was distorted in the trial to serve a $1.4 trillion litigation pipeline. The plaintiffs’ theory reifies addiction as behavior beyond control. If that were true, Satel argues, none of her patients would ever get better.

 

Satel comes at this as a doctor rather than a moralist. Clinically, she acknowledges, social media addiction exists — excessive use, loss of control, continued harm — and the treatments are the same behavioral strategies she uses at her clinic. But legally, where causation is everything, the plaintiff argument collapses. No brain scan can ever distinguish an impulse that wasn’t resisted from one that’s irresistible. The mechanism of harm is unprovable — a ludicrously brittle foundation, Satel argues, for a trillion dollars of lawsuits against social media companies.

 

So when is “addiction” really addiction? Satel’s upcoming book Not a Disease: Rethinking Addiction in the Heart of America’s Overdose Crisis [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/839111/not-a-disease-by-sally-satel/], which will be out in early 2027, addresses this awkward truth. And we’ll certainly have her back on the show to discuss.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The $1.4 Trillion Distortion of Addiction. The March bellwether verdict awarded “Kaley” $6 million from Meta and YouTube, but the real story is the litigation pipeline behind it — four states suing Meta in a single day, with total claims reaching $1.4 trillion. Satel’s objection is professional: the lawsuits invoke brain science at the most superficial level and reify addiction as behavior beyond control. If addiction truly extinguished self-control, her methadone patients would never get better — and they do. Kaley herself had fragilities that long predated the platforms, one therapist testified social media barely came up in her sessions, and her stated career plan is to become an influencer.

 

•       Clinically Real, Legally Incoherent. Satel’s central distinction: in a clinic, social media addiction is a recognizable condition — excessive use, loss of control, continued harm — treatable with the same strategies she uses for drugs, from identifying idiosyncratic cues to self-binding tactics like grayscale screens and switched-off notifications. In a courtroom, where causation is everything, the concept falls apart. No brain scan can distinguish an impulse that wasn’t resisted from one that’s irresistible; the technology simply doesn’t exist. The mechanism of harm at the center of the litigation is not just unproven but unprovable.

 

•       Demoralization Is Not Depression. At her methadone clinic, nine patients out of ten arrive reciting diagnoses — bipolar, PTSD, depression — that closer examination reveals they don’t have. What’s medicated as depression is often demoralization: the entirely understandable response to crumbli

Who's Addicted to Addiction? Sally Satel on the Social Media Trials & America's Therapeutic Culture

The Israeli art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Allon] is as real as George Smiley or Hercule Poirot. He even has his own Wikipedia page. The CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel describes herself on X as a friend of Gabriel Allon before she gets around to mentioning her husband, the best-selling thriller writer Daniel Silva [https://danielsilvabooks.com/] who, of course, is the creator of Allon. As with all successful literary inventions, of course, Silva is as much Allon as Allon is Silva. Silva-Allon. Amongst the most lucrative partnerships in contemporary fiction.

 

Unsurprisingly, Silva still hasn’t managed to kill off Allon. Twenty-six books into the series, the retired Mossad legend turned Venice art restorer is the truest fake spy in the business — a character so real that Silva, who seems to revel in his insularity, has to lock himself away from imagining how readers receive him. Or perhaps he’s locking himself away from Allon.

 

In Ransom [https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/ransom-gabriel-allon-book-26-daniel-silva], out today, a billionaire real estate baron asks Allon to find his vanished wife, the dazzling socialite Alice Winter — who has, of course, a darker life. Behind Silva’s latest summer best-seller looms Russia’s shadow war on Europe. That’s the post-cold war cold war politics of Ransom. Unit 29155, the GRU’s sabotage specialists, are hitting pipelines and flying drones over Copenhagen, an MI6 officer describes the Russians as feral animals, and Ransom’s climax unfolds at an emergency Downing Street summit with Zelensky without the United States in the room. It’s a terrifying narrative as real as Gabriel Allon.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       An Art Restorer Who Used to Be a Spy. Gabriel Allon was invented for one book — a 1999 novel inspired by the Camp David peace process, written like a demon in a cottage near Land’s End — and was never meant to continue. Twenty-six books later, Silva has flipped the character’s formula: once an operative whose cover was art restoration, Allon is now an art restorer who used to be a spy, formally retired and living in Venice. As for his age, Silva freezes time the way Christie froze Poirot: Allon is aging in reverse, quite intentionally, and Silva will write him for as long as people want to read him.

 

•       Russia’s Shadow War on Europe. The serious spine of Ransom is the campaign of sabotage and subversion that Russia is waging against all of Western Europe — the GRU’s Unit 29155 hitting pipelines, running hacking operations, and flying the drones that shut down Copenhagen Airport and pushed Denmark toward its highest state of alert. One MI6 officer tells Silva the Russians are acting like feral animals, and the worse the battlefield goes, the more aggressive the sabotage becomes. Silva has been here before: Moscow Rules put him ahead of the curve on Putin in 2008, and Allon’s personal war with Putinism enters its latest round.

 

•       Writing an Israeli Hero After October 7. Allon is the old Israeli liberal establishment made flesh — secular, social-democratic, the Ashkenazi security elite whose surviving members now oppose the conduct of the war. Silva, an avowed two-stater, saw the change coming years before October 7: quoting his friend Richard Haass, this is not your parents’ or grandparents’ Israel. Allon, he insists, would never serve in a cabinet alongside far-right extremists like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich — and they wouldn’t have him. What happened on October 7 was barbaric, Silva says, but this war has gone on far too long.

 

•       The Super Rich, With a Judgmental Eye. It’s fun to write about the rich — the jets, the expensive toys, the glamour of Venice, Knightsbridge, and Ibiza — but Silva does

The Art Restorer Who Came in From the Cold: Daniel Silva on Gabriel Allon, the Truest Fake Spy

The leftist cultural critic David Masciotra [https://davidmasciotra.com/] isn’t happy with the state of America in the first half of 2026. His dislike of the MAGA crowd goes without saying. But his anger at the state of progressive politics is more noteworthy. So far, he says, 2026 has been — to borrow from Antonio Gramsci — a time for monsters both on the left and right. With its “Epstein class” vocabulary, knee-jerk Luddism and AIPAC litmus tests, the left, Masciotra argues, is mimicking MAGA in its paranoid bigotry.

 

The year’s most disturbing story so far is Graham Platner, the erstwhile Maine Senate candidate who, Masciotra suggests, is either an idiot or a Nazi. Equally disturbing were the “progressives” who blindly defended Platner until the most recent rape accusations.

 

So how to slay these monsters on the left? What’s missing, Masciotra argues, is the kind of positively benevolent Jacksonian (Jesse) vision which seizes the moral high ground of American politics. We are still waiting for the next Bill Clinton, Obama, or even Bernie able to imagine a new dawn for the left in America. Maybe we’ll see the early shoots of a more optimistic progressivism in the second half of the year. In the manner of a football (soccer) match, let’s hope 2026 turns out to be a year of two halves.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Old Gods Return. Masciotra's answer to the what-time-is-it question is that 2026 has seen the old gods stumble back onto the landscape: nationalism, male chauvinism, paranoia and conspiracism. Borrowing from Zygmunt Bauman, he argues that we have moved from a solid age to a liquid one, in which nothing feels stable — and instability inculcates a nostalgia that is usually irrational and ill-informed. People are reaching for the resurrection of manufacturing, the male-headed nuclear family, even a return to religion, with young Americans reportedly turning to Catholicism. Quality of life is objectively better than in our grandparents' era, and yet we live in an age of doom-scrolling and pessimism.

 

•       The Epstein Class and the Left's New Litmus Tests. The criticism of Israeli conduct after October 7 has morphed, for many on the left, into an all-encompassing paranoia in which AIPAC, Zionists, and “the Epstein class” control everything. Graham Platner coupled those terms constantly in his stump speeches — antisemitic conspiracy-mongering 101, in Masciotra's phrase — and declaring Israel genocidal has become a litmus test in Democratic primaries from Maine to Denver to California. Masciotra, who saw Jesse Jackson spend decades atoning for Hymietown, calls this the most important story of 2026 to monitor: the collapse of parts of the progressive left into bigotry, misogyny tolerance, and purity tests.

 

•       Luxury Beliefs and Streamer Politics. Voter turnout used to be organized bottom-up — black churches, the NAACP, Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition — around the issues of actual neighborhoods. Now streamers like Hasan Piker mobilize thousands of calls into districts they know nothing about, amplifying what Masciotra calls luxury beliefs: positions whose consequences never touch the people who hold them, from making every race about Israel to defunding police in neighborhoods the believers don't live in. Whether it's Piker on the left or Nick Fuentes on the right, national streamers will always champion luxury beliefs, because they lack the knowledge to champion local ones.

 

•       Working-Class Drag Doesn't Work. Platner looked like he had just changed a tire and talked like a pro wrestler cutting a promo on Susan Collins — and the polls showed Collins beating him even before he dropped out over credible accusations of rape and domestic violence. White working-class voters, Masciotra argues, are not looking for someo

A Time for Monsters: David Masciotra Looks Back in Anger at the First Six Months of 2026 in America

Will 2026 be one of those grand historical years that change the world — like 1917, 1789 or 1968? Not according to Keith Teare [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/], publisher of That Was The Week [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/] newsletter and co-host of our weekly tech roundup. For Keith, the best historical analogy is 1905, the year of the first abortive Russian revolution. The year that didn’t change the world.

 

Keith’s latest tech newsletter [https://www.thatwastheweek.com/] asks “What Time Is It?” His answer is that we have “multiple clocks” — micro and macro, short, medium, and long term to make sense of our current AI moment. This week, for example, OpenAI and Anthropic both shipped work-focused products, and most of the world hasn’t noticed. Thus his allusion to 1905. We are on the brink of massive change. But nothing is going to change. Not quite yet. Until everything does.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       It's 1905 in the AI Economy. Keith's answer to the what-time-is-it question is the failed Russian revolution — the moment when the variables of transformation were all in motion but nothing was yet visible, and which took seventy years to fully play out. AI's radical change is real, he argues, but it is being experienced by a small number of people and is not yet generalized through the economy. The evidence of the week: OpenAI and Anthropic both shipped work-focused products — and most of the world shrugged.

 

•       The Socialist Temptation of Slippery Sam. The Wall Street Journal frames Altman's offer of 5% of OpenAI to Washington as socialism creeping into Silicon Valley. Keith — who hated the word even when he was a communist — says the term has been Americanized into meaninglessness: it now just means the capitalist state doing more. What Altman is actually proposing is capitalism's end game — a sovereign wealth fund holding equity in the companies everybody wants to fund, so that private wealth creation reaches the point where everyone can imagine benefiting from it. The precise opposite of British Leyland.

 

•       The Multiple Clocks. Keith's framework sorts the week's flood of AI news into micro and macro issues running on short, medium, and long-term timelines. At the micro-short corner sits deployment friction: Microsoft and Amazon spending billions on forward-deployed engineers, and Apple suing OpenAI. In the middle, work adapts — the human as the driver of AI rather than AI imposed on humans. At the top sits Arvind Narayanan's idea of AI as a “normal technology,” which deflates hysteria without deflating importance: electricity was a normal technology too, and it still changed everything — just slower than its loudest advocates expected.

 

•       Abundance and Its Discontents. Matt Yglesias argues that saving capitalism requires radical land use reform, which reignites the show's longest-running argument. Keith's case: the Elizabeth Line and the congestion zone have redefined London, multiplying its effective land fifty-fold, and a house twenty minutes from the center can be had for a couple of hundred thousand pounds. Andrew's case: prices haven't fallen, London is more expensive than ever, and free is doing a lot of work as “a tendency, not an achievement.” The quarrel is adjourned until next week, with Keith cheerfully moonlighting as a real estate agent.

 

•       Two Americas — and the Small Stuff. Ivan Krastev tells Yascha Mounk that American exceptionalism ran roughly from 1850 to Vietnam and has been replaced by defensive preservation — MAGA as a reaction to decline rather than a vision. Noah Smith's version: America can't build a passenger train, yet its AI industry is upending the world. And against John Battelle's worry that digital life has lost the plot,

Ten Days That Didn’t Shake the World: Is it 1905 in AI Time?

“Someone said, oh, you look like Steve Bannon, and I love you for that… No, I just shaved my hair and lost some pounds.” — Kaya Genç on Trumpism’s global fanbase

 

The NATO circus rumbled into the Turkish capital of Ankara this week resembling more of a gun show than an alliance summit. Ringmaster Donald J. Trump promised Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the F-35s and lifted the very sanctions that Trump himself had imposed. Erdogan handed out pistols to the assembled leaders — with poor old Keir Starmer (no Winston Churchill) leaving his at the airport. And observing all these clowns from Istanbul was the Turkish novelist and essayist Kaya Genç [https://thenewpress.org/books/how-we-see-it/].

 

As a contributor to the anthology How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump [https://thenewpress.org/books/how-we-see-it/], Genç is a keen America watcher. He first set foot in the United States in January 2017, stumbling into New York City’s protests against Trump 1.0’s Muslim-ban. What seemed temporary — Trump as a bizarre historical aberration — looked to Erdogan-literate Kaya Genç like an operating manual for 21st century populist authoritarianism.

 

Turkey, Genç argues, has spent a century Americanizing itself. First with the 20th century Marshall Plan, the highways, the Hilton hotels, and finally an American-style executive presidency operating on the politics of referendum. Now, he says, the whole world — from Turkey to France and Britain — is living with the consequences of 21st century Americanization.

 

Like a more functional NATO, right-wing populists operate like an international alliance. Erdogan, Trump, Meloni, Le Pen and Farage are like a club in which projecting strength at summits buys impunity at home. And this club has a house style. Turkish right-wing columnists, Genç reports, deploy Michael Corleone on their X banners — exactly David Thomson’s warning earlier [https://keenon.substack.com/p/a-sudden-flicker-of-light] this week about Hollywood’s glorification of on-screen violence.

 

So, in a way, America observers like Kaya Genç got a sneak preview of Trump’s America in movies like The Godfather. First as cinema, then as life. From both Turkey and Russia with love.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       NATO: The Club of the Mighty. The night before the summit, activists were rounded up in Ankara — LGBTQ rights defenders, labor unionists, journalists — as threats to NATO security. In Turkish civil society, Genç explains, NATO doesn’t represent the liberal world order; it represents the mighty, and has since the writers of the 1960s. The summit itself was a military passion show: jets overhead, revolvers gifted among the attendees, and a host country whose ruling politicians no longer hide that arms exports — including the drones Ukraine used so effectively — are now the mission of the Turkish economy.

 

•       Trump: A Star Among Right-Wing Voters Everywhere. In India, a chubbier, longer-haired Genç was once told: you look like Steve Bannon, and I love you for that. The Turkish media savaged Biden but forgives Trump everything — Netanyahu is the villain of the Turkish press, while Trump speaks the language. Not Turkish (though he tried a phrase): the language of the presidential system. The Turkish right’s America has always been selective — yes to the death penalty and gun ownership, no to labor rights, free expression, and the trans movement — an instinct as old as the poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy’s advice to copy Germany’s industriousness and leave out the decadence.

 

•       Living the Consequences of Americanization. Turkey began its republic in the 1920s on the European model — parliament, proportional voices for an ethnically diverse country. After the Marshall Plan, it r

From Istanbul With Love: Kaya Genç on How Turkey is Watching Trump's America

“A place that doesn’t have great philosophers will not have great technologists either.” — Mehran Gul on Europe’s inexplicable underperformance

 

The digital revolution, we were promised, would mean the end of geography. From Beijing to Birmingham to Berlin to Barcelona, anyone could invent anything anywhere, and so the geography of innovation would no longer matter. But that’s not the way it has worked out. At least according to the Geneva-based innovation geographer Mehran Gul [https://mehrangul.com/].

 

Gul’s acclaimed The New Geography of Innovation [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-New-Geography-of-Innovation/Mehran-Gul/9781982110536] is a travelogue of innovation. But what he finds on his journey around the world in search of innovation is the end of the end of geography. Yes, Gul reports, there’s innovation in Beijing and in Birmingham (USA) — but not in Birmingham (England), Berlin or Barcelona. All the important invention is in China and the US. There simply isn’t much radical stuff going on anywhere else.

 

Gul began his journey expecting to find ten or twelve countries able to innovate competitively with the United States and China. But what he discovered is either niche players or, in the case of South Korea, Israel, and India, just an extension of the US-centric system. Europe — as renters rather than owners of American technology — comes off worst. When PayPal went public, it minted 160 millionaires who went on to help build SpaceX, Tesla, LinkedIn and Palantir; when Skype exited at about the same value, it minted 11. And if you put London aside, the rest of the UK is now poorer per capita than Mississippi.

 

And the AI boom has only compounded all this, with half of last year’s key research papers coming from China, 40% from America, and just 4% from Europe. So really the new geography of innovation is the old geography. Only with China replacing Europe as the only serious competitor to American innovation. Oh lord, oh lord. As a Mississippi bluesman might summarize Europe’s predicament.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Golden Shares: The Two Systems Are Converging. OpenAI offering Washington a 5% stake, the US government owning Intel — these are Chinese moves, and Gul argues the two models are becoming more alike than either admits. But he pushes back on the lazy version of the China story: its tech sector rose despite the state, not because of it. Jack Ma exiled to Japan, Didi hit with a billion in fines, entire sectors decapitated overnight in 2021 under the banner of common prosperity. In a country with no independent media and no opposition parties, the only rival to centralized power is the tech sector — and the party knows it.

 

•       Two Countries — and Everyone Else. Gul started writing expecting to find ten or twelve countries punching at America’s level; the honest answer turned out to be two. Only China has broad-based competence across technologies and a genuinely competitive relationship with the US. The middle powers — South Korea, Israel, India — are extensions of the American system, not rivals to it. That finding surprised the author as much as anyone: it’s not the book he set out to write.

 

•       Europe: Renters, Not Owners. After the Fable 5 and Mythos bans, Europe woke up to being a renter of American technology — foundation models, NVIDIA GPUs, all of it. Its best companies keep leaving: DeepMind to Google, Arm to a New York listing, Hugging Face from Paris to Manhattan — while Volvo, Supercell, and KUKA sold to China. Gul’s diagnosis is institutional, not cultural: European employees own half as much of their startups as American ones, so there is no European PayPal mafia. His fixes: a European Nasdaq to replace 41 competing capital markets, and pension funds unleash

The End of the End of Geography: Mehran Gul on Why Innovation is Happening in America & China — but Nowhere Else

“I crack the tab open, and I feel the cold metal… I hear the tink and give of the aluminum. And maybe when I’m done, I crush it into a small patty.” — Ian Bogost on the everyday enchantment of a Diet Coke can

 

Don’t sweat the small stuff is one of the most persistent (and annoying) mantras of the self-help industry. But the counter-intuitive Atlantic columnist Ian Bogost [https://bogost.com/] advises the opposite. In his new book, The Small Stuff [https://smallstuffbook.com/], Bogost suggests that gratification lies in our appreciation of small stuff like the crinkle of empty Diet Coke cans and the foldability of plane tickets.

 

Max Weber argued that disenchantment was the defining quality of modernity, but in The Small Stuff, Bogost maps a way back to it. What we need to get away from, he says, is “optimization” — metrics, feedback loops, money as a proxy for a place in heaven. Rather than the cult of delayed gratification, pick up that empty coke can and revel in its architectural glory. Or lick a tree. That’s how to be enchanted in postmodernity.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Sweat the Small Stuff. Bogost inverts three decades of self-help orthodoxy: the small stuff is precisely what we should be sweating. The crack of a Diet Coke tab, the cold metal warming in your hand, the can crushed into a patty before the recycling bin — these sensory encounters are not where deep purpose lives, and Bogost never claims they are. But they recur every day, sometimes several times a day, and accepting them as meaningful rather than as noise to get through delivers what he calls a surprising payload of engagement and enchantment. For some it’s Diet Coke; for others, woodworking, gardening, or the gear shift of a manual transmission.

 

•       Dematerialization: How We Lost the World. The book’s central diagnosis is what Bogost calls dematerialization — the slow disconnection from the physical world driven by convenience technologies. The QR code that replaced the concert ticket you might have pinned to a bulletin board. The automatic faucet you wave at awkwardly in the public restroom — which never works, and doesn’t even save water; it just makes buildings easier to manage. The process is decades old, hardly limited to computers, and it stripped the texture from everyday life so gradually that nobody noticed what was being given up.

 

•       It’s Sensory, Not Physical — and Not Anti-Tech. This is not a go-touch-grass book. Bogost insists the small stuff is sensory rather than physical, and that smartphones are compelling precisely because they are delightful — the smooth glass that demands to be touched, the thunderstorm animation in the weather app. Everything is technology, including the clothes on your body and the language in your mouth. He gave his twelve-year-old a smartwatch rather than banning screens, because parenting means living in the same world as your kids — and kids must live a contemporary life to become the adults who invent the next one.

 

•       We Already Got Rid of God — So Meaning Had to Move. Pressed on Weber and the Protestant ethic, Bogost argues that secularization emptied out the place where meaning used to live — good works justified by an infinite time in heaven — and replaced it with happiness, purpose, and wealth as proxies. The result is a hyper-optimized, future-oriented culture in which everything worth doing is worth doing for some later payoff. Bogost admits he struggles with this himself: the health wearable he wears while writing a book against quantification. What he loves about his morning walk isn’t the step count. It’s the twigs crunching underfoot.

 

•       The Quietism Charge — and the AI Twist. Isn’t this stoicism for the age

The Glory of Small Things: Ian Bogost on How To Be Enchanted by Diet Coke Cans & Plane Tickets

“America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” — the message Tad Devine and Ben Tulchin developed for Bernie Sanders, which tested highest in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2015

 

How the Democrats Screwed Bernie. It could have been coined by Donald Trump. That was Tad Devine [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-the-Democrats-Screwed-Bernie/Tad-Devine/9781668232286]’s first objection when his editor floated it. But as Devine, Bernie Sanders’ chief strategist on his 2016 Presidential campaign, worked on the book about the 2016 campaign, he realised it most accurately expressed how he felt about what actually happened. And so the new tell-all — the inside account of the historic Sanders campaign — is, indeed, entitled How the Democrats Screwed Bernie [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-the-Democrats-Screwed-Bernie/Tad-Devine/9781668232286].

 

Devine was never an outsider. He worked on Al Gore’s 2000 and John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaigns. He first met Bernie Sanders in 1996, when Peter DeFazio — the Oregon congressman for whom Devine and his partner Mike Donilon had just run a near-miraculous campaign — suggested they meet. Sanders had almost lost his House seat in 1994. Devine’s campaign won it back by 26 points. Ten years later, Devine ran Sanders’ successful Senate campaign against a free-spending billionaire. They won by 30 points. Devine schooled Bernie in the insider-politics of the Democratic party. But he didn’t transform him into an insider. Bernie was and is always Bernie. The consummate outsider.

 

So how, exactly, did the Dems screw Bernie? According to Devine, it was a coordinated campaign by the Clinton Machine, the DNC, and a network of Super PACs to stop a wildly popular outsider through dark money, dirty tricks, and deliberately structured primary rules. The unHillary candidate who, Devine argues, may well have been the people’s choice — and could have beaten Donald Trump in November 2016.

 

But Bernie’s real legacy, Devine insists, is not what was done to him. It’s his campaign message. “America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” That outsider language — which Devine developed with pollster Ben Tulchin — captures how America is screwing itself. The consummate insider Trump stole Bernie’s language. And if the Democrats want to screw the MAGA crowd in 2028, they need to seize back this outsider message.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Title That Sounded Like Trump: Devine’s first reaction when his Simon & Schuster editor proposed the title: I don’t want to be anything like Trump. But as he worked through the process of writing the book, he came to see that the title most accurately expressed how he felt about what happened in 2016. The Democratic establishment — the Clinton Machine, the DNC, the network of Super PACs and media allies — used dark money, dirty tricks, opposition research, and deliberately structured primary rules to stop a wildly popular outsider candidate. A candidate who, the book argues, may well have been the people’s choice and may well have defeated Donald Trump.

 

•       How Devine Met Bernie: 1996, Peter DeFazio, and 26 Points: Devine was already a Democratic establishment figure when Peter DeFazio — a progressive Oregon congressman — introduced him to Sanders in early 1996. Sanders had almost lost his House seat in 1994; Devine’s firm came in a month before the 1996 election and reversed the trajectory. Sanders won by 26 points. Ten years later, Devine ran Sanders’ Senate campaign against a billionaire who spent the equivalent of $350 million in California, and they won by 30 points. A bond of trust formed between the establishment consultant and the independent socialist, though it was a relatio

How the Democrats Screwed Bernie: Tad Devine on the 2016 Campaign, the Rigged Economy, and What’s at Stake in 2028

“For all the paperwork of democracy — government by and for the people — we have become a citizenry of spectators who simply want to be entertained. And we are accustomed to the realization that we can’t do anything about what’s on the screen.” — David Thomson

 

Has the prolific film critic David Thomson [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Sudden-Flicker-of-Light/David-Thomson/9781668205730] fallen out of love with the movies? That’s the question I began my conversation with Thomson, arguably the greatest living writer on film. My question was triggered by his revisionist movie history (out today), A Sudden Flicker of Light [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Sudden-Flicker-of-Light/David-Thomson/9781668205730], which, while still glorifying film, nonetheless recognizes the damage that the medium has done to us.

 

No, he hasn’t fallen out of love with the movies, Thomson responded. But he did acknowledge a new kind of wariness about his beloved medium — a suspicion of auteur worship, that tradition which concentrates on the great artistry of individual directors like Welles, Hitchcock, and Scorsese while ignoring what the motion picture medium as a whole has done to society.

 

“What has God wrought?” Samuel Morse asked about the telegraph. David Thomson is asking the same question about the consequence of movies.

 

Cinema, particularly Hollywood, Thomson argues, has spent a century disempowering audiences. Sitting in the dark, gazing at the screen, people have lost their agency. This passivity, Thomson argues, has invaded our political life, transforming us from citizens into spectators. No, Mr Smith hasn’t gone to Washington. Instead, America has become a theater of gawkers addicted to screen entertainment, unable to discriminate between a sudden flicker of light and reality.

 

Thus the degeneration of America into a violent Coppola movie. Thus The Joker who has crawled out of primeval darkness and now monopolizes all our screens. You could make a movie about it. Call it “Being There” or “Network.” Or perhaps “The Truman Show.”

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Cinema Has Trained Us to Be Spectators — and That Has Destroyed Our Agency: Thomson’s central argument: sitting in the dark watching a bright light in front of them, audiences learned that the thing on the screen is not their responsibility. People are not really hurt on screen, no matter their bodies are torn apart. They are not really happy, no matter what they say in the film. And whatever happens, the audience remains a spectator. Extrapolate that out into a broader world and you have a society in which, for all the paperwork of democracy and government by and for the people, people have become a citizenry of spectators who simply want to be entertained. America, Thomson believes, is in that state.

 

•       Every Cut Is Violent — and Every Cut Is a Marriage: Thomson’s most original observation is the smallest: the cut. A cut is where the stream of imagery you are watching goes from one shot to another. It is a separation — but it is also a marriage. Every cut says: join them up. The way we measure the effectiveness of directors from D.W. Griffith onward is that they found ways to put shots together so that film had sequence and order, like the order of sentences in writing. And every cut has an element of violence in it, because you are seeing one thing and then, bang, you are watching something quite different. We have never taught our children what a cut is — even though they have spent far more of their lives watching moving imagery than reading. That neglect, Thomson argues, is consequential.

 

•       The Culture of Manhood and the Systematic Neglect of Women: Thomson’s most politically charged observation: the culture of manhoo

A Sudden Flicker of Light: Has David Thomson Fallen Out of Love With the Movies?

“White Americans considered themselves chosen by God to possess the continent and lord it over others — and they saw Native people as indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction.” — David J. Silverman

 

Was the colonization of North America a genocidal project? That is the delicate question David J. Silverman [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/chosen-and-the-damned-9781635578386/] confronts in his powerful new book, The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/chosen-and-the-damned-9781635578386/].

 

Yes, Silverman concludes, there was an American genocide. But with a crucial distinction. Rather than a top-down government-organised “Final Solution,” the fate of Native Americans was what Silverman calls a “structural genocide.” It reflected a complete indifference to Native American life, grounded in a religious and racial ideology that gave white Americans the right to possess the continent and viewed Native Americans as indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction.

 

The Spanish colonization of Latin America, Silverman notes, intended to subjugate the Native population and keep them as tributaries. The English, and their American successors, in contrast, intended to replace them. It’s the same structural genocide that occurred in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa.

 

For all Silverman’s dark take, there is good news. He argues that this structural genocide came to an end in the late 1960s. In an extraordinary and underappreciated transformation, Native American activists convinced a broad majority of Americans that tribes as tribes should be a permanent part of the United States. White supremacy, Silverman concludes, has been a feature of North American history since its colonization. But so has pluralism. American genocide vs American pluralism. Is history once again repeating itself in Trump’s America?

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Structural Genocide: Society-Wide Indifference, Not Just Government Policy: Silverman’s central concept: structural genocide. Not the top-down, government-directed campaign to exterminate a people — though there were moments of exactly that across the centuries, when the government decided certain groups of Native people should be exterminated for resisting American rule. What he’s describing is a society-wide and culture-wide indifference to Native American life, grounded in a racial ideology in which white Americans considered themselves chosen by God to possess the continent and Native Americans indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction. That ideology, combined with the imperative to seize Native American land, led white Americans from the seventeenth century through the twentieth to destroy Native American life through dozens of different forms.

 

•       Anglo vs Spanish Colonialism: Replacement vs Subjugation: The Spanish in Latin America and the Caribbean were violent and horrific — but their purpose was to subjugate the Native population and have them subservient, not to replace them. Once the Spanish had defeated Native people, they took their foot off the gas and kept the surviving population as tributaries. The English colonies, and their American successors, intended to replace Native people — to displace them from the land and install new settler societies of men, women, and children. That pattern is also visible in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. It is not unique to the United States, but it is particular to English-origin settler colonialism.

 

•       White Americans as “Chosen”: The Theological Foundation of Racial Ideology: Silverman’s most striking argument is the theological one. White Americans did not merely believe they were racially superior — they

Was the Colonization of North America a Genocidal Project? David Silverman on the Tragic Fate of Native Americans

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