“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.

 

•     

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

“We’re losing home on so many different levels. Physically. Politically. Morally. And after AI, spiritually — because language, our spiritual home, is taken away from us. We now have to share it with an unhuman entity.” — Ece Temelkuran

 

Do you feel homeless — physically, politically, morally or spiritually? That’s the question posed by Ece Temelkuran [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Nation-of-Strangers/Ece-Temelkuran/9781668094570]’s new book Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Nation-of-Strangers/Ece-Temelkuran/9781668094570]. Shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, the narrative is structured as a series of letters from one homeless stranger to another. Temelkuran left Turkey in 2016, after threats to her life made staying untenable. After seven years of exile — in Beirut, Tunis, Oxford, Paris, Zagreb, and now Berlin — she has written both her own and our story in today’s globalized, populist age.

 

She’s been called everything from a 21st century Hannah Arendt to a “ruthless Cassandra.” And yet she retains faith in the future — as a defiant stance, a can-do-no-other attitude against rootlessness and loneliness. The wisdom of survival, Ece Temelkuran argues, lies with refugees, exiles and migrants like herself. This nation of strangers are rebuilding home in our homeless world.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Four Kinds of Homelessness: Temelkuran identifies four simultaneous crises of home. Physical homelessness: refugees, migrants, the displaced. Political homelessness: people who no longer recognize their countries, who feel unrepresented by any party, who cannot feel that they belong where they are. Moral homelessness: people who see the cruelty of our times and find no institution — state, court, international organization — capable of stopping it. And spiritual homelessness: the loss of language as our innermost home, now shared with AI. Four levels of being unhoused at once. That is the human condition of 2026.

 

•       Minneapolis as a Nation of Strangers: The week the book was published in the US, Minneapolis happened — ordinary people forming human chains to resist ICE agents. Temelkuran’s reading: that was a Nation of Strangers in action. People who had never met, people from different communities who owed each other nothing in the old sense, holding on to each other because they recognized a shared condition. Not an ideology, not a party, not a leader — just strangers building a home together in real time. That, she says, is what the book is about.

 

•       Digital Refugees: When Elon Musk bought Twitter, millions of people fled to Mastodon, Bluesky, and other platforms — behaving, Temelkuran observes, exactly like refugees. Looking back at the old home while building a new one. Checking both simultaneously. She asks: why did no one think to occupy Twitter? To say: this is ours, not yours? Her conclusion: our political imagination has become extraordinarily limited. We accept displacement, digital or physical, as inevitable. We do not think to resist it by occupying the space rather than fleeing.

 

•       Gaza and the Move-On Ideology: Gaza was the ultimate test of how much humanity can swallow. Temelkuran draws an arc from Colin Powell’s tube in the UN Security Council in 2003 — when a global anti-war movement was brushed aside — to today. Each time people mobilize and are ignored, they lose a little more faith in themselves, in politics, in institutions. What devastated Temelkuran most was not the bombing but Jared Kushner at Davos presenting his PowerPoint for a seaside resort in Gaza. That, she says, is what neoliberal morality looks like. Move on. That is the lowest of the low.

 

•       

A Nation of Strangers: Ece Temelkuran on Rebuilding Home in a Homeless World

“You can’t be confident about human decision-making. You can be confident on the potential of technology. Humans are quite capable of making both wrong and bad decisions.” — Keith Teare

 

Is a jobless AI future really something to celebrate? That Was the Week [https://thatwa.st/] publisher Keith Teare [https://thatwa.st/] certainly thinks so. His editorial “Civilization: What Is Worth Doing” this week imagines a future in which nobody has to work unless they choose to, basic necessities are no longer scarce, leisure time is abundant, and governance fades to near-invisibility.

 

I’m not so sure. As I told Keith, “That sounds incredibly boring. I don’t want to live in that kind of society.”

 

The conversation this week has been civilizational. A few days ago, the podcaster Patrick Wyman came on the show to argue [https://keenon.substack.com/p/why-history-keeps-happening] that history is mostly unintentional and unexpected. But Keith says civilization is broadly linear and tends, if not toward justice, toward progress. Wyman says civilizations are plural and never inevitable.

 

“Why History Keeps Happening” is how Wyman put it. The end and the beginning of history are, thus, delusional. We are, then, always in the middle of history. That’s the wisdom missing from all the ridiculous hysteria about AI. It’s just one chapter in our history. The promise that AI will create mass abundance is as somnolent as the fear it will wipe out our civilization. Pass the Soma.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Civilization: Singular or Plural? Wyman’s argument: civilizations are plural, nonlinear, full of failure and unintended consequence. Keith’s counter: civilization — singular — is the long arc of human progress collectively, broadly linear over two hundred years. Both are right at different scales. Andrew’s instinct: we’re in a nonlinear moment masquerading as progress. Keith’s: we’re at a fork in the road. That much they agree on. The more interesting question is who controls which direction the fork takes.

 

•       Paul Ehrlich and the Limits of Forecasting: Norman Lewis’s cautionary tale: Paul Ehrlich predicted in the 1970s that population growth would exhaust the Earth’s resources within a generation. He was famously, totally wrong. Andrew’s application: most people are probably wrong about AI right now — both the doomers and the optimists. The future is not the thing you think you’re heading toward. The Wyman principle: history keeps happening in directions nobody predicted.

 

•       The Pyramid of Change: Keith’s model for how history gets made. Agents of change form a pyramid. At the top: a small number of people who have a much larger influence on what happens than everyone at the base. Most people receive change rather than make it. Those who step outside the norms and make things happen — those are the ones who make history. The question of our moment: who is at the top of the pyramid? And do they share your values? Or anyone else’s?

 

•       AI Panic in the Media: Reflecting, Not Forming: Nirit Weiss-Blatt’s research into ten studies on AI coverage: the media is overwhelmingly negative. Keith’s reading: media reflects opinion rather than forming it. Negativity around AI is a reasonable reaction to not knowing. When you don’t know, you can believe anything, and most of the available influence is negative. If AI delivers real benefits, opinion will change, and media will follow. Andrew’s reading: the cause is genuine uncertainty, not media panic.

 

•       Keith’s Utopia: “That Sounds Incredibly Boring”: Keith’s vision: everyone eats, everyone is warm, nobody has to work unless they choose to, leisure time is abundant, paid labour replaced by a society that provi

That Sounds Incredibly Boring: Keith Teare's Vision of our Jobless AI Future

“It was a completely unthinking exercise in cost-cutting that made no sense in terms of the newspaper. I think perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.” — Simon Elegant on being ‘eliminated’ by the Washington Post

 

Hong Kong in 2019. A dismembered body is found in a landfill. A disgraced police superintendent is called back from internal exile to solve it. The city around him is burning. Rather than a John Woo movie, this is the setting for a Simon Elegant [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/City-on-Fire/Simon-Elegant/9798897100958] thriller. Born in Hong Kong, former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine, most recently the Washington Post’s man in China until Jeff Bezos “eliminated” him three months ago — Elegant has written the definitive Hong Kong novel.

 

First and foremost, City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/City-on-Fire/Simon-Elegant/9798897100958] is a crime thriller. Superintendent Killian Tong — half-Chinese, half-Irish, loved by no one in his department — investigates a murder while his sister is noisily demonstrating on the other side of the barricades. But the book doubles as a compressed history of Hong Kong: from Palmerston’s “barren rock” in the 1840s — seized from China after the opium wars — through the ninety-nine-year lease, the handover in 1997, and the slow strangulation of the “one country, two systems” promise.

 

Elegant is neither a hardline China hawk nor an apologist for Beijing. Yes, he credits the British with a relatively enlightened administration — from its public housing to the uncorrupt civil service that inspired the Singapore model. But he is also clear about what happened after 1997. Hong Kong people assumed Beijing would honour the Thatcher-Deng terms, and then discovered, to their horror, that they had no rights. It was a silent coup rather than a gaudy takeover of power. And so the 2019 protests — when a million people went onto the streets — are not just a backdrop to City on Fire but also the real-life stage on which Hong Kong burnt.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Enlightened Colonialism — With Caveats: Was Hong Kong an example of enlightened British colonialism? Elegant says: relatively, yes. The administration was light-handed. The public housing was so good that Singapore copied it. The civil service was — after 1972, when they had to create the ICAC following a police corruption scandal — genuinely clean. Milton Friedman praised the free-market model. But it was also racialized: the upper levels were almost entirely white Anglo, and the Chinese were largely excluded from administrative power. Governor Jock MacLehose changed this. Enlightened colonialism, Elegant concludes, is not a contradiction in terms — but it is relative. Compared to the Belgian Congo, Hong Kong was paradise.

 

•       One Country, Two Systems: A Promise Broken: The terms negotiated by Thatcher and Deng in the 1980s guaranteed Hong Kong’s autonomy until 2047. Hong Kong people assumed these terms were real and would be adhered to. They were not. The first attempt to pass a national security law came in 2004. There were mass protests in 2014. In 2019, a million people — in a city of six million — were on the streets. Beijing’s choice was not between crushing them or not. It was between blood in the streets and a silent coup. They chose the silent coup. The national security law of 2020 was the final instrument. There is no longer any meaningful “one country, two systems.”

 

•       The Policeman as Moral Complexity: Elegant’s decision to make his protagonist a policeman — rather than a protester — is the novel’s central artistic choice. Superintendent Killian Tong is not a villain. He is a man caught between institutions he has serve

Hong Kong Burning: Simon Elegant on the 2019 Protests 

“If criticism isn’t going to be written by one human mind, what else is it for? Criticism done by AI means nothing.” — Bethanne Patrick

 

Is London really falling? Perhaps. This week on Keen On America, everything seems to be falling. There are young men falling from riverside apartments. Girlhood is falling to the commodification of appearance. Book reviewing is falling to AI. Mary Todd Lincoln fell through history as a shrill and inconvenient widow. And just three days ago, Yale historian Ian Shapiro argued [https://keenon.substack.com/p/how-politicians-broke-our-world] that democracy itself has fallen — from the euphoric heights of 1989 to today’s nadir of illiberal populism.

 

One person who never falls is our unfailingly literate friend Bethanne Patrick [https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books] — book critic at the Los Angeles Times, founder of #FridayReads, and the best-read lady in America. And her May list of recommended reads is full of books about falling. Take, for example, the New York Times bestselling London Falling [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/747792/london-falling-by-patrick-radden-keefe/] by Patrick Radden Keefe — a true crime whodunnit about Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old who reinvented himself as the son of a Kazakh oligarch and fell to his death from a Thames-side luxury apartment. Then there’s Girls [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/770037/girls-by-freya-india/] by Freya India on Gen Z and the commodification of girlhood; Make Believe [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/770012/make-believe-by-mac-barnett/] by Mac Barnett, the Children’s Laureate, on storytelling as an art of raising kids; I Am Not a Robot [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/770000/i-am-not-a-robot-by-joanna-stern/] by Joanna Stern on AI as useful tool, not a civilizational menace; and An Inconvenient Widow [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/An-Inconvenient-Widow/Lois-Romano/9781668052808] by Lois Romano which rehabilitates the already fallen Mary Todd Lincoln.

 

And then there’s the fall of book reviewing itself. Where have all the critics gone? New York Times book critic Dwight Garner wrote [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/books/review/ai-book-reviews.html] its obituary this week. But Bethanne Patrick hasn’t fallen. And, last I checked, London is still standing.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       London Falling: The Oligarchs Were the Problem: Patrick Radden Keefe’s new New York Times bestseller is about Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old London boy who reinvented himself as the son of a Kazakh oligarch and fell to his death from a Thames-side luxury apartment. Bethanne’s reading: the most interesting element is not the Brettler family’s grief — sympathetic as they are — but the portrait of a London transformed by money from overseas. Twenty years ago, the worry was economic immigrants. The people who really changed London were the oligarchs. Andrew is sceptical of the neoliberalism-as-villain thesis. Janan Ganesh: London has always been defined by capitalism.

 

•       Girls: The Commodification of Girlhood:  by Freya India (born 1999) argues that Gen Z girls have always been girls — but technology has made the existing anxieties about appearance, body, and social status thousands of times worse. Face-tuning, influencers, targeted advertising, social media bullying. Bethanne’s daughter — summa cum laude in economics — relaxes by watching reality shows about the commodification of female appearance. The book’s parallel with London Falling: both are about young people who cannot escape the mirror of other people’s wealth and image.

 

•       Make Believ

Is London Really Falling? Bethanne Patrick on Patrick Radden Keefe, Freya India and the Collapse of Book Reviewing

“Fraud makes up between 40 and 50 percent of all crime in the UK. Police resource dedicated to fraud: 1 percent. No country is giving fraud the attention it deserves.” — Becky Holmes

 

Was Shakespeare a fraud? Possibly, says Becky Holmes [https://mhpbooks.com/books/the-future-of-fraud], the Stratford-upon-Avon-based writer and the lady behind the X account @deathtospinach. She should know. Best known as the author of Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You [https://unbound.com/books/keanu-reeves-is-not-in-love-with-you/], a cult hit among the romance fraud crowd, Holmes’ latest book is The Future of Fraud [https://mhpbooks.com/books/the-future-of-fraud]. It’s a short, sharp, witty history and anatomy of fraud, from the first recorded case in ancient Greece to today’s AI-enabled deepfakes and romance scams.

 

Holmes’ most alarming statistic is that fraud accounts for between 40 and 50 percent of all crime in the United Kingdom, while only 1% of police resources are dedicated to investigating it. No wonder so few fraudsters are ever prosecuted. Holmes wants more Sherlocks. She wants fraud awareness on every school curriculum. And she wants our language to change. No, you didn’t “fall for” a scam. Your money was stolen from you. As if you were mugged on the street or your home was broken into.

 

The internet was bad enough for fraud. But AI, she warns, offers online criminals even more opportunity. It’s not just Keanu Reeves who isn’t in love with you. Never trust a handsome soldier, she says. Especially a virtual one.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The First Recorded Fraud: 300 BC, Greece: A Greek merchant took out an insurance policy on his boat, borrowed money, and planned to sink it and collect the proceeds. It didn’t go according to plan. But the basic structure — a false representation designed to extract money or goods from another party — has not changed in 2,300 years. Every fraud since, from the South Sea Bubble to Bernie Madoff to AI-enabled romance scams, is a variation on the same theme: getting something from someone by not telling the truth.

 

•       AI Has Erased All the Red Flags: Holmes used to advise romance fraud victims and potential victims: if he won’t do a video call, that’s suspicious. If the voice sounds wrong, that’s suspicious. If he can’t meet in person, that’s suspicious. AI has rendered all of these warnings useless. You can now have a fully convincing video call, voice message, and real-time conversation with someone who doesn’t exist. Deepfakes mean you can’t even trust what your eyes tell you. The “red flags” that protected fraud victims for thirty years are gone.

 

•       40 to 50 Percent of Crime, 1 Percent of Resource: In the United Kingdom, fraud accounts for between 40 and 50 percent of all recorded crime. Police resources dedicated to investigating fraud: 1 percent. Holmes cites a comparable US statistic: in one state, there were millions of people and ten police officers dedicated to cybercrime — and not one of them did it as their primary job. No country, Holmes argues, is giving fraud the attention it deserves. The gap between the scale of the problem and the resources devoted to it is not a funding issue. It is a political choice.

 

•       You Didn’t Lose Your Money. It Was Taken from You: Holmes has a crusade about language. The phrase “fell for a scam” implies the victim’s credulity caused the loss. “Lost their money” implies carelessness. Both are wrong: in fraud, money is taken by a deliberate criminal act. Holmes wants the language changed because language shapes understanding, and understanding shapes policy. If fraud victims are seen as complicit in their own victimhood, society finds it easier to underfund investigation and under-p

Never Trust a Handsome Soldier: Becky Holmes on the Past, Present and Future of Fraud

“Justice may have been served, but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up.” — James Lasdun

 

In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh — wealthy scion of a South Carolina prosecutorial dynasty — was found guilty of murdering his wife Maggie and his son Paul at their family estate. With its opioid addiction, fatal boat crash, staged suicide, and a cousin called Eddie, the case could have been invented for our true crime age. And who better to tell the story of the mysterious Mr Murdaugh than the literary crime writer James Lasdun [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324075325] whose 2023 New Yorker piece [https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-lingering-mystery-of-the-alex-murdaugh-murder-trial] about the trial became the magazine’s most-read story of the year.

 

Lasdun’s new book, The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324075325], tries to answer the one question the trial never answered. Why would a father annihilate his son?

 

The prosecution claimed that Alex killed Maggie and Paul to distract from a web of financial crimes about to be exposed. While this is theoretically possible, Lasdun acknowledges, it is totally implausible psychologically. Coming from a family of prosecutors, Murdaugh would have known he would be the prime suspect. And this family annihilator, as the prosecutor described him, murdered not just his wife, but his boy. Who would annihilate their beloved child to muddy a prosaic embezzlement?

 

The Southern gothic case isn’t over. The court clerk who managed the Murdaugh trial resigned in disgrace after it emerged she had interfered with the jury — fabricating a Facebook post to remove a juror who was bending toward acquittal. Murdaugh has appealed to the South Carolina Supreme Court. A retrial isn’t inconceivable. But even if the murder conviction is overturned, Murdaugh faces forty years inside for his financial crimes. So he’s never going free. But James Lasdun’s core question remains unanswered. Why?

 

“Justice may have been served,” Lasdun concludes, “but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up.” Mr Murdaugh remains a mystery, perhaps even to himself.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Family Annihilator: A Psychological Category: The term “family annihilator” — first used at the Murdaugh trial — is not a well-developed criminological category. There isn’t much psychology behind it. What Lasdun found in his research: most family annihilators are men who kill their families when they believe everything is about to be taken from them — not out of hatred, but out of a grotesque form of ownership. The family is theirs. If their world is ending, the family ends with it. This pattern, Lasdun argues, begins to illuminate what happened at Moselle. Not excusing it. Illuminating it.

 

•       The Thirteen Minutes of Mystery: The murders took place in a thirteen-minute window at the kennel at Moselle. In thirteen minutes, Alex was supposed to have shot his wife with a shotgun and his son with a rifle, staged the scene, called 911, and composed himself sufficiently to appear on a video call immediately afterward showing no signs of distress. Lasdun’s question: was he capable of that? The prosecution said yes, and the jury agreed. Lasdun is not saying they were wrong. He is saying that the how and why of those thirteen minutes remain genuinely mysterious — and that the mystery is part of what makes the case important.

 

•       Cousin Eddie and the Staged Shooting: Three months after the murders, Alex arranged a meeting on a rural road with his cousin Eddie — a distant relative — and emerged with an entry and exit wound at the back of his head. Alex claimed he had asked Eddie to shoot him dead so that his

 The Mysterious Mr Murdaugh: James Lasdun on Why a Father Annihilated His Son

“Every single person that we meet was both the endpoint of thousands of years that brought them there, and the midpoint of some other process, and was the beginning of something else entirely. Think of yourselves as the middle and the beginning, not just the end.” — Patrick Wyman

 

History, we are often told, is a simple story of progress — from caves and villages to cities; from forests and farms to factories; from chieftains and kings to democracies. But, for Patrick Wyman [https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/lost-worlds-how-humans-tried-failed-succeeded-and-built-our-world-patrick-wyman], host of the enormously popular Tides of History and Fall of Rome podcasts, that’s far too linear a narrative. In his new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World [https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/lost-worlds-how-humans-tried-failed-succeeded-and-built-our-world-patrick-wyman], Wyman argues that rather than a teleological inevitability, civilization is a chaotic ten thousand year story of improvisation, experiment, failure, and unintended consequence. It is never ending. We are always in the middle of it.

 

Dramatic advances in archaeological technology triggered Wyman’s argument in Lost Worlds. Ancient DNA, isotope analysis, LiDAR, cutting-edge excavation are all opening up what Wyman calls “a golden age for popular historians.” We can now trace the lives of individuals in ways that were inconceivable just a generation ago. Wyman’s star is Ötzi the Iceman — a man murdered 5,300 years ago in the Alps, whose gut contents, DNA, last meal, and likely killers we now know. Rather than a symbol of prehistoric life, Ötzi the Iceman reveals why history keeps happening.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       The Prelapsarian Fallacy: Hunter-Gatherers Weren’t Paradise: The romantic idea — popular in the last decade as people read Graeber and Wengrow or Yuval Noah Harari — is that hunter-gatherers had it better. Farming made us smaller, sicker, more crowded, more unequal. Wyman’s counter: yes, on some metrics early farmers were less healthy than foragers. But farming also supported enormously larger populations. It expanded the possibilities of human life in ways that foraging never could. Looking back at the past and calling it paradise says more about the critique of the present than about the actual realities of past lives.

 

•       Civilization Was Not Inevitable: We have a story about how we got from foragers to cities: people settled, started farming, produced surplus, developed specialisation, built states. But Wyman’s new archaeology shows that this story is wrong at every step. Farming didn’t always replace foraging. Villages didn’t automatically spark agriculture. Cities didn’t necessitate rigid hierarchies. For every society that moved from one stage to the next, there are others that moved in different directions, collapsed, hybridised, or simply chose something else. The line of progress is a retrospective fiction.

 

•       Ötzi the Iceman: A Man With a Story: Wyman’s most vivid example of what the new archaeology makes possible: Ötzi, a man murdered 5,300 years ago in the Alps, whose mummified body was found in 1991. From isotope analysis of his teeth, we know where he grew up. From his gut contents, we know what he ate in his last meal — venison and ibex. From his DNA, we know his ancestry. From the arrow in his back, we know how he died. We don’t know his name, but we know enough to recognise him as fully human. That is what the new tools give us: not symbols of a lost world, but individual people with individual stories.

 

•       The Fall of Rome Was Not a Tragedy: Wyman spent fifteen years of his life thinking about the fall of the Roman Empire and hosting a

Why History Keeps Happening: Patrick Wyman on Human Failure and Success in Building Civilizations,

“The current crisis was far from inevitable. Politicians made consistently bad choices. In doing so, they fostered a crisis of confidence in political institutions, empowered anti-system candidates, and produced a new Cold War as dangerous as the last.” — Ian Shapiro

 

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a moment of extraordinary euphoria. Fukuyama even described it as the end of history. But what seems to have really fallen in November ’89 was the vitality of democracy. Almost forty years later, we have Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and, perhaps most worrying of all, Keir Starmer. Callous and inept politicians are breaking our democratic world. Our job is to put it back together.

 

That’s the thesis of a new book by Ian Shapiro [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ian-shapiro/after-the-fall/9781541606272/?lens=basic-books] — Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale. In After the Fall [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ian-shapiro/after-the-fall/9781541606272/?lens=basic-books], Shapiro argues that it’s politicians who have created today’s crisis of democracy. His pivotal moment is 2008 rather than 1989. The global financial crisis was the inflection point — the moment at which the corruption of the neoliberal order became self-evident, when elites bailed out the banks and we see the birth of left and right wing illiberal populism.

 

The roots go back before 2008. Clinton’s greatest failure, Shapiro argues, was not NAFTA or welfare reform. It was Russia. Yeltsin wanted to join NATO. Even Putin, in his early years in power, acknowledged that Russia considered itself European. George Kennan, Brent Scowcroft and Richard Nixon warned that expanding NATO eastward would create a new enemy. Clinton ignored them all. So history repeated itself in the form of Versailles rather than the Marshall Plan.

 

So how to raise ourselves up after this fall? What road to take? Maps, Shapiro suggests, aren’t always helpful. The New Deal had no GPS algorithm. FDR invented it on the fly. What democratic governments need now, he insists, is massive investment in physical, technological, and labor market infrastructure. Charismatic leaders matter. But the ideas matter more. We need politicians who take risks. Otherwise we’ll be saddled with Keir Starmer and our current crisis of extraordinary dysphoria.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       2008, Not 1989, Was the Inflection Point: The fall of the Wall in 1989 produced euphoria. The real break came nineteen years later. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the neoliberal model, undermined the supremacy of the US-led world system, and — crucially — left behind a large population that would subsequently be mobilizable by political entrepreneurs. Elites bailed out the banks and returned to business as usual. They didn’t realize that business as usual was over. From 2008 you can draw a straight line to 2016, to Brexit, to Trump, to every anti-system surge that followed.

 

•       We Repeated the Mistake of Versailles: After World War II, the Marshall Plan invested in the defeated powers — Germany, Japan — and folded them into the new security and economic architecture. After World War I, Versailles punished Germany, and Keynes predicted the results. After the Cold War, the victorious West chose Versailles over Marshall. Yeltsin wanted to join NATO and the EU. Even early Putin said Russia considered itself European. Kennan, Scowcroft, Nixon all warned that expanding NATO eastward would create a new enemy. Clinton ignored them. We created the enemy we warned ourselves about.

 

•       Politicians Broke the World — Not Capitalism, Not Culture: Shapiro’s subtitle is precise. The crisis of democracy was not caused by inevitable economic forces or cultural shifts. It was caused by

How Politicians Broke Our World: Ian Shapiro on Raising Ourselves Up After the Fall

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