Almost every credible analysis of this past election points to several dominant issues: dissatisfaction with the economy generally and anger over inflation particularly, immigration, and the vague but profoundly powerful anti-incumbent sentiment that’s swept the entire democratic world.

“Woke” certainly didn’t cost Democrats the election, but the discursive and emotional conditions of the woke world are an albatross around the neck of liberal elites who heavily influence public perception.

you can’t build a political coalition through emphasizing difference, you can’t staple together certain minority identities while rejecting majority identities and win elections.

Then find a designer who is a thinker, who has product, customer, and business sense and has the ability to create work for the problem at hand (not just emulate visual trends or other companies). This isn’t a unicorn — this is what good design is.

There wasn't that kind of clarity from a musical position on Queer. He threw out lots of different things that were kind of riddles to solve, but, eventually, what we decided on was leaning into Burroughs and the idea of the cut-up technique and using samplers. It felt like an organic way to tell the story musically.

Reznor: I just found some notes from a call with Luca. So I'll read [them to] you. Here was our directions: "Love could feel like dread—Stockhausen. Lee towards lover—engulfing, overwhelming, an uncompromising approach. He's a broken, lonely man—unknown reciprocation, unsure throughout, but still beautiful. I like the scale of an orchestra—bipolar. Make the score bipolar. Burroughs was like this, from Old America, but contemporary—the score should be like that. Maybe electronic element—Ayahuasca." Okay—go write a score.

the original cut was significantly longer, at least an hour longer than what's in theaters now. And a lot of what was taken out was a more surreal element that was exciting and alters the way the film feels quite a bit. When a lot of that got removed, it was hard for us to understand what the film became, because it shifted the tone of it quite a bit in certain ways.

It became disorienting at times to also quantify the impact the whole film has. You know what I mean? We're watching three-minute chunks, a week of this three-minute and then a week of that seven-minute segment, assuming it sits atop the scaffolding that got us there and leads to what's happening.

sometimes, when you start taking those pieces out, it becomes harder to understand. What you're working on is now affected because it doesn't have that stuff you know is there because you watched it, but it's not there. That's the part of filmmaking that I find tricky. We've experienced it with [David] Fincher as well on some things. To be able, as a director, to remain objective with that many moving parts, that's what feels... When people have said, “Do you ever think about directing?”—it's like, I've thought about how I know I couldn't do it. I thought about, “Well, I'd like to do it,” but it's like, the ability to be able to remain objective about so many things, that feels daunting to me. And as composers we feel like we're able to microscope in to get really close up on things.

When a statement is attributed to “a spokesperson” from a company or institution, the world doesn’t know who that spokesperson is. Only the reporter or writer, and perhaps their editors. There is an explicit lack of accountability attributing statements to an institution rather than to specific people. We even have different pronouns — it’s institutions that do things, but only people who do things. Who is the question.

This West Point / ProPublica near-fiasco has me reconsidering my skepticism toward The Verge’s obstinacy on this. It occurs to me now that The Verge’s adamancy on this issue isn’t merely for the benefit of their readers. Putting one’s name on a statement heightens the personal stakes. This is why it’s more than vanity to put your name on your work, whatever your work is — it shows you take responsibility for its validity

I don’t know if it’s actually methodology. I’ve never wanted to be an actor as a source of income. I never cared about fame. I always wanted to do this, so I moved to New York to do theater because I loved it. When I read a script or I am considering a role, I’m going off of this compulsion that I feel. When I read something and I feel that overwhelming sense to be compelled to do it, I just get excited.

What is it about this role or this story that makes me so excited? What is this magnet and this drawn? I believe that the best way to get into a role, to figure out the thoughts and the understandings of another human being is by silencing the noise around yourself. It’s important to create an environment and a space for yourself to just be quiet, to start to really consider what those thoughts are and think about the role.

There’s so many different specific things about a character that let you know who they are. Something he does so beautifully is he’ll give you a very specific action or note to do, and it might feel so incredibly weird, and you’re like, “That makes no sense. Why would I do that then?” and then you do it and you’re like, “Oh my God, that totally worked, and why wasn’t that my instinct at first?” It made me think more about what a character can do in a space, it made me feel more open to the idea of trying things that might feel odd or different. He also edits in his head, which I think is really cool. He’s already editing the scene. That’s why he does two takes.

It was my job to find where her pain is stored, the trauma of losing your career, the idea of never allowing yourself the time to grieve, being in a marriage where she’s in charge all the time, she’s making all the decisions, being accountable for two people. Her life, since she was a kid, has felt so incomplete, because this one true love, which is tennis, has been ripped away from her.

Per-seat pricing only works when your users are human. But when agents become the primary users of software, that model collapses.

Executives aren't evaluating software against software anymore. They're comparing the combined costs of software licenses plus labor against pure outcome-based solutions. Think customer support (per resolved ticket vs. per agent + seat), marketing (per campaign vs. headcount), sales (per qualified lead vs. rep). That's your pricing umbrella—the upper limit enterprises will pay before switching entirely to AI.

enterprises are used to deterministic outcomes and fixed annual costs. Usage-based pricing makes budgeting harder. But individual leaders seeing 10x efficiency gains won't wait for procurement to catch up. Savvy managers will find ways around traditional buying processes.

This feels like a generational reset of how businesses operate. Zero upfront costs, pay only for outcomes—that's not just a pricing model. That's the future of business.

The winning strategy in my books? Give the platform away for free. Let your agents read and write to existing systems through unstructured data—emails, calls, documents. Once you handle enough workflows, you become the new system of record.

Now comes the place the movie was building toward all of his time. Not a “climax,” nothing really exciting, only an experience that helps explain Sutter’s life up until now, and points toward his future. He takes her along to meet his dad (Kyle Chandler). A lot of the meaning here is in long shots. Sutter says the hell with it. Insults Aimee. What an affecting film this is. It respects its characters and doesn’t use them for its own shabby purposes. How deeply we care about them. Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley are so there. Being young is a solemn business when you really care about someone. Teller has a touch of John Cusack in his “Say Anything” period. Woodley is beautiful in a real person sort if way, studying him with concern, and then that warm smile. We have gone through senior year with these two. We have known them. We have been them.

When they make love the scene is handled perfectly by the director, James Ponsoldt. Neither is a virgin, neither is experienced. They perform the task seriously and with care, Aimee hands Sutter a condom and he puts in on and enters her carefully and they look solemnly into each other’s eyes. None of that wild thrashing about that embarrasses older actors, who doth protest too much.

The movie’s first hour continues on a, I dunno, realistic or naturalistic tone. It makes no point of it. It just looks at these two. They get to enjoy hanging out, and although Sutter says he has no intention of getting serious with Aimee, damned if he doesn’t ask her to the Prom. It’s not even that they fall in love; they just intensely enjoy one another’s company.

Guadagnino said in a press release shared with Our Era, “What struck me most was the strangeness of it — it’s the most accessible of his works, but what connected me to it was something I could feel within myself at the time: the idea of craving contact with somebody who reflects you, who you connect with on the deepest conceivable level.”

Craig disclosed he would have worked with Guadagnino on any opportunity, but, to be able to work with him on this specific film, Craig felt incredibly gracious. He wanted to show viewers that Lee’s addiction doesn’t define him. His discomfort with who he is does; causing him to always look for an escape in something, someone or some place.

For characters to fully come to life on-screen, as one sees with Starkey and Allerton and Craig and Lee, the cast needs to feel the story is in good hands. That comfortability and care oozing on set is what allowed Craig and Starkey to let go of who they are and go the distance emotionally and mentally to become their characters’ complicated selves.

While Queer depicts a very specific time and place, its themes - longing, loneliness, and the limits of what we can seek in another person; what they can do for us and what we must do for ourselves - remains universal.

“In my mind, the images and sets for Queer had to be coming through the eyes and mind of Burroughs,” says Guadagnino. “Thirty years after I started thinking about the novel as a movie, I was still committed to the idea of recreating Mexico City, Panama City and Ecuador as if these were artificial places reflecting the anguish and desire and imagery of Burroughs’ source material,” Guadagnino said in a press note shared with Our Era.

For the first two parts of the movie Lee has a certain undoneness to his clothing with his Hemingway silhouette. This contrast to Allerton’s uptight, refined and juvenile collegiate look creates a sort of sexual allure to him that captivates Lee upon laying eyes on Allerton for the first time. Their costumes highlight the two men’s stark incongruities - their age, their stations in life, their psychology.

The liberation created on set is what queer people seek to obtain.

There’s an oppressed feeling from both characters. Most times, it felt like Lee and Allerton were slightly cracking themselves open into who they were; always running to some place or to someone new. While the two men were able to open with one another at times, this film shows their personal struggles with being queer. Open queerness is a freedom that is priceless, but a price Lee and Allerton cannot afford. It’s this lack of freedom that many queer people experienced in the 20th century that creates a turmoil in them that leads them to feel that freedom through other means: seeking what others can offer.

Now that I have more of an understanding of filmmaking and an understanding of costume within film, it’s helped me build a team around it—and I would like to continue doing it, because for me, it’s a great escape from my job. It helps me balance out a bit, and being creative without the commerce element feels like a very different exercise—it’s about characterization, and there’s no preciousness around it representing just one vision.

That’s what I love about very good cinema: Those textures you find in the 1950s or ’60s with the clothing—it’s never just a flat surface. You have Lee, played by Daniel, at the beginning wearing this shirt that’s optic white…. [There’s] this idea of it being pristine, like cocaine. By the end of it, after his heroin trip and everything else getting darker and darker, it becomes dirtier…. I like following those threads. With costume, you can do things like that which are more subtle, whereas sometimes with fashion, it has to be loud for people to grab on. In film, you have to lure the audience in and let them know who the character is in a way that unfolds. It’s not about the bang of fashion where it’s a 15-minute show that has to sell you this one idea.

What I find amazing about these pieces is that, as you said, they could be plucked out of a store today, and I did quite like having those things in the film—because sometimes we feel like we’re inventing everything now, but then you realize there were people in the past who were even further ahead than we are.

As the creative director of a fashion house—or two fashion houses—you’re always the decision-maker and the person everyone is turning to to weigh in on everything and have the final say. Working as the costume designer, did it feel pleasant to relinquish that total control for a little while? Yes, I enjoy it. It’s quite nice sometimes to be submissive in life. [Laughs.] I quite like not being in that driving seat all the time, because it makes you think differently when you’re back in the driving seat. I think it’s really helped me with my journey within fashion. It’s nice to restart—it keeps your feet on the ground. I think, in fashion, it’s very easy to levitate off the ground. It helped me to rechallenge myself, and to have those moments in Rome where I really felt like a student again, saying, “I don’t know how this works—but how do I make it work?”

I think with Loewe, for example, it might have affected the way I really reduced the menswear down in the recent show. It became a form of textural classicism—very precise. And I think Allerton may have inspired this idea of building a perfection that is almost like an armor, but then ultimately, you see that there are holes in it—in the trouser, in the sweater. It all looks very together at first, but then you realize it’s not.

I think it’s really important for me to keep doing my day job, because it sharpens my knife outside of it. And I think they can dovetail into one another.

We were actually introduced by Karla Otto. It was one of those meetings where I felt like I had known Luca all my life. We were meant to just have a coffee, but then we chatted all afternoon. I just feel like we are searching for the same things but in different fields, so it’s really nice to be able to collaborate in this way—which requires a huge amount of trust in each other—but pushing each other too. And there are not many people, I think, who understand clothing as deeply as Luca does.

I think Allerton may have inspired this idea of building a perfection that is almost like an armor, but then ultimately, you see that there are holes in it—in the trouser, in the sweater. It all looks very together at first, but then you realize it’s not.

there were plenty of memorable moments for Jonathan Anderson—but few were quite as awe-inspiring as his first day of filming, walking through the back lot of Rome’s legendary Cinecittà Studios. “One of my favorite films is Sunset Boulevard, and it reminded me of the scene when Norma goes to the studios, and there’s just cinema happening,” Anderson says over Zoom from Los Angeles, where Queer had premiered the night before, with genuine wide-eyed wonderment. “You enter into one of those dark spaces and find a stage lit as a 1950s Mexican street. Then you’re in the middle of the jungle. If you were to ask a child what cinema is, it would be this.”

Pioneered by our team and now widely used as a standard in the field, RCS is the classically hardest benchmark that can be done on a quantum computer today. You can think of this as an entry point for quantum computing — it checks whether a quantum computer is doing something that couldn’t be done on a classical computer. Any team building a quantum computer should check first if it can beat classical computers on RCS; otherwise there is strong reason for skepticism that it can tackle more complex quantum tasks.

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

“Maybe another portal is his open chest. He just goes, ‘Please come in, come in,’” says Craig. “It applies to art. It applies to everything. Letting one’s self go. If you don’t do it, how can you ever know? That tragedy of not doing that is greater than the embarrassment of doing it. We’re defined by those moments in our lives.”

“I’m really interested in the repression of others,” Guadagnino says. “I realize many, many times I go back to the theme. The idea of being so vulnerable and ready to be. He doesn’t have a sense of pride or a protection of social codes.”

Starkey, the 31-year-old “Outer Banks” actor, was met with the very different challenge of playing a character with few words on the page and a cryptic presence. He theorized that Allerton is in retreat because it’s “as if you’ve lived your whole life and never seen your own reflection, and someone puts a mirror in front of your face.” “A question I asked early on was: Is Allerton aware of the game that he’s playing? Is he aware that he may have some power over Lee, and does he like it?” says Starkey. “Luca’s answer to that was: ‘That’s a very good question.’”

They are simply lovers who experience a passing connection. Their search for something deeper (which eventually takes them on an ayahuasca trip overseen by a shaman played by an unrecognisable Lesley Manville) is thwarted by what the director calls the “asynchronous” nature of their dynamic.

How loud was the conversation back then over authentic casting? “It was never even discussed,” Craig says, looking askance. Guadagnino is equally dismissive: “Sexuality is not one thing. Is it five things, is it seven? There is no such thing as ‘the gay’.” Craig has another thought: “Sexuality is a very modern idea,” he says. “People’s sexuality, or whatever they desire, is as individual as a fingerprint.”

Does sharing a vocation reduce the chances of being asynchronous? “No, it enhances them because film-makers are radical narcissists who just want to do their own thing. It’s a disaster.”

Guadagnino goes into splutter mode again. “I would never put myself on the same shelf as Daniel. Come on, he’s an icon! I’m a grey, balding Italian-Algerian director who’s made some movies. I’m boring.” Craig leans forward: “So am I. Let’s say I wasn’t famous, and I was a free agent. It either happens or it doesn’t happen. Those moments are magic. I think of moments like that from my life and, my God, they’re electrifying. Whereas if you’re out on the prowl, that’s really sad. And look, Lee sort of was on the prowl. But he wasn’t looking for what he found with Allerton. That’s what I’m interested in capturing as an artist. The moment where you go, ‘Oh fuck!’”

A big chunk of Americans ignore news completely, or get it sporadically from TikTok, X, or YouTube. Rather than seeking it out, people are exposed to snippets of current affairs as part of curated news feeds, often from obscure or disreputable sources (only 3% of Facebook’s content is political news).

Meanwhile, the right has capitalized on the decline of legacy media, expertly curating a profitable and thriving ecosystem of podcasters, influencers, alt-tech platforms like Rumble, and media companies like the Daily Wire propped up by conservative billionaires and funders. Young talent is found in spaces like TikTok, developed and incubated in spaces like PragerU, promoted by other influencers, and amplified by social media spaces that prioritize conservative content.

No matter how liberal they are, left-wing billionaires are unlikely to support creators who advocate for socialism or the abolition of wealth hoarding.

Influencers are not bound by journalistic ethics or objectivity and are free to take funding from companies, PACs, and wealthy donors. They speak directly to the concerns of younger people, pushing populist messaging. Entry points into this right-wing ecosystem come through various forms of entrepreneurial hucksterism. Young people faced with high housing costs, dwindling job prospects, and inflation — regardless of what economic statistics say — seize on webinars and YouTube videos by people claiming that you can hustle and grind your way into economic success, whether through crypto, dropshipping, multi-level marketing schemes, or OnlyFans.

we now understand a lot about why false information spreads (it’s a combination of emotional appeal, partisan animus, and algorithmic amplification). But we are no closer to solving the problem at its center: How can we find common ground when we can’t agree on basic facts?

Moving forward, we should not be concerned with isolated incorrect facts, but with the deeply-rooted stories that circulate at all levels of culture and shape our points of view. The challenge for 2025 is to confront these deeper epistemic divides that shape how Americans understand the world; in other words, the ways we arrive at the knowledge that forms our perspective.

Guadagnino reminded me that as we come of age, we decide for ourselves what informs us, and spoke to the first time he read Burroughs. “You enter into the language of Burroughs and you understand, at 17 years old, that there are ways we can express ourselves that are so wide, sophisticated, complicated, and that you never have to adapt to a logic that is preordained.”

Burroughs in fact traveled there in 1952; The Yage Letters chronicles his experiments in his letters to Ginsberg. He was obsessed with the idea that yage could enhance telepathy. In the hallucinatory new scenes, the connection between Lee and Allerton goes to places the earthbound book could never take it.

When the screenplay is his own, firmly in Guadagnino’s hands, it’s actually fabulous — and a relief after the earlier conflict between the director and his material. At the same time, it makes no sense. That’s the most Burroughsian nod in this film: the sheer randomness and trippy outrageousness of the end. It’s very Naked Lunch — both the book and David Cronenberg’s 1991 film inspired by Burroughs, which was clearly on Guadagnino’s mind.

It’s paying more of a tribute to an adaptation of a different Burroughs book, a film that feels genuinely Burroughsian but has less of a basis in the underlying text than his own. Something is off, the essential is missing, and this may be why I didn’t feel Burroughs’s spirit.

still, I wept through scenes of Guadagnino’s film — including a hallucinatory reference to Joan’s death in which Lee does the same failed William Tell routine with Allerton — but it wasn’t for Joan or Burroughs; it was for James’s lover Michael Emerton, who  killed himself with a   gun. I wept as this beautifully designed movie, with gorgeous men in well-cut suits, gave me time to think about the karmic connections that both blessed and cursed me. I wept for Billy Jr., whose mother Burroughs had killed. Then I wept for Burroughs, and I wept for Joan.

I wept for the portrayal of transactional sex that was the “romance” the director referred to. I wept as I questioned notions of intent and integrity in transactional relationships: mine with younger, troubled men who lived on the fringes of gay culture; Burroughs’s with James; and James’s with me. Those relationships, for better or worse, follow the karmic path laid down for me 40-plus years ago. That karma, at least for me, as I flew through the past making sense of it, was neutralized by the acceptance of its very existence, its painful impact on me and those affected by it, and, finally, by releasing it. That was Guadagnino’s gift to me.

Most poignantly, I wept for James, who lives alone, unable to walk, with a brain injury that was inflicted during a gay bashing and made worse by his falls at home and sustaining further concussions. But there has been some nice news for him, as a double LP of his work as a singer-songwriter is being released on Lotuspool Records. And he told me he liked Guadagnino’s Queer — though he quibbled with the casting and look of Allerton — and that’s even better news. Guadagnino liked hearing that

On the Zoom with Guadagnino and Anderson, I wanted to ask about legacy. Are there responsibilities we who make art or work in the arts have to our elders, to the radical spirits who pushed open the doors? I mentioned the affluent gay men, usually heteronormatively married, who “rent a womb” and maybe buy an egg to drop in it so their children have their genes — all of which seems to me to be the furthest thing from queer. In response, some signifiers were mentioned. Anderson speaks to the look of the film, citing George Platt Lynes’s influence; they both chimed in about Powell and Pressburger (the Archers), of The Red Shoes; I mentioned Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle, which Guadagnino said, indeed, influenced him. The point has been missed, and the clock is ticking. I move on, disappointed.

Will this film ignite a radical spark in younger viewers — be they queer or not? That’s what Burroughs did for me and for many, many of his readers

The craftsmanship of the film is sterling on many levels. But it is not the book I know by the writer I knew so well. It is stylish in the modality of fashion — having a “look”; it is beautiful in its entirety as a complete visual construction. It is, essentially, a gay location film. It is romantic, something of a travelogue — you might want to go where it is set, eat at the restaurants, while wearing the clothing, certainly in the company of some of the flawless boys cast. But it is not the world that the book conjures for most readers, certainly not me. This is the work of the director — as any film should be.

Still, a bad match of director and material renders confusion at best, emptiness at worst; I worried that this film could potentially misconstrue the importance of Burroughs’s role as a visionary queer writer for future generations. I was incapable of explaining this to Guadagnino and Anderson, in our 20-minute Zoom, not to mention it might have stopped the interview. But I tried.

It wasn’t just the peculiar casting of a beefy daddy like Daniel Craig as the Burroughs character, William Lee, or pretty Drew Starkey as the aloof, younger love interest, Eugene Allerton, who spends the film looking great in fabulous knitwear by Jonathan Anderson, Guadagnino’s friend and the film’s costume designer, but nothing like the image of the character I had in my head.

Each level gives you completely different information, depending on what Google thinks the user might be interested in. Maps are a true masterclass for visualizing the same information in a variety of ways.

Viewing the same text at different levels of abstraction is powerful, but what, instead of switching between them, we could see multiple levels at the same time? How might that work?

A portrait lens brings a single subject into focus, isolating it from the background to draw all attention to its details. A wide-angle lens captures more of the scene, showing how the subject relates to its surroundings. And then there’s the fish eye lens—a tool that does both, pulling the center close while curving the edges to reveal the full context.

A fish eye lens doesn’t ask us to choose between focus and context—it lets us experience both simultaneously. It’s good inspiration for how to offer detailed answers while revealing the surrounding connections and structures.

Imagine you’re reading The Elves and the Shoemaker by The Brothers Grimm. You come across a single paragraph describing the shoemaker discovering the tiny, perfectly crafted shoes left by the elves. Without context, the paragraph is just an intriguing moment. Now, what if instead of reading the whole book, you could hover over this paragraph and instantly access a layered view of the story? The immediate layer might summarize the events leading up to this moment: the shoemaker, struggling in poverty, left his last bit of leather out overnight. Another layer could give you a broader view of the story so far: the shoemaker’s business is mysteriously revitalized thanks to these tiny benefactors. Beyond that, an even higher-level summary might preview how the tale concludes, with the shoemaker and his wife crafting clothes for the elves to thank them.

This approach allows you to orient yourself without having to piece everything together by reading linearly. You get the detail of the paragraph itself, but with the added richness of understanding how it fits into the larger story.

Chapters give structure, connecting each idea to the ones that came before and after. A good author sets the stage, immersing you with anecdotes, historical background, or thematic threads that help you make sense of the details. Even the act of flipping through a book—a glance at the cover, the table of contents, a few highlighted sections—anchors you in a broader narrative.

The context of who is telling you the information—their expertise, interests, or personal connection—colors how you understand it.

The exhibit places the fish in an ecosystem of knowledge, helping you understand it in a way that goes beyond just a name.

Let's reimagine a Wikipedia a bit. In the center of the page, you see a detailed article about fancy goldfish—their habitat, types, and role in the food chain. Surrounding this are broader topics like ornamental fish, similar topics like Koi fish, more specific topics like the Oranda goldfish, and related people like the designer who popularized them. Clicking on another topic shifts it to the center, expanding into full detail while its context adjusts around it. It’s dynamic, engaging, and most importantly, it keeps you connected to the web of knowledge

The beauty of a fish eye lens for text is how naturally it fits with the way we process the world. We’re wired to see the details of a single flower while still noticing the meadow it grows in, to focus on a conversation while staying aware of the room around us. Facts and ideas are never meaningful in isolation; they only gain depth and relevance when connected to the broader context.

A single number on its own might tell you something, but it’s the trends, comparisons, and relationships that truly reveal its story. Is 42 a high number? A low one? Without context, it’s impossible to say. Context is what turns raw data into understanding, and it’s what makes any fact—or paragraph, or answer—gain meaning.

The fish eye lens takes this same principle and applies it to how we explore knowledge. It’s not just about seeing the big picture or the fine print—it’s about navigating between them effortlessly. By mirroring the way we naturally process detail and context, it creates tools that help us think not only more clearly but also more humanly.

I got the sense that their entrepreneurial spirit had led them to the sort of scam that leads you to wear a shirt with a huge dollar sign on it alongside a number of similar young men willing to wear that same shirt, the type of scam that encourages you to work out with and find community among your new colleagues, the type of scam that answers the two dominant questions posed by the young American man in 2024: what will make this mean something, and how can I get rich as quick as possible?

I think young men have turned more conservative because “conservatism,” as it were, is the mode of politics that makes the most sense in Scam America, and these young men are the Scam Generation.

America has always been a nation of grifters, con men, and schemers; what’s different in Scam America is the scope and form. America in 2024 is not a fallen or crumbling empire; it is an enshittified product, a tired casino, a website losing ad revenue, a restaurant line full of private delivery drivers.

America is a casino now, and the young men voting for Trump are the sort of young men pounding free drinks at the blackjack table and toasting the pit boss. A vote for Trump is a vote for a cig inside, for another round, for the line to keep going up, up, up. Does that mean this configuration is permanent? Maybe, maybe not. Casinos are windowless so that you cannot tell the time; they pump in oxygen to keep you alert. They do this, of course, because their owners know that in time everybody loses. The young men of Scam America are not necessarily out of reach, but if the left wants any chance at swaying them, it should plan ahead to when party’s over and the hangovers kick in.

Lee is chasing Allerton, but he’s really chasing a sense of self. This isn’t just a film about queer characters with a queer form — it’s also a film with very specifically queer motivations and conflicts. This is a film for anyone who has every desired assimilation, who has ever looked for self-love in self-hate, who has ever sought control with a desperate fuck.

Allerton is an idealized figure for Lee. (With their glasses and similar hair coloring, Allerton could even appear to be an idealized figure of Lee.) His disconnect from his queerness is a pull for Lee. The same way Lee wants to distance himself from the more feminine gays, he wants to run toward Allerton. It’s not just an addiction to desire, it’s an addiction to self-loathing.

Daniel Craig embodies Lee’s desire with an idiosyncratic charm. He may yearn for Allerton’s neutral normalcy, but, as portrayed by Craig, he’s undeniably queer. This isn’t shown with the obvious cues often inhabited when famous actors play gay. Instead, Craig finds the layers in Lee’s queer presentation — how he plays it up and how he tries to quiet it down.

In the 1960s, airlines were The Future. That is why old films have so many swish shots of airports in them. Airlines though, turned out to be an unavoidably rubbish business. I've flown on loads of airlines that have gone bust: Monarch, WOW Air, Thomas Cook, Flybmi, Zoom. And those are all busts from before coronavirus - times change but being an airline is always a bad idea.

That's odd, because other businesses, even ones which seem really stupid, are much more profitable. Selling fizzy drinks is, surprisingly, an amazing business. Perhaps the best. Coca-Cola's return on equity has rarely fallen below 30% in any given year. That seems very unfair because being an airline is hard work but making coke is pretty easy. It's even more galling because Coca-Cola don't actually make the coke themselves - that is outsourced to "bottling companies". They literally just sell it.

If you were to believe LinkedIn you would think a great business is made with efficiency, hard work, innovation or some other intrinsic reason to do with how hardworking, or clever, the people in the business are. That simply is not the case. What makes a good business is industry structure

Classically, there are five basic parts ("forces") to a company's position: The power of their suppliers to increase their prices The power of their buyers to reduce your prices The strength of direct competitors The threat of any new entrants The threat of substitutes It's industry structure that makes a business profitable or not. Not efficiency, not hard work and not innovation. If none of the forces are very much against you, your business will do ok. If they are all against you, you'll be in the position of the airlines. And if they're all in your favour: brill, you're Coca-Cola.

On the one hand, I think the progressive trans movement has moved so far it’s trying to defend an untenable position: that all you have to do to gain access to a protected space is claim a protected identity for yourself. Imagine a situation where someone known to family and friends (and identifiable to the public) as a man declares one day that they are transitioning to female. Nobody could reasonably expect all girls and women to be comfortable with that person showing up in their bathroom or locker room a few days later. And yet, this isn't how transitioning always (or even often) works. To take the example at hand, Rep.-elect Sarah McBride is 34 years old. She was her student body president at American University in college, and in her final week in that role, she came out as trans in the school newspaper. She described how she wrestled with her gender identity, writing that being trans was her "deepest secret" and something that she "couldn't accept," thinking she had to pick a pursuit of politics over being trans and couldn't possibly do both together. That was over 12 years ago, and now she is an openly trans woman who has been elected to Congress. Regardless of your views on this issue, we should all be able to empathize with McBride and the intentionality behind her transition. She is not a confused teenager. She is not someone attaching themselves to an identity for personal gain, or to be a predator, or on a whim. She is an adult exercising her freedom to live as she chooses.

Many on the right seem to think they can just legislate trans people away — pretending that by excluding them they will somehow cease to exist. They won’t. Whether they exist because of gender dysphoria or ambiguous sex organs or social contagion is, for the purposes of legislation like this, irrelevant. As a pluralistic society, we should strive to create free societies for all.   At the same time, many on the left seem to think they can use academic theory to set the definitions of common words and reorganize social norms without listening to concerns about comfort level, fairness, basic differences among the sexes, and perceived or actual safety. This, too, is entirely unrealistic.

I genuinely think someone like McBride should be able to use the women's bathroom in Congress’s halls, yet I can also hold that this doesn't mean all self-identified trans women are entitled to all women's spaces. I wish more people could hold these things at the same time, too, but alas — that doesn’t appear to be the country we have.

Polls show that many of the policies enacted by President Biden are popular. His measures to reduce the cost of insulin and other drugs receive support from more than 80 percent of Americans. His infrastructure bill, his hawkish approach to China and his all-of-the-above energy policy, which combines expanded oil drilling with clean-energy subsidies, are popular, too. But voters obviously like some of his policies more than others. And an unusual pattern seems to be hurting Biden’s re-election campaign: Voters are less aware of his most popular policies than his more divisive ones.

Adam Green, co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a Democratic-aligned group, blames what he calls fight theory. “It’s not enough to have positive messaging,” Green said. “Voters must see drama, clash and an ongoing saga in order for our message to break through a cluttered news environment.”

fights become the subject of political fundraising emails, activist campaigns, news stories and social media posts. Conflict attracts attention. The situation with Biden’s most popular economic policies — especially the reduction of medical costs — is somewhat different.