TLP Weekend Edition (December 20-21, 2025)

What we're reading and checking out.

Built to Spill at Ottobar, Baltimore, December 17, 2025. Their near-”perfect” record from 1997 is featured this week. (Author photo)

✍🏻 “The Lost Generation,” by Jacob Savage. Savage’s article on millennial generation white men in Compact has gone viral, and deservedly so. His data-packed article makes the following case:

As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. “Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”

This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing—it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014—born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s—you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall….

Over the past two years I’ve spoken with dozens of white male millennials, excavating hopes and dreams, disappointments and resentments. To a man, they insisted on anonymity. There were frenzied pre-publication negotiations over what personal details I could include, back-and-forths over words and phrases, requests to change pseudonyms to sound even less like real names. Standing behind it was a fear: that they would end up being that guy…

Most of the men I interviewed started out as liberals. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting. We millennials were true believers in race and gender-blind meritocracy, which for all its faults—its naïveté about human nature, its optimism in the American Dream—was far superior to what replaced it. And to see that vision so spectacularly betrayed has engendered a skepticism toward the entire liberal project that won’t soon disappear.

“What troubles me is that a lot of thriving white millennial men have had to follow the Josh Hawley path, where you have to leave liberal America,” an old friend, the father of two biracial children, told me. “I don’t want to do that. Liberal America is my home. But if everyone says, this is not the place for you, what are you supposed to do?”

Savage makes a compelling argument, backed up by a trove of statistics. A must-read whether you’re initially sympathetic or not to his position. It will make you think.

📖 “What Is Heather Cox Richardsonism?,” by Nate Silver. In his latest Substack piece, the former FiveThirtyEight founder and keen political observer breaks down the modern Democratic Party into three factions:

First, there’s the Capital-L Left: populist, deservedly feeling recharged by the success of Zohran Mamdani and a backlash to the increasingly politically assertive billionaire class.

Next, there’s what you might think of as the Abundance Libs: technocratic, more willing to find common ground with Republicans, and more sympathetic to market-based solutions. I’m a big fan of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of Abundance, but I think the project is more neoliberal than left-wing—to me, not such a bad thing! That’s a subject for a different newsletter, however.

The third faction is Richardsonism or a term I’ll treat as synonymous with it: #Resistance Libs. They’re older, with extremely high educational attainment, predominantly female, and very highly politically engaged. This is the audience for a cluster of political activism encompassing things such as the No Kings protests and some highly popular anti-Trump Substacks along with certain prominent podcasts and much of Bluesky.

Longtime readers of TLP will likely know that we fall somewhere in the middle of the first two factions. It’s the third group that we (and Silver) believe is steering the Democrats in the wrong direction—and yet with whom an inordinate amount of power and influence lies. Silver spends the bulk of the piece elaborating on this third faction and why it is important to think of it as distinct from the populist left and abundance liberals:

Whatever you call this faction—The #Resistance or No Kings or Richardsonism—I think one must identify it as a distinctive thing. Richardsonism often clashes with the Abundance Libs, especially on questions of “electability” and the strategic benefits (or lack thereof) of moderation. But it also doesn’t always vibe with the Capital-L Left. There’s not a lot of economic populism, for instance.

Read the full, un-paywalled piece.

🗽 “Mamdani and the Future of the Left,” by Gregory Conti. Another excellent Compact article (they’ve been a roll lately!), adding to the lively discussion on the significance of Zohran Mamdani’s meteoric ascent to the mayoralty of New York.

In Mamdani, then, we see a synthesis of anti-capitalism and identitarianism that more closely resembles ideological developments in postcolonial polities than American traditions. Mamdani may be a devotee of Marx, but this is no socialism for white men. Old-school economic leftists were among the sharpest critics of wokeness, but Mamdani’s leading role in shaping the future of the left suggests their hopes that progressivism will jettison minoritarian grievances and moral panics will be dashed. This was always the more likely outcome, since progressivism’s most organized and ardent constituency is the college-educated, cash-strapped, and recognition-hungry professional middle class. Mamdani’s flavor of democratic socialism caters to this stratum rather than to the truly needy…

The rapturous reception of Mamdani by many Democratic commentators should not be mistaken for his having charted a path forward for the national party. Progressives generally imagine that the future belongs to them, but in many ways Mamdani’s campaign looks like a last gasp of the social justice energies of the last decade. On the same day as Mamdani’s triumph, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger claimed the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, respectively, by running on cultural moderation and fairly conventional centrist economic policies—emphasizing affordability without appealing to anti-capitalism. Moreover, a great deal of the party’s intellectual leadership is embarrassed by cultural radicalism and academic fixations, and under the heading of “abundance” is embracing targeted deregulation. While the DSA class will never stop banging the drum of climate emergency, and Mamdani remains steadfastly opposed to “any new fossil fuel construction,” normal Democrats, including young people, have lost interest in the issue. Although progressives may never cease treating the transgender movement as the next great civil rights cause, the rest of the public has returned to its senses. In other words, especially if his administration acts on the discredited left shibboleths on policing, education, and the economy that anchored his platform, Mamdani is likelier to be where the train toward a Bernie-DEI fusion goes off the rails than a harbinger of anything important to come.

🎞️ Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, by Hayao Miyazaki. Continuing our tour of the Miyazaki works, this film was released before Studio Ghibli was actually founded but has all the themes and styles that defined the later collection. This animated movie is based on a 1982 manga Miyazaki wrote:

In the aftermath of the Seven Days of Fire, an unavoidable conflict of apocalyptic proportions that destroyed civilization and the Earth's ecosystems, noxious fumes and mutated insectile behemoths threaten the remaining humans. And then, a millennium after the destructive war, ruthless invaders set foot in the verdant Valley of the Wind, a peaceful community ruled by a charismatic young leader. But a toxic forest of dangerous fauna and flora encircles the land. As blind ambition and stubborn disregard for all living things trigger a new murderous clash between warring human factions, the valley becomes the breeding ground for unbridled violence and methodical annihilation. With nature's survival hanging by a thread, can valiant Princess Nausicaä restore peace and stability before it's too late?

Sounds grim but it’s ultimately a heartwarming movie.

🎸 Perfect from Now On, by Built to Spill. It still makes us chuckle that Warner Brothers actually released this album in early 1997. There’s not one “radio friendly” track on the whole record. Instead, astute listeners are rewarded with eight-minute wanderings, songs within songs, insane guitar lines from Doug Martsch, various drops and tempo shifts, and the coolest drumming ever. Darn near perfect if you ask us!

Built to Spill played a smashing version of one of our favorite tracks, “Made-Up Dreams,” last week at the Ottobar in Baltimore.