TLP Weekend Edition (July 12-13, 2025)
What we're reading and checking out.
📰 "The Grip That Race and Identity Have on My Students," by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Williams, a visiting professor at Bard College, writes about how his younger students have little memory of Barack Obama's first presidential campaign, which gave many people hope that America was preparing to enter a new age of post-racialism. Instead, his students came of age during the Trump era and thus formed their views about questions of race and even their sense of self in backlash to his presidency and penchant for attacking critics on the basis of their identity. This has left many younger Americans incapable of subscribing to a more optimistic vision for the U.S. or even fathoming that we are capable of moving beyond identitarianism and toward a more sophisticated national identity.
Rather counterintuitively, Mr. Obama’s “post-racial” movement and the passing good will it engendered notwithstanding, it was Mr. Trump’s victory in 2024 that amounted to the least racially polarized presidential election in more than a generation. One essential lesson I draw from this is that there remains a significant and seemingly growing share of minorities who do not wish to be dealt with only insofar as we are minorities.
Yet through my students’ lack of familiarity with the recent journey this country has undertaken, I began to grasp how difficult it is today even to recall the ascent of Barack Hussein Obama to the U.S. presidency. Nor the way it seemed to herald not only the end of the cinematically violent and tumultuous Bush era but also the dawn of a whole new so-called post-racial, genuinely progressive epoch of multiethnic social harmony.
Why does this matter now? The loss, already noticeable during Mr. Obama’s second term, of a grand and generous shared vision of American society has been catastrophic, though not incalculable.
🏳️🌈 “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way,” by Andrew Sullivan. In another NYT column from a few weeks ago, Andrew Sullivan, a pioneer in the gay rights movement, explains how “trans rights” activism is far different from the successful movement he devoted so much of his life to—and not in a good way.
[A] funny thing happened in the wake of [gay rights] triumphs. Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains and staying vigilant but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives—including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague—gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the social justice left, they radicalized.
In 2023 the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights group in the country, declared a “state of emergency” for gay men, lesbians and transgender people—the first time in the organization’s existence. It had not declared a state of emergency when gay men were jailed for having sex in private, when the AIDS epidemic killed hundreds of thousands of gay men or when we faced a possible constitutional amendment banning marriage equality in 2004. In fact, we found out, this “emergency” was almost entirely in response to new state bills proposing restrictions on medical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria, bathroom and locker room bans and transgender issues in school curriculums and sports….
[M]oney has poured into gay, lesbian and transgender groups in the past decade….But this huge increase in funding was no longer primarily about gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights, because almost all had already been won. It was instead about a new and radical gender revolution. Focused on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with white supremacy, they aimed to dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with gender identity in the law and culture and to redefine homosexuality, in the process, not as a neutral fact of the human condition but as a liberating ideological queerness—which is then meant to subvert and queer language, culture and society in myriad ways.
The words “gay” and “lesbian” all but disappeared. L.G.B.T. became L.G.B.T.Q., then L.G.B.T.Q.+, and more letters and characters kept being added: L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ or 2S.L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ (to include intersex, asexual people and two-spirit Indigenous people). The plus sign referred to a seemingly infinite number of new niche identities and, by some counts, more than 70 new genders. The point was that this is all one revolutionary, intersectional community of gender-diverse people and intertwined with other left causes, from Black Lives Matter to Queers for Palestine.
They needed a new banner for that. So the rainbow flag, invented back in 1978 at the request of Harvey Milk, was replaced over the last few years by a new progress flag, representing intersectional oppression. Black and brown stripes were added to the rainbow—for Black and brown people (and the people lost during the AIDS crisis)—and pink, light blue and white for trans people. That flag now demarcates not simply a place friendly to all types of people, as the old rainbow flag did, but a place where anyone who does not subscribe to intersectional left ideology is unwelcome….
The gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, had long asked for simple liberal equality and mutual respect—live and let live. Reform, not revolution. No one’s straight marriage would change if gay marriage arrived, we pledged. You can bring up your children however you like. We will leave you alone. We will leave your children alone.
But in the wake of victory, L.G.B.T.Q. groups reneged on that pledge. They demanded that the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted. Elementary school children were taught that being a boy or a girl might not have anything to do with their bodies and that their parents had merely guessed whether they were a boy or a girl when they were born. In fact, sex was no longer to be recognized at birth—it was now merely assigned, penciled in. We got new terms like “chest-feeding” for “breastfeeding” and “birthing parent” for “mother."…
[L]ook at the recent results of the L.G.B.T.Q. movement. In the past five years, activists have managed to move public opinion away from their causes in many respects. In 2021, for example, 62 percent of Americans said that transgender athletes should be able to play only on teams that matched their gender at birth; by 2023, that figure had risen to 69 percent. This is not bigotry at work. This year, the same pollster found that a solid majority of Americans—56 percent—favor policies protecting trans people from discrimination. Americans are broadly fine with transgender people. They are fine with gay people. They just reject replacing the fact of biological sex with the phantasms of gender ideology.
🤖 20th Century Boys, by Naoki Urasawa. This epic 22-volume manga (combined into 11 separate books in the nice “Perfect Edition”) is a joy to read as it moves through numerous plot twists and character developments with superb graphics and endearing dialogue. It’s a complicated and fun story, but here’s the gist:
This is the story of a group of boys who try to save the world! As boys, Kenji and his friends came up with a bunch of stories about an evil organization bent on world destruction. As adults, someone is now turning their fantasies into reality!
Humanity, having faced extinction at the end of the 20th century, would not have entered the new millennium if it weren't for them. In 1969, during their youth, they created a symbol. In 1997, as the coming disaster slowly starts to unfold, that symbol returns. This is the story of a group of boys who try to save the world.
There once was a boy who imagined the end of the world. It was just a child’s game… but not anymore! The Friend is carrying out his plan for the extermination of the human race—all according to his predictions. And the man who survived Bloody New Year’s Eve is heading toward Tokyo. The boys are coming back together one by one. The time is come. This is the countdown to the final battle.
🎾/⚽️ Wimbledon Gentlemen's and Ladies' Finals and the FIFA Club World Cup Final, on ESPN and TBS. On Saturday, American No. 13 seed Amanda Anisimova faces off against the Polish No. 8 seed Iga Świątek in the ladies’ finals after the American knocked off the top seed Aryna Sabalenka in the semis. On Sunday, the top two on the men’s side—Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz—battle it out on Center Court for grass supremacy. Sinner appeared to injure his elbow earlier in the tournament, but it didn’t prevent him from getting through to the finals. Sunday afternoon, the seemingly unstoppable soccer phenomenon and recent Champions League victors, Paris Saint-Germain, take on Chelsea in the Club World Cup finals in East Rutherford, NJ, ahead of next year’s full World Cup in the USA.
🎹 Live February 14, 1972, Hamburg, by the Bill Evans Trio + Herb Geller. This one-off collaboration between the long hair-era Bill Evans and the famous saxophonist and flutist is a real sonic gem. The musicians got together for a radio gig in Germany, where Geller lived at the time:
Again, the sound is warm, big and clear, with depth and dimension. Regarding the sound, Roberto and Diego included the following note:
No compression. No filters used. Frequencies were balanced to achieve a balanced overall sound. Controls were applied for sounds out of register or “broken”, in order to ease listening. Given the difference in sound quality between tracks during the concert and the rehearsal tracks, an attempt was made to make the overall sound as homogeneous as possible. In all the themes it was sought to reconcile the respect for the original aesthetic of the live recordings of that time with the current technological possibilities in relation to the recovery of the timbre and the ghosts of the sound of each instrument, giving the register as much realism as possible. The language and musical aesthetic of the Bill Evans Trio can be heard in the best possible sound balance with total transparency and definition for the first time.
Here’s some of the rehearsal footage. Enjoy!
Andrew Sullivan has written a beautiful piece so full of truth and so honest.
I've been following Andrew Sullivan for decades and this is one of the most thoughtful pieces he has ever written.