TLP Weekend Edition (May 10-11, 2025)

What we're reading and checking out.

The world’s 1.4 billion Catholics have a new Pope—Leo XIV. Chicago’s finest! “Viva il Papa!” (Photo: Francesco Sforza, Vatican Media via Getty Images)

✝️ “FULL TEXT: Pope Leo’s XIV’s Homily at Mass With the Cardinal Electors in the Sistine Chapel,” published in the National Catholic Register. The first American pontiff in the Catholic Church’s long history focused his initial homily on the need to restore the missionary work of the Church and to focus on “ordinary people,” the men and women who make up the faith even as many live exceptionally hard lives:

Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure.

These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied. Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed. A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.

Today, too, there are many settings in which Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman. This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptized Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.

This is the world that has been entrusted to us, a world in which, as Pope Francis taught us so many times, we are called to bear witness to our joyful faith in Jesus the Savior. Therefore, it is essential that we too repeat, with Peter: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16).

🩺 "HHS Releases Landmark Review on Youth Gender Medicine," by Jesse Singal. At a time when most conversations around sex and gender in America are emotionally charged and highly polarized, Singal is one of the few journalists who approaches this topic with intellectual honesty, curiosity, and rigor. Over at The Dispatch, where he is now a regular contributor, Singal analyzes the Trump administration's recent review of best practices for treating pediatric gender dysphoria. He writes that he was expecting the report to be politicized, given Trump's early moves on these issues. But he was surprised to find that this was far from the case:

"I was shocked when I found out who was on the team of external experts commissioned by the HHS to write the report: I was familiar with almost all of them, and they were not cranks at all. They are, as expected, skeptics of rosy narratives about the efficacy of youth gender medicine, to varying degrees. But they are informed skeptics who have been deep in the weeds on these issues for a long time, and a significant number have published peer-reviewed papers on this topic."

Check out the full piece for Singal's thoughts on the report.

📖 “It’s Our Fault: On MANGO’s, Coconuts, and the Responsibility of a Powerless Left,” by Dustin Guastella. In Damage magazine, TLP friend Dustin “Dino” Guastella offers a blunt assessment of the left’s cultural flaws in driving away working-class voters from parties like the U.S. Democrats that historically represented workers and their families. Ultimately, “Class values are class interests,” as he puts it:

One of Karl Marx’s great insights was that political values are little more than a mask for class interests. Understanding the social conditions of a given class, how its members make their way in the world, helps us make sense of that collection of ideas that make up their ideology. Whatever passes for the Left today has a distinct ideology informed by its unique class base. Broadly, that base is made up of college-educated professionals, but much more specifically those in the media, the academy, the arts, and the activist NGOs: the MANGOs, as Alex Hochuli usefully termed them.

MANGOs, by their very nature, have influence in the world of politics and ideas. In some ways it's their job to have public influence. They staff congressional offices, they determine what news is worthy to print, they invent and circulate policies. They have a lot of power. Yet, they are generally shielded from the public. Their livelihoods are often the result of patronage, not governed by the rules of the market nor by the demonstration of merit. Moreover, they are uniquely politically situated such that their positions are never up for democratic challenge. Despite the sprawling influence of this clerisy, they are made responsible only to their peers. Think of the NGO director whose nonprofit manages to produce no tangible results save the impressive six-figure salaries of its leadership; or the salaried “fellow” whose generous stipend is provided by some foundation and whose task is to write endless babble promoting its views….

The MANGO class can afford to be socially irresponsible. They are, to some extent, shielded from any real consequences of their behavior. But the Left can’t afford to be so flippant with ideas. As Marx pointed out, we have a special responsibility to renew the “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” including criticism of ideas associated with the Left. It is up to us to generate the ideas that can inform a real opposition to the rising tide of Right populism, and that can’t happen if we spend the next four years defending the ideology of a class we don’t have any business defending.

There is no shortage of writers on the Left who insist that everything must change. That the Democratic Party must be torn down. That the Left must be rebuilt wholecloth. That solidarity and sociality itself must be reimagined. And they are right. But few of these same advocates could be bothered to consider that their own opinions might be wrong. Informed by the wrong social base, advancing the wrong interests, and, therefore, desperately in need of rethinking. What good is it to strike out as an independent party, to build new organizations of the Left, and to elect new leaders if the basic political commitments of this next generation remain informed by the values of the same Brahmin caste and rejected by the very group we need most to win?

If the values of the Left remain unchanged, so too will its fortunes.

🎶 Talkin' Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital, by David Browne. This is the book to read about the Greenwich Village music scene—how it came about and how it evolved. You’ll be amazed at how many stellar musicians came through and went on to have a huge impact on American music and culture. Highly recommended.

Although Greenwich Village encompasses less than a square mile in downtown New York, rarely has such a concise area nurtured so many innovative artists and genres. Over the course of decades, Billie Holiday, the Weavers, Sonny Rollins, Dave Van Ronk, Ornette Coleman, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Phil Ochs, and Suzanne Vega are just a few who migrated to the Village, recognizing it as a sanctuary for visionaries, non-conformists, and those looking to reinvent themselves. Working in the Village’s smokey coffeehouses and clubs, they chronicled the tumultuous Sixties, rewrote jazz history, and took folk and rock & roll into places they hadn’t been before….

Talkin’ Greenwich Village lends the saga the epic, panoramic scope it’s long deserved. It takes readers from the Fifties jamborees in Washington Square Park and into landmark venues like Gerde’s Folk City, the Gaslight Café, and the Village Vanguard, onto Dylan’s momentous arrival and returns, the no-holds-barred Seventies years….and the folk revival of the Eighties.

🎷 Talkin’ Greenwich Village, Chapter One: The Rising Sun. To accompany his book, Browne produced Spotify playlists with music from each of the chapters. Here’s the Chapter One playlist, featuring folk songs from Dave Van Ronk and old school jazz from the likes of Sonny Rollins. Enjoy!