TLP Weekend Edition (November 15-16, 2025)

What we're reading and checking out.

Which tribe do you belong to? Check out Echelon’s interesting new political quiz to find out.

✍🏻 “The Shutdown Was a Proxy War,” by Evelyn Quartz. After a record 43 days, the federal government shutdown has finally ended. What came of it? Who “won” it? No one can really say. These questions and others lead one to wonder what the point of it even was. Former Capitol Hill staffer Evelyn Quartz criticizes Democrats on her Substack page for orchestrating a shutdown that amounted to little more than elite posturing and power games, while ordinary Americans—many of whom the party claims to represent—suffered.

From the beginning, this shutdown was never about health care. It was about who could raise the most money, generate the loudest moral outrage, and walk away looking like they “fought” heading into the midterms. Even Ezra Klein said the quiet part out loud earlier today: “Democrats said the shutdown was about the subsidies, but for most of them, it wasn’t. It was about Trump’s authoritarianism. It was about showing their base—and themselves—that they could fight back.”
Since Democrats have shown no appetite to meaningfully challenge Trump on economic policy, they’re forced into the realm of political theater—where they perform for the cameras across national news and social media. Their strategy is driven mainly by polls that measure which side is to blame.

All of this relies on the assumption that the American public will view politics as spectacle and cheer for the right side. The problem is this is a game the elites play among themselves, much to the detriment of ordinary people.

The shutdown was, in truth, a proxy war. Like all proxy wars, those calling the shots didn’t pay the price. The public did, through missed paychecks, mounting bills, hunger, and the kind of instability that hits hardest the people who had no role in manufacturing the crisis. The two sides weren’t fighting over the stated issue of health care at all, but over control of the broader narrative: who could dominate public discourse, who could claim the moral high ground, who could galvanize their base and donors by projecting “strength.” The shutdown became a symbolic battlefield onto which Democrats and Republicans projected their messaging wars, leaving ordinary Americans to absorb all the collateral damage. This ought to be the source of your outrage.

📊 “What’s Your Political Tribe?“ by Echelon Insights. Our friends over at Echelon have put together a fascinating new quiz based on the “tribe” typologies they published earlier this year. They gauge where Americans fall on a three-dimensional axis measuring social attitudes, economic views, and support for the establishment. Ultimately, the quiz places users into a political tribe (based on their typologies), a quadrant (based on social and economic views), and a new party in a scenario where America has a multi-party system. We encourage you to check out the short quiz to see where you land.

(TLP landed in the “Electability Democrats” tribe located in the economically liberal/socially conservative political quadrant who would vote for the Labor Party in a multi-party system—sounds about right!)

🎥 Fitzcarraldo, directed by Werner Herzog. However strange this film sounds, it is in reality even stranger. Must be seen to be believed. It will haunt your dreams. It is currently available for streaming on Criterion. If you don’t subscribe, you should!

Fitzcarraldo is a 1982 epic adventure-drama film written, produced, and directed by Werner Herzog. The film stars Klaus Kinski as Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, a would-be Irish rubber baron known in Peru as “Fitzcarraldo”, who is determined to transport a steamship over the Andes mountains to access a rich rubber territory in the Amazon basin. The character was inspired by Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald, who once had a disassembled steamboat transported over the Isthmus of Fitzcarrald by natives.

The film had a troubled production, chronicled in the documentary Burden of Dreams (1982). Herzog had his crew attempt to manually haul the 320-ton steamship up a steep hill, leading to three injuries. The film’s original star Jason Robards became sick halfway through filming, so Herzog hired Kinski, with whom he had previously clashed violently during production of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and Woyzeck (1979). Their fourth collaboration fared no better. When shooting was nearly complete, the chief of the Machiguenga tribe, whose members were used extensively as extras, asked Herzog if they should kill Kinski for him, though Herzog declined.

📖 The Story of a Life, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated from the Russian by Douglas Smith. This autobiographical book is a real pleasure to dig into on a cool autumn night, “[t]aking the reader from Paustovsky’s Ukrainian youth, his family struggling on the verge of collapse, through the first stirrings of writerly ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on the front lines of World War I and then as a journalist covering Russia’s violent spiral into revolution.” Paustovsky’s descriptions of his childhood are as fascinating as his socio-political observations about Russia’s descent into civil war, as Sophie Pinkham describes in a review:

But part of the charm of this book is Paustovsky’s inveterate lyricism in the face of cataclysm. He was so in love with nature, with beauty, with the small joys and tragedies of ordinary life that he was distractible even during the most momentous events. Street battles didn’t stop him from registering the broken branches of lime trees. When he saw Vladimir Lenin speak at Lefortovo Barracks in Moscow, he was more interested in the story of a recruit he met in the crowd, a peasant whose lovely young wife had died in childbirth. Paustovsky supported the Bolsheviks, or at least said he did, but he abhorred violence and preferred poetry to propaganda. When he befriended the staff of a botanical garden on the outskirts of Moscow and returned home with a bouquet, he took pleasure in handing out free flowers to his fellow tram passengers—a truly Paustovskian approach to the redistribution of resources.

🎸 Touch, by Tortoise. Originally based in Chicago, post-rock legends Tortoise are back after nine years with a fine new album on International Anthem. The new record encapsulates the band’s intriguing mix of styles honed since the early 1990s:

Each step in the discography underscores a truth about Tortoise: The questions about arrangement and orchestration are foundational, defining the scope of the canvas and the density of the band’s exactingly precise soundscapes. There can, as McCombs notes, be multiple drummers on a track, and their beats can be supported by acoustic percussion or random electronic blippage. Likewise, on any given track, there can be multiple mallet parts, sometimes sustaining gorgeous washes of color, at other times pounding out intricate Steve Reich-style interlocked grids of harmony. There can be multiple guitars, each with its own earthshaking effects profile. (Parker laughs when he says “I’m kind of like the straight man with the guitar sounds.”) There can be multiple synthesizers—darting squiggles of lead lines crashing into asymmetrical arpeggios, or bliss-toned drones hovering in the upper-middle register like a cloud in a landscape painting.

Tortoise is performing in NYC this weekend playing new tracks like, “Axial Seamount,” and hopefully some older stuff too. See you at the show!