TLP Weekend Edition (October 11-12, 2025)

What we're reading and checking out.

Joe Westerlund on the kit with Califone at the Quarry House Tavern in Silver Spring, June 2023. Westerlund’s excellent new solo record is featured as this week’s music recommendation. (Author photo)

📰 “An Ideological Revolution Needs 12 Years in Power,” by Ross Douthat. Douthat has emerged as one of the more interesting columnists at the NYT, mixing a blend of historical analysis with in-depth reporting and keen understanding of the various permutations of nationalism, populism, and conservatism. In this piece, he correctly notes that real moments of political transformation in American politics require numerous presidential terms.

Twelve years here means three consecutive presidential terms, a number I’m choosing for two reasons. First, because it’s entirely attainable: Over the past century the same party has held the White House for at least three terms on three occasions (1921-33, 1933-53 and 1981-93) and come excruciatingly close on several others (the nail-biter elections of 1968, 2000 and 2016).

Second, because the most successful American ideological revolutions of the 20th century, Rooseveltian and Reaganite, were both three-term affairs, whereas in several cases a potential realignment or revolution was left unfinished or meaningfully rolled back because of a failure to claim just one more term.

This was true of Great Society liberalism, which for all its exertions fell short of establishing a consensus as durable as the New Deal or a welfare state as capacious as those of Western Europe—but which might have gone further if Lyndon Johnson could have passed the baton to Hubert Humphrey. It was true of the Obama presidency, which seemed poised to establish progressivism’s cultural dominance for a generation or more, only to yield to Trumpism because Hillary Clinton couldn’t hold the key Midwestern states. And further back it was true of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, whose utopian progressivism yielded to an age of business-friendly libertarianism because he had no inheritor.

Will Donald Trump and JD Vance successfully achieve this transformation? Douthat says it’s possible but unlikely without a more popular course correction: “This is where the Trump administration is obviously falling short. It has acted aggressively, but it hasn’t persuaded the majority of Americans that those actions mostly serve the general good. It has consolidated presidential power, but it hasn’t consolidated the potential majority coalition that was within view in 2024.”

🗞️ “Don’t Bet Against Bari Weiss,” by Caitlin Flanagan. How did Bari Weiss do it? She left The New York Times under fire from her fellow staffers and started a Substack on a shoestring, which became The Free Press. TFP racked up an astonishing 1.5 million subscribers and has now been acquired by Paramount Skydance for $150 million, with Weiss installed as head of CBS News. Cue the media freak-out. Flanagan’s sharp and funny piece in The Atlantic explains how Weiss did it and dissects the current huffing by others.

You could be forgiven for not knowing how much people love CBS News. I certainly didn’t until a few weeks ago, but the hoary institution is once again being described as the “Tiffany network”—Edward R. Murrow saying, “Good night and good luck”; Walter Cronkite taking the manliest moment in all of live television to get control of himself after announcing the death of John F. Kennedy; and … the trail grows cold. Dan Rather in a turban?

I don’t know and neither do you, because it turns out that fans of the network were willing to do whatever it took to save the network—except watch CBS News. It’s the least watched of all three little-watched network news programs, each weeknight a valiant struggle to report news that everyone’s been refreshing all day long—or more likely not, because…NATO?—and close with a human-interest piece, like one last bedtime story.

But now—cry havoc and write a hit piece—CBS News has been desecrated, a Slurpee sloshed on William Paley’s Picasso. The network is owned by Paramount Skydance. Paramount is now run by Larry Ellison’s son, David, who also bought Bari Weiss’s publication, The Free Press, and selected her as the new editor in chief of CBS News. Weiss is a hugely successful journalist and entrepreneur, and the target—especially from others within her field—of Bari Weiss–derangement syndrome….

Apparently, sufferers of BWD include “everyone” at CBS; they are freaking out, no, they’re “literally freaking out,” a staffer told The Independent—“it’s not a good place right now.” The Washington Post reported on Saturday that the network’s journalists “reeled” as they “digested” the news, although by yesterday morning, the Post had downgraded the mood at CBS to (per one employee) “noticeably uncomfortable,” with “pockets of hopefulness”—both good signs, because reeling while digesting is misery. Apparently, there is also anxiety about coming layoffs, an understandable fear but a long-standing one…

Weiss’s hiring at CBS isn’t a reeling-and-digesting story. It’s a business story. Everyone in journalism has known for years that there’s been a huge opportunity for a publication that employs the traditional methods of U.S. journalism—reporting, deep sourcing, fact-checking, fearlessness—to subjects that either don’t get covered enough or get covered only from a certain perspective. If creating such an enterprise seems simple to you, you don’t know the territory. It’s one of the hardest things you can attempt in media: it’s hugely expensive, and it has to fight for space in the attention economy at a time when Americans’ drive for knowledge seems to be powering down.

That she will somehow denigrate the storied CBS News—it has been reported that some staff members have delivered minatory instructions to not “mess with the Golden Goose(s) of ‘60 Minutes’ and ‘CBS News Sunday Morning,’” as though West 57th Street were the O.K. Corral—is a complete misreading of her and her vision, which is to bring the traditional methods of American journalism back to the news, and also to build a culture of ideas. This is exactly what she’s done at The Free Press, which covers a variety of stories, the most popular of which—Uri Berliner’s explanation of NPR’s decline, for example—are those that hold powerful institutions to account.

Note: Ruy is a contributing writer at TFP and approves of this article.

🤠 “Cowboys and Italians,” by Eileen Jones. At TLP, we love us a good spaghetti western! Jones’s article in Jacobin does a fine job of explaining the origins and significance of this entirely delightful film genre. Only complaint: she does not mention Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence, which genre fans truly must watch.

Even as the American appetite for westerns began to wane after a half century of popularity, the Europeans still couldn’t get enough of our cowboys and Indians. Thus, in the early 1960s, the spaghetti western was born in all its lurid, Technicolor glory.

Many film genres reflect the narrowly defined cultural concerns of single nations or regions. Genres like Japanese salaryman films about middle-class office workers and Mexican comedia ranchera films, for example, tend not to travel well. But the border-crossing spaghetti westerns played everywhere. The drama of the American frontier, it seems, had global appeal.

It all started when writer-director Sergio Leone, the preeminent figure in the subgenre, wanted to make an Italian western based on Akira Kurosawa’s samurai masterpiece Yojimbo (1961), which was itself based on American pulp genius Dashiell Hammett’s superb 1929 novel, Red Harvest, adapted in 1942 under the title The Glass Key. Wildly influential to this day, Red Harvest has been adapted and readapted countless times—often without credit. A line from the same novel would later inspire the title for Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film, Blood Simple (1984), as well as a good deal of the plot, tone, and thematic concerns of their magisterial neo-noir Miller’s Crossing (1990). The Bruce Willis flop Last Man Standing (1996) is officially a remake of Yojimbo, and Rian Johnson’s nicely done teenage neo-noir indie Brick (2005) also harkens back to aspects of Red Harvest.

Writer-director Sergio Corbucci—or “the other Sergio” most responsible for defining the spaghetti western—also relied on Red Harvest and Yojimbo for the basic structure of his most notable entry in the genre, Django (1966). It features a drifter and former Union soldier as the titular hero (played by the Italian actor Franco Nero in the role that made him a star) who arrives in a US-Mexican border town dragging a coffin, later revealed to be housing his massive Gatling gun. He gets embroiled in the violent feud between the town’s controlling forces, Confederate Red Shirts and Mexican revolutionaries, after he saves a mixed-race prostitute from execution on a burning cross erected by the former faction.

But even in a crowded field, Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964)—the first spaghetti western—certainly vies for the greatest adaptation of Red Harvest yet. Leone was rewarded for his visionary achievement with fame and fortune, not to mention credit for minting a new global star named Clint Eastwood, all while founding a splendid and lucrative new subgenre. The only downside was a lawsuit brought by Toho Studios on behalf of Kurosawa, who later claimed to have made more money off the suit over A Fistful of Dollars than on any of his own films.

⚽️ Norway vs. Israel, World Cup Qualifier in Oslo. Soccer and geopolitics have a long and complicated history. (See one of our favorite books on the subject, Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World.) On the occasion of the cease-fire in Gaza, Israel travels to Oslo this weekend and then Udine, Italy on Tuesday, in need of critical points to have a chance at making the World Cup next year in the United States. Norway will almost certainly move on, given its undefeated record so far in Group I. Ahead of the match, however, the Norwegian Football Federation decided to put up a hostile political front against Israel to protest the war, all but ensuring the need for heightened security and fan monitoring/protection given all the planned protests ahead of Saturday’s match.

Here’s hoping for a competitive and dignified match in Oslo—and a focus on the game rather than politics. The game starts at noon EDT on Fox Sports.

🎶 Curiosities from the Shift, by Joe Westerlund. Master percussionist Joe Westerlund is out with a fantastic new double record featuring 12 tracks of flowing and rhythmic compositions built on drums, guitars, trumpet, sax, violin and viola, flute, and electronics. TLP saw Westerlund on drums with Califone a few years back in a mesmerizing show in a dive bar in Silver Spring.

During the same half-decade, though, Westerlund became engrossed in studying the clave, the metric pattern that first defined so much Afro-Cuban and Latin music and then drifted into almost every corner of jazz and rock. What did it mean for an idea to be so flexible, for it to fit so many forms while retaining its own essence? His interest in composing with this new musical curiosity—that is, in constructing grooves that felt instinctual and irrepressible—compounded amid the pandemic, when people desperately wanted to remember what it was like to inhabit their bodies in a room crowded by strangers. The result is another leap into the unknown for Westerlund: Curiosities from the Shift, a 12-track playground of endlessly interwoven beats and melodies, where Westerlund’s clave enthusiasm collides with his textural experimentalism, where his rhythmic symphony of one shakes hands with a half-dozen friends decorating this space alongside him.

Curiosities began taking accidental shape when Califone mastermind Tim Rutili asked Westerlund for a few ideas amid lockdown. Westerlund had been playing in Califone for years, and Rutili was hoping a long-distance beat might spark a song. Nothing concrete came of those sketches, as Rutili pursued other paths. So Westerlund went his own way with them, instead, steadily building those ideas into his own compositions. They are now the basis of the three-piece suite that holds Curiosities’ first half, beginning with the junkyard percussion and delightful bass splashes that frame “Tem” and ending with the surrealistic boom-bap of thumb pianos and shakers on “Can Tangle.” There is a hard-won joy to these numbers, as if Westerlund is delighting in real time in spotting a potential dead end but finding his own way forward, anyway.

Here’s a nice new track from the album, “Felt Like Floating.”