🇺🇸 “The Most Ordinary Town in America,” by Chris Arnade. The Free Press recently republished an updated version of Arnade’s great Substack piece on Michigan City, Indiana, the kind of town where “citizens are preoccupied not with the political vitriol dominating social media, but with the fundamentals of an authentic life: taking care of family, cherishing friends, and relishing in strangers’ kindness,” as the FP editors write. In the article, Arnade recounts his encounters with truly decent Americans:
I heard stories like that of a recent widow, whose husband used to mow the lawns of everyone on the block who couldn’t do it themselves. So now, the one day a week she isn’t working at the power plant or caring for her grandkids, she pushes the lawn mower. And it does tear her up now and then, because It smells of my husband, can you believe that? A mower smelling of a man dead for over a year? But it does, and if you had only met him, you would know why that brings me to tears. Because they don’t make men like that anymore, a man who didn’t have a bad word to say about anyone and only cared about helping. That is who God struck down at 65. It doesn’t seem fair, but he lived a good life, and I only wish he would have had a few more years to go to his favorite granddaughter’s wedding, which is next weekend, down at the casino in town. Have you been? You should go if you haven’t.
Or the 40-year-old man who moved back from Atlanta to care for his mother, who has dementia, because none of the other kids could. One is in the military overseas, and the other, well, she married up and now she thinks she is too good for us, although she offered to help put her in a home, but us other two don’t have that sort of money. And it isn’t the right thing to do anyways, so I came back here. And it isn’t that bad, although I’m not looking forward to snow again. But you do what you have to do. So now I spend my days chasing after my mother when she goes missing, and my nights here working the late shift…
More importantly, these cities are reminders that whatever happens online and in politics can be muted, at least temporarily. That doesn’t mean those battles over politics don’t matter, or don’t ultimately impact life in a place like Michigan City. Because they do, eventually, in very fundamental ways. For example, past trade policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement changed Michigan City, moving many of its companies south, or across the water to China. And so the town had to remake itself, which it did.
It is because of profound impacts like this that fixing our political climate is so essential. Doing so requires a balanced perspective about what we are fighting for: not scoring temporary points against our opponents, but building a healthy society.
And what is a healthy society? A healthy society is one in which communities such as Michigan Cities exist in droves; where “normal people” live fulfilling, rewarding, and tranquil lives; and where they can tune out the online noise to focus on the business of living, which is already hard enough, without another layer of nastiness weighing on it.
🙏🏼 “How religious is your state?“ by the Pew Research Center. Earlier this year, Pew Research published the findings of its 2023–2024 Religious Landscape Study, in which they surveyed nearly 37,000 American adults to “provide authoritative figures on the size of U.S. religious groups,” as the Census Bureau does not collect that information. Throughout 2025, they have used this data to help Americans better understand the state of organized religion in the U.S. today. One such analysis broke down their data state by state, examining not just which religious traditions are most dominant in them but also how religious their residents are. Check it out to see where your state ranks!
🇬🇧 A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65, by David Kynaston. This volume is the fourth installment of Kynaston’s epic social and political history of Britain from the end of the war to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The series is quite massive, and you can basically pick up any of the books and learn something interesting and new about Britain during this period. Well worth your time with a cup of tea or pint:
A Northern Wind is a chill reminder of calamitous social management, not least in the replacement of solid Victorian terraces by high-rise housing. Kynaston notes that even then, some were having second thoughts about this modernist dream, with its emphasis on style and impact overlooking the needs of the prospective tenants. Not much to cheer in education, either, where the continuing unfairness of the 11-plus, the unloveliness of secondary moderns and the “barrier to democracy” represented by private schools kept British society more or less benighted. “Ultimately,” writes Kynaston, “this was an issue about social class.” It always is. The 1960s was still a conservative age, still hidebound by deference at one end of the class spectrum and complacent in its privileges at the other. Billy Liar (1963) is identified as a key film of the time, a passionate reaction against the forces of northern “prejudice, intolerance, prudishness”, with men like Billy, by refusing the chance to escape, doomed to become just as inward-looking as their parents. In the end it’s Billy’s girl Liz (Julie Christie) who makes the break, a clarion call to women, though one that was agonizingly slow to catch on…
The book concludes on two seismic moments, one a beginning, one an ending. Labour’s election victory in 1964 was not the landslide expected, but a majority of four: thus, a country still suspicious of change. The latter was the death of Churchill, at 90, in January 1965, which few would dispute as the passing of an era. His funeral at St Paul’s brought London to a standstill and the country to a reckoning. It marked “the final act in Britain’s greatness”, wrote one journalist, who also called it “a gesture of self-pity”; “sobering”, wrote an elderly diarist, “but we have been pronounced dead before and been buried and there has been a resurrection”. It is characteristic of Kynaston to present such opposing views and somehow to harmonise them. He is the most humane and even-handed chronicler of our time, and the one best qualified to carry this mightily compelling national story onwards.
📸 In My Eyes, Photographs 1982-1997, by Jim Saah. Who needs another coffee table book about boring paintings when you can have one about the legendary D.C. music scene?! TLP has a weathered copy of this gem and gets asked about it all the time.
In My Eyes, Photographs 1982-1997 features hundreds of impressive (and never-before-seen) photos of punk and hardcore legends such as: Fugazi, Minor Threat, Void, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Jawbox, Government Issue, The Faith, Iron Cross and more. But Saah’s musical palette wasn’t just confined to punk rock, as evidenced by the inclusion of The Cramps, The Pixies, Lou Reed, Guided by Voices, Fishbone, Wilco et al. The hardcover book closes with several intimate interviews between Saah and longtime friends/fans including Ian MacKaye, J. Robbins, Jon Langford, artist Shepard Fairey, and photographers Cynthia Connolly and Patrick Graham.
🎸 Passe, by Oruã. If you don’t already know Oruã, these Brazilian psych maestros will quickly become your new favorite band. At least that’s what happened on our end when we saw them open for Built to Spill a few years back. As Brad Cohan describes:
Listening to Oruã’s Íngreme (2021) or Romã (2019), it’s easy to fall under the spell of the spaced-out and bright melodies they’ve dubbed “a poor man’s jazz” and “working-class krautrock.” The music of Oruã gives off such a weightless feel that their trippy atmospherics sound like they just floated in from another spiritual dimension. When Oruã lock in on those solid gold bass and drums grooves, and Almeida reels off slinky guitar salvos galore, the krautrock influence is palpable. That said, their MO isn’t restricted to Can worship, as evidenced by the lo-fi dynamics and easy, Guided by Voices-esque hooks.
On Passe, their fourth album, Oruã blow out a sundrenched experimental rock choogle that’s as serene as the seaside air of their Rio de Janeiro hometown. Their admitted 1970s-era German avant-garde and American lo-fi indie obsessions seep through, but behind the ’90s-styled slacker veneer, the lyrics, sung in Portuguese, lay bare themes of resistance…That tightrope act between heavy subject matter and radiant melody, accentuated by deft in-studio tinkering, turns out to be Oruã’s forte. Wrangling together synthesizers, tapes, saxophones, metallophones, and percussion, Almeida and his bandmates pepper tracks like the from-outer-space instrumental “Análise de Conjuntura,” the dubby “Espiritualmente Aceso,” and the dirge-like title track with warped and contorted textures and tones that yield even more layers to an already entrancing listening experience.
The opening track “Real Grandeza” grabs you right from the start.
What a delightful read first thing a nice Saturday! Michigan City and Brazil, thank you!
Although I’m a new poster, I’ve been lurking here for a long time, and I’ve noticed that the site is relatively dead on the weekends. So I thought I’d treat the weekend “What we’ve been reading” post as an open thread, but if that’s not appropriate for this site, please delete and I’ll never do it again.
Here goes:
I’m stereotyping, but my general assumption is that left-leaning people with fully-informed worldviews are relatively old people in their 60s. I say this out of love because my parents are where I learned this worldview from, and even though we disagree on politics and religion, I love them deeply. And my general extraction of my parents’ worldview is that they fought two history-defining battles and won them both: the liberation of black people and the liberation of women. And yet almost as soon as they had solidified their victory, an ugly backlash emerged with Ronald Reagan and the rise of a powerful right wing. And then after beating back that challenge with Barack Obama’s multiethnic coalition, the right wing backlash grew even more powerful and even more ugly.
They say that generals are always trying to win the last war. While my parents’ generation is fighting against a long since vanquished ghost, young people on the right today are building a new movement of peace and love to respond to messes created by previous generations.
I saw a Ted Lasso clip on TikTok and one of the comments said “We came so close to creating a world of positive masculinity, but the last two years have taken it from us.” I love almost everything about Ted Lasso but the show got one important thing wrong: as a fish out of water show, it should be about a jolly Midwestern evangelical football coach who goes into stiff and reserved England to spread love. Culturally, they got almost everything about Ted right except for his faith and his politics. (There was a brief period early in the show where I thought the opening credits that showed blue stadium seats turning red were not-too-subtle symbolism of where the show was going).
If that seems like a ridiculous claim I’ll give two more examples of positive, healthy and conservative masculinity from pop culture. The first is from the only other character in pop culture that I can think of who is like Ted: Ned Flanders from the Simpsons. He was the original archetype of a jolly Midwestern evangelical who returns hostility with loving kindness. Yes, sometimes Ned fails to do so and snaps, but that doesn’t make him a hypocrite, it makes him human. Ted also had a moment or two like that during the show. My second example is the greatest portrayal of positive masculinity in all of fiction, at least as far as I’m concerned, and that’s Samwise Gamgee from “Lord of the Rings.” And Tolkien wrote Sam to embody the qualities of the English Yeoman farmer. And the ways that Sam and Frodo communicated their love for each other were far more intimate and personal than what we see from men today.
I imagine that the perfect time to be promiscuous was during the early days of the Sexual Revolution. They grew up in a world where young men and women were socialized to be steadfast and compassionate long-term partners for each other, but they were given the freedom to be promiscuous. And that’s how my parents will always see it. But the Sexual Revolution also released bottom-up forces that no amount of institutional dominance by the left could control. Almost as soon as the Sexual Revolution began, game-playing and sexualized hierarchies began. See also: every movie created about high schools from the 1980s and onwards. It’s also shocking looking back at these old movies just how misogynistic they are. In “The Breakfast Club,” John Bender fingers Molly Ringwald’s character while hiding under her desk. Her slapping his hand away is played for laughs and they end up together as a couple. “The Revenge of the Nerds” features sensitive non-jock, positive masculinity nerds hiding closed circuit cameras in a sorority to watch the women naked, and then selling naked pictures of the sorority president for a fund-raising event. And of course, the main character dons the same Halloween costume as her boyfriend and then rapes her by deception. They end up together when he reveals - after sex - who he really was.
Lest you think cherry-picking pop culture is not representative of empirical realities, this does in fact dovetail into empirical research. Peter Jonason has done a lot of research on Dark Triad personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) and found that men higher in Dark Triad traits do better in short-term mating opportunities (AKA “hookups”) but worse at long-term stable relationships (AKA “marriage”). And I would encourage everyone to read “The Myth of Monogamy” by David Barash, an evolutionary biologist who studies birds. Birds are a good model for humans because birds and humans both have unusually vulnerable offspring that benefit from paternal investment. Because of this both birds and humans have one foot in the world of monogamy (maximize paternal investment into children) and another foot in the world of promiscuity (maximize genetic quantity for males, maximize genetic quality for females). The same war that is fought in the hearts of men is also fought in the hearts of birds.
The Sexual Revolution was predicated on a willfully bad misreading of human nature. And although 80s movies no longer fly, modern dating apps like Tinder have only made things worse. Let me say that again because it’s that important: we are not finding a stable halfway point between “the left creating art that celebrates rape culture” and “abstinence and monogamy.” Chesterton’s fence remains undefeated.
There is a reason why lesbians aren’t interested in hookup culture and hookup apps like Grindr, and that’s because women prefer monogamy. And men know this, particularly men high in Dark Triad traits. Men lie to women, tell them they’re special, seduce them into bed, and then ghost them and move onto the next victim. Or worse, ghost them for a couple weeks, then reach out claiming work was crazy and seduce them a second time. These men repeat the cycle endlessly until the woman finally realizes that she isn’t ever going to get a committed relationship with this man. The kids today call these “situationships” - relationships where the woman provides sex but the man does not provide any emotional connection or intimacy.
So teenage boys today have three choices. The first is the sensitive new man approach. But that will only work if you are intelligent and intrinsically motivated enough to graduate from college and enter the liberal world. And even that is based on a lie. I would recommend Carol Hooven’s book on testosterone. We’ve got a lot of animal studies showing that male animals who are prevented from engaging in rough play are shy and withdrawn, unable to regulate their aggression, and have a tendency to “punch down” on those they perceive as weaker. That truth should be readily available to anyone with common sense and/or a social epistemology.
The second choice is to follow the actual incentives created by the Sexual Revolution: to fight your way up the male hierarchy. AKA take the red pill. Listen to Andrew Tate’s advice. Lift weights. Learn to fight. Make a lot of money and drive fancy cars. If you succeed, then the reward will be worth it: lots of women. But most young men will not climb the hierarchy very far. It is a zero-sum game, after all. The majority of these boys retreat into the Big Four: video games, anime, porn, and hostility towards women. This is the reason for that backlash against liberalism that my parents, correctly, lament so much. What they don’t realize is that they created it. Eventually these young men will reach their 30s and mature enough to settle down, but they will settle down with bitter and resentful hearts towards women.
The third choice is Jesus. This is why Charlie Kirk resonated so much with young people. This path means dropping out of what the world wants and choosing a more authentic life. And unlike the new age sensitive man path, Jesus is for everyone. Charlie Kirk was the disciple to Gen Z men, and there does seem to be a genuine revival among Gen Z. The multi-ethnic Obama coalition was always a lie. It had a bunch of college educated liberals with one set of values, and diverse working class minorities with very different values
The growing realignment that this site has so capably documented is happening because minorities are realizing that they have far more in common with the white working class than they do with college-educated whites. As Charlie Kirk put it: “God, family, country, and in that order.” Trump has created the first true multiethnic coalition in American political history, and they are going to heal this nation. Or perhaps I'm being naive, and Gen Z will fail, like previous generations failed. But we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us. (Philippians 4:13).
NB: I’m a big fan of TikTok, I think it’s the only positive social media that exists because it’s about ordinary people talking to ordinary people. X and BlueSky seem to feature sarcastic memes and insults sent by elites, but the short video format of TikTok encourages ordinary creators to act in a more humane way. I would encourage anyone who is genuinely interested in young people to start lurking #christiantiktok. Here are two short videos (TikToks are all short) to get you started.
https://www.tiktok.com/@y3d1dya/video/7541989395113463071?_r=1&_t=ZT-90ein1KhqoP
https://www.tiktok.com/@presencerevival/video/7556729308950105376?_t=ZT-90eihUTpf9j&_r=1