TLP Weekend Edition (October 4-5, 2025)

What we're reading and checking out.

Freddy Peralta #51 of the top overall seed Milwaukee Brewers will pitch Game One of the NLDS against the Chicago Cubs starting at 2:08 ET on Saturday. (Photo: Kylie Bridenhagen/Getty Images)

🇺🇸 “It’s Not About Schumer. It’s About the Election,” by Charlie Cook. Earlier this year, when Democrats threatened for the first time to shut down the government to stop DOGE’s mass layoffs and cuts to federal spending, the party’s more combative members trained their ire at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who eventually refused to shut it down and kept the government running. To understand what led the party to go through with it this time, it’s worth looking back at a smart piece by the Cook Political Report’s Charlie Cook, who observed in that first showdown that Democrats’ actions signal more than anything that they still have not come to terms with the results of last year’s election. This piece is paywalled, but here’s the gist:

Going after Schumer is a curious outlet for their discontent. From the calls for Schumer to step down from his leadership post, one might plausibly think he had become embroiled in a sex scandal or implicated in some kind of financial misdeed. In fact, Schumer simply voted a week ago in favor of a Republican-sponsored government spending measure that kept the government from shutting down.

Schumer has explained, maybe not well, that in the context of everything President Trump has done over the 63 days since taking office, shutting the government down might not be in the best interest of the country or the U.S. economy. A lot of Americans, both federal employees and regular citizens, risked being hurt in such a shutdown. A shutdown-related blow to the economy could tip the country into a recession.

This vote was hardly heresy. Deep down, it’s pretty clear that many Democrats still haven’t quite processed the outcome of the last election…

If these temperamental Democrats want to blame Schumer for the 2024 election, go ahead, but they should wonder why they are not attributing a share of the guilt to every other Democrat who was in Congress in 2021 and 2022 as well as in Biden’s administration.

It took a lot of effort to blow the situation that Democrats were handed in 2021, but they did a great job of it. If they wanted Trump to return to office, it’s hard to see what else Biden and Democrats could have done to bring him back.

🌏 “It’s the Internet, Stupid: What caused the global populist wave? Blame the screens,” by Francis Fukuyama. In Persuasion, Fukuyama looks at the nine primary explanations for why “conspiratorial” populism has risen around the globe. Trying to understand why global populism peaked in different contexts at roughly the same time, he goes through economic, cultural, social, and governmental reasons and then settles on number nine: ”social media and the internet.”

Ever since the year 2016, when Britain voted for Brexit and Trump was elected president, social scientists, journalists, pundits, and almost everyone else have been trying to explain the rise of global populism. There has been a standard list of causes:

1. Economic inequality brought on by globalization and neoliberal policies.

2. Racism, nativism, and religious bigotry on the part of populations that have been losing status.

3. Broad sociological changes that have sorted people by education and residence, and resentment at the dominance of elites and experts.

4. The special talents of individual demagogues like Donald Trump.

5. The failures of mainstream political parties to deliver growth, jobs, security, and infrastructure.

6. Dislike or hatred of the progressive Left’s cultural agenda.

7. Failures of leadership of the progressive Left.

8. Human nature and our proclivities towards violence, hatred, and exclusion.

9. Social media and the internet.

I myself have contributed to this literature, and like everyone else ticked off cause #9, social media and the internet, as one of the contributing factors. However, after pondering these questions for nearly a decade, I have come to conclude that technology broadly and the internet in particular stand out as the most salient explanations for why global populism has arisen in this particular historical period, and why it has taken the particular form that it has.

I’ve come to this conclusion by process of elimination. It is clear that all nine of the factors above have played some role in the rise of global populism. Populism, however, is a multifaceted phenomenon where certain causal factors are more powerful in explaining particular aspects of the phenomenon, or in explaining why populism manifests itself more powerfully in certain countries than others. For example, while racial resentments obviously play an important role in America, they do not in Poland, which is one of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the world. And yet the populist Law and Justice Party came to power there for eight years.

Even if you don’t agree with his conclusion, it’s worth reading the whole thing to see Fukuyama’s take on “the weaknesses of explanations 1 through 8.”

📖 Fairyland, by Paul McAuley. This is the definitive biopunk novel. Paul McAuley is one of modern science fiction’s finest authors—and criminally underread. So read this one and follow it up with the greatest SF far-future cycle, Confluence.

A thriving trade in barely legal psycho-active viruses has kept underground gene-hacker Alex Sharkey alive in an uncertain post-Millennium—a desperate business that has inadvertently allied him with criminals and Triad chiefs. But these are desperate times Sharkey lives in—with the ecosphere teetering on the brink of collapse in the midst of a bioscientific golden age that has produced such marvels as body-tailoring fembots...and dolls.

Compliant, blue-skinned gengineered creatures, dolls have been specifically designed to serve their human masters as pets, unskilled laborers, even as targets in twisted and brutal murder games. Their creation, and destruction, is of no concern to Alex Sharkey, however, until he receives an irresistible summons—and a challenge—from a brilliant, mesmerizing little girl.

Calling herself Milena, she is the hypnotic and powerfully adept product of a biotechnology project that bred artificially accelerated supergeniuses, and needs Alex’s unique expertise to transform the dolls into fairies, a brand new species capable of reproduction and free thought. Yet it is not altruism that drives Milena; her ultimate goal is far more complex, and potentially devastating to all of humanity.

⚾️ ALDS and NLDS, various ballparks across the country. The MLB Wild Card Series produced some exciting and tense games in the still-newish best-of-three format. Now it’s time for best of five as Wild Card winners Detroit and New York face off against Seattle and Toronto, respectively, in the ALDS, while L.A. and Chicago play top seeds Philadelphia and Milwaukee, respectively, in the NLDS. American League Division Series games will air on Fox and FS1, while National League Division Series games will air on TBS and truTV.

From here on out, we’ll be rooting for any team with a payroll of less than $250 million (meaning the Midwest three of Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee, plus the Emerald City).

🥁 Makaya McCraven, Off the Record, North American fall tour. TLP is thrilled to see this jazz drummer, producer, and “beat scientist” at Solar Myth in Philly on Saturday after repeated sessions with his fantastic records In the Moment and Deciphering the Message. McCraven and his collaborators mix traditional and contemporary jazz with improv, hip-hop sampling, loops, and overdubs to produce intriguing music for your speakers and headphones—or live and in person.

Here is a fine new track called “Dark Parks” from his upcoming EP collection, Off the Record.