Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, “The Variety Bag Has Ruined Halloween“
All Halloween candy is the same now. Nothing stands out, apart from the quantity of candy dumped out on the floor back home. Every house seems to buy a variety bag of seemingly random candy, and consequently every stop metes out a little more of the same treats as the previous one did or the next one will. A harvesttime holiday that evolved from traditional reflections on death is now merely another household chore to carry out on the way to mortal life’s certain end.
Jordi Graupera, The New Yorker, “A Philosopher of War Changes His Mind“
[T]he wall between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, which had sustained his theory for almost half a century, was no longer sturdy. [Michael] Walzer thought the matter through aloud with me, at one point letting out a small chuckle at his intellectual perplexity. A few minutes later, he looked down, leaning toward the screen and speaking with resignation. “There is a sense in which the carnage of Gaza, the ongoing carnage, simply made the war unjust,” he said. “Did the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I thought they were violations of jus in bello, but you could say they made the war unjust. It went beyond a war crime. I don’t know how to explain it.”
Keith Humphreys and Brent Orrell, The Atlantic, “Why So Many Men Aren’t Working“
What these men are spending time on is an unprecedented array of affordable, addictive goods and services—including an average of five and a half hours a day watching television and movies, plus many more on other screen-based activities such as watching pornography and playing video games. One recent study found that 52 percent of men ages 18 to 49 have an online sports-betting account.
This isn’t just about screen-based consumption. The legalization of marijuana production and sale has collapsed the price and increased the potency of the drug, making it inexpensive to be high most or all of the time. More than a quarter of working-age men who are not employed, in school, or in other training use marijuana, and they tend to consume it every day or almost every day.
These cheap, anesthetizing entertainments don’t just make empty hours fly by more enjoyably; they also may be making men less work-ready. Most jobs—manly or otherwise—require some ability to concentrate, to listen to and follow directions, and to endure discomfort. Many also require knowing how to interact respectfully with women. Days spent watching porn, gambling, and using drugs augment none of these skills.
Margaret M. Cassidy and Andrew Swick, War on the Rocks, “The Next Congress Needs to Reclaim Its Oversight of the Department of Defense“
Congress should use all the powers at its disposal to achieve oversight of the department and to limit the executive branch, to achieve both an effective, long-term defense strategy and a healthy balance of power in the federal government. A new Congress in January, whether under unified Democratic or divided control, will have the opportunity to do so using the tools it embedded in recent National Defense Authorization Acts to assert its role in defense strategy.
[…]
Congress instead needs to use its constitutional oversight powers: appropriations, confirmations, investigations, and even impeachment. Congress can and should restrict funding if the administration does not comply with the statutes it has written. Members should deny confirmation to nominees that do not reflect appropriate deference to Congress’ role. Democratic-controlled chambers will undoubtedly conduct investigations into the department’s conduct over the past several years, even if Republicans maintain control of the Senate. Finally, Congress should consider impeaching officials who disobey congressional directives, as they already tried with Hegseth, including even the president.
Anton Jäger, NYT, “Europe Is Aflame, and It’s Not Going to Stop“
To analysts such as Ivan Krastev, the background for these uprisings is a wider sense of futurelessness, also palpable in continental anxieties about migration and demographic decline. In this dire setting, riots express a zero-sum mentality in which participants feel that the building of durable collective power is improbable and direct action is more promising.
Such hopelessness is deepened by a labor market in which degrees seem meaningless, as artificial intelligence is set to dissever the structure of Europe’s working lives. Whereas the mass mobilizations of the 20th century took place in a hopeful future conditional, the time horizon of contemporary protest has shrunk to more immediate aims: increased funding, the seizure of goods. “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” (“To understand all is to forgive all”), as the French say. Yet a certain youthful nihilism, in the face of such somber prospects, is hard to qualify as irrational.
Political prediction always exudes a whiff of astrology. Even if a Serbia-style scenario is hard to envision, Europe’s current upheavals will undoubtedly have short-term effects, perhaps jerking French public opinion to the right or swaying Spanish voters to the left. Yet whatever the protests’ consequences on the level of formal politics, their root conditions — fiscal retrenchment, digital entropy, grief over a future annulled — are unlikely to recede. It is hard to believe the protesters will, either.
