Quillette

Podcast Political scientist Richard Hanania discusses why populism usually fails, why Western elites matter, immigration, MAGA, H-1B visas, housing and declining fertility. Richard Hanania. Image by Quillette.

Billed as “an American docudrama,” Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, directed by Anna D. Shapiro and written by Eric Bentley, recently ended a two-month run at the New York City Center. For New York theatre-goers, the hook was pre-sold and high concept: a period drama about the investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) into alleged communist subversion in the entertainment industry with dialogue drawn verbatim from the Congressional Record.

My guest today is Tanveer Ahmed. He’s a psychiatrist and the author of three books, Fragile Nation, In Defence of Shame and The Exotic Rissole. He’s just written a piece for Quillette about something he sees in his consulting room and in the data at the same time: men who have quietly stopped working and who have stopped looking for work. Not unemployed exactly, but demoralised. It’s a distinction that turns out to matter enormously, and we get into why.

No political analyst has put a better spin on contemporary US foreign policy than Tod Lindberg. As a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Lindberg has long been an astute observer of global politics and a principled advocate for American power in an unruly world.

People in Canberra are typically quite polite, non-intrusive, and tolerant. That may be why the civil servants up the road from where I live don’t ask, “What the hell are you doing?” The doing for which I’m attracting sidelong glances is picking up garbage—specifically discarded cigarette packets. Not vape containers. Not cigar or cigarillo packages. Just empty packs of Manchester Sapphire Blue smokes, Winfield Original Classic, or one of the other 155 varieties that I’ve come across.

I lived in Reykjavík for a year in 2011, doing fieldwork for my PhD. The best thing about living there—better than the Northern Lights, better than the glaciers and volcanoes, better even than the fact that nobody locks their doors—was the public pools. They’re geothermally heated and open all winter, with ice coating the decks and steam rising off the water like the River Styx with lap lanes. The smell of sulphur rises with the steam.

This week, my guest is what might be called an ideal Quillette thinker. And by that I mean someone who started out on one side of the left-right culture war, got exasperated by all the intellectual dishonesty he saw within his or her ideological tribe, and then drifted more toward centrist classical liberalism, all the while taking a scientifically rigorous approach to each issue. This anti-tribal approach to policy and politics can be a lonely affair.

Beijing’s Cold War with the West entered a new phase this month. The chastened creators of AI agent Manus are preparing a return to Singapore, after witnessing the forced collapse of their US$2 billion sale to Meta. Manus was originally developed in China, before its parent company relocated to the city-state. But three months after the big sale to Meta was announced, the founders were summoned back to Beijing and prevented from leaving until the deal was scrapped.

Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers was first screened at the Venice Film Festival on 31 August 1966. I saw it several months after it was released in North America in September 1967 while I was an undergraduate at York University in Toronto. The political and cultural turmoil of the late 1960s was in full swing, and the film made a deep impression on my friends and me.

In January 1986, four skinny, long-haired twenty-somethings from Huntington Park, California, walked into a recording studio in Los Angeles. Three weeks later, they emerged withReign in Blood—a 28-minute and 55-second sonic blitzkrieg that became an instant thrash-metal classic. This wasn’t just another metal album. It was an assault that redefined just how fast and just how uncompromising music could be.