Scope of Work’s Spencer Wright on imports, tariffs, and maturity. “I buy a pair of shoes, make myself a drink, take a sip of water — it all has so much meaning.”
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Entries for May 2025
Ooh, I like this question: “What is the best album released by a music act at least 15 years after its debut album?” Any ideas?
What Is Fascism?
Robert Paxton is one of the world’s foremost scholars of fascism and in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism (Bookshop), he defined the term:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Paxton famously declined to label Donald Trump a fascist, warning against overuse of the term, before changing his mind after January 6th’s attack on Congress.
Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. For an American historian of 20th-century Europe, it was hard not to see in the insurrection echoes of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched on Rome in 1922 and took over the capital, or of the violent riot at the French Parliament in 1934 by veterans and far-right groups who sought to disrupt the swearing in of a new left-wing government. But the analogies were less important than what Paxton regarded as a transformation of Trumpism itself. “The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told me. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”
When an editor at Newsweek reached out to Paxton, he decided to publicly declare a change of mind. In a column that appeared online on Jan. 11, 2021, Paxton wrote that the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.” Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” he went on. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
See also Umberto Eco’s 14 Features of Eternal Fascism, How Fascism Works, Toni Morrison’s Ten Steps Towards Fascism, and Rick Steves’ The Story of Fascism. (via @chadloder.bsky.social)
Pirouette Abecedarium at MoMA: “Twenty-six designers, scholars, DJs, photographers, and entrepreneurs will each present on one paradigm-shifting object or idea, each corresponding to one letter of the alphabet.”
Scientists on the Trump regime’s war on science in the US. “However bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse. They’re dismantling and destroying everything.”
Why Lawrence of Arabia Still Looks Like a Billion Bucks
Even after 60+ years, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the best-looking films out there; this video explores why. I got to see Lawrence of Arabia on a big screen last fall and it was stunning — the colors, the amount of detail, the cinematography in general.
“The Adventures of Tintin officially entered the public domain in 2025. We now all own the alluring aesthetics of this timeless classic.”
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