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Reagan (2024). Directed by: Sean McNamara. Starring: Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight. (IMDb)

I must confess that Ronald Reagan’s appeal has always mystified me somewhat. Reagan (2024) the movie goes some way toward filling in the blanks, and anyone interested in thinking critically about U.S. politics would benefit from watching it. Despite being widely panned by critics—it currently holds a putrescent eighteen-percent score on Rotten Tomatoes—the film helps account for the long-standing appeal of conservatism in American society. Perhaps in spite of itself, it also demonstrates just how far conservatism has fallen, to such a degree that Trump’s MAGA movement now bears little resemblance to its ideological forbears.

Zoë Schiffer (2024). Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter. Portfolio. 330 pp.

We all live in Elon Musk’s world now—and as Zoë Schiffer shows in this meticulously researched book on Musk’s 2022 Twitter takeover, it is a bizarre, dysfunctional, and despotic world.

After reading Extremely Hardcore (Musk’s phrase describing the work culture he expected at Twitter), it is extremely difficult to maintain the illusion that Musk is some kind of business genius: Musk spent $44 billion to acquire a company worth only around $25 billion, effectively overpaying $19 billion, or the gross domestic product of a small country. Moreover, Musk has failed to turn Twitter/X into a profitable venture despite a ruthless slash-and-downsize program of corporate austerity. How, then, to make sense of the contrast between the outward myth of genius and the interior corporate dysfunction? Schiffer’s eminently readable blow-by-blow account of Musk’s Twitter acquisition raises the question: Is the world’s richest man still a rational decision-maker?

Today is Election Day in the United States, a defining moment not just for the U.S. but for the world as a whole.

In these final moments, how should we think about Donald Trump’s candidacy? I recently listened to Joe Rogan’s 3-hour interview with Trump (so that you don’t have to), and Rogan is right to point out that Trump has “comedic instincts,” engages in a form of “stand-up,” and often performs with “great timing.” Trump’s flair for self-deprecation no doubt helps explain his political success. He is, at heart, a performer. By comparison, centrist Democrats often feel wooden—the gap between Biden and Trump is the distance between modernist self-seriousness and postmodern playfulness. But with her charisma, Harris has been far more successful at circumventing this obstacle than her predecessors.

The Apprentice (2024). Director: Ali Abbasi. Writer: Gabriel Sherman. Starring: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova. (IMdb)

Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024)—the title playfully plagiarizes the 15-season reality show that made Donald Trump a household name—could hardly be more timely, purporting to tell the story of Trump’s rise from relative obscurity in 1970s Queens, New York to Manhattan moguldom by the mid-1980s.

The Apprentice does so effectively, even if it veers dangerously into aestheticism, devolving at times into an almost celebratory visual spectacle more than a critical biographical film. With all the familiar tropes of the 1980s aesthetic paraded before the audience—the big hair, VHS scan lines, disco needle-drops, cocaine-fueled parties, and the ruthlessly individualistic pursuit of profit and pleasure—The Apprentice largely forgoes deeper analysis of one of the most powerful and dangerous people in recent history, shifting blame instead onto the shadowy master-figure of Roy Cohn.

Civil War (2024). Director/Writer: Alex Garland. Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny. A24 Films. (Rotten Tomatoes) (IMDb)

Despite occasional glimmers of hope, Civil War (2024) is a terribly depressing movie; but worse still, it is largely an empty movie.

Missing are two crucial elements, which could have compensated for the film’s overall bleakness: situating the U.S. as portrayed in the film within a global system, forcing a reckoning with the possible role played by the American empire in its internal disorders; and a tangible analysis of the domestic political situation leading to the film’s central conflict. Strangely, for a movie about civil war, Civil War is remarkably uninterested in how the war came about, and it shows zero interest in what the rest of the world is doing about it.

How can we distinguish between problematic or dangerous conspiracy theories and legitimate intellectual critique?

Stuart Hall (1932-2014), born in Jamaica and educated at Oxford University, was one of the key cultural theorists, Marxist sociologists, and leftist thinkers in the postwar era. Hall is particularly known for concepts like encoding/decoding and authoritarian populism, and for his interest in studying conjunctures (the totality of societal situations); he is also known for his critical analyses of Thatcherismin the 1980s and studies of popular culture, identity, and race/ethnicity, and for helping establish cultural studies as a distinctive subdiscipline.

We live in ahyper-factualage, where we know more, with greater speed, about more things than ever before in history.

“We’ve had enough!” — “There’s no more room!” — “They’reto blame for the housing shortage!” — “They’ve taken all our jobs.” — “Our country isfull.”

Gaza is being decimated. There are reports of polio virus found in Gaza’s sewage by the World Health Organization (WHO). Mountains of garbage are piling up as basic services have collapsed. The UN reports that clearing 40 million tons of rubble may take 15 years, with housing stock not rebuilt until 2040 at an estimated cost of $40 billion. And as of July 2024, some 39,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. The real body count may prove much higher, given the significant destruction of civil infrastructure by Israel’s armed forces, making recovering and registering fatalities difficult, with thousands likely buried beneath the rubble of the bombed-out enclave.