Book Reports

Another batch of 40 brief notes on recently published books -- the third I've published this year, after March 15 and June 1. Actually, a good deal more than 40 books mentioned below, as I've tacked on lists of related books where it seemed appropriate and useful -- in some cases, the list is probably the point. Inclusion in a list doesn't guarantee that I'll never write a book up separately, but usually satisfies my sense of duty.

While the dates above seem to suggest a regular, orderly process, I only managed to do this once in 2018, and twice in 2017 (here and here), so I feel like I'm working my way out of a deep hole. Indeed, I have 55 more-or-less written entries in my scratch file for later, so I could do a fourth one next week, or at least by the end of the year. Oh, and that doesn't count the merely noted titles that follow the top 40 -- 46 more of them in the file, but I'll list some of them to end this post.

Worth noting that I have read (or am working on) the books I have cover art for on the right. Kate Brown's book on Chernobyl is probably the "best read" of the bunch. Just started Poniewozik's Audience of One, and he's scoring points from the very start (unlike, say, Tim Alberta, who wants you to regard John Boehner and Paul Ryan as normal, decent human beings). I checked out Astra Taylor's Democracy May Not Exist but We'll Miss It When It's Gone, but ran out of time before I got deep enough into it to count. I bought a copy of Stanley Greenberg's RIP GOP, but haven't gotten to it yet -- I figure it's next in queue after Poniewozik, but a lot of what I've read recently has been plucked opportunistically from the city library.

It occurs to me that I should probably do a whole piece on music, but these days I never find the time to read up on what's supposed to be my specialty. Still, I have a handful of music books in the draft file, starting with Robert Christgau's Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading, and John Corbett's Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music. I also started a list entry on cookbooks, which could grow into a specialized post -- not least because I do regularly buy and use cookbooks.

Tim Alberta: American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (2019, Harper). It's pretty easy now to see how everything Republicans did from 1968 to 2016 paved the way for electing this crass, bigoted grifter and sham. Nixon laid the foundation with his crass appeals to racists and reactionaries, his Orwellian "peace with honor" (a tactical retreat covered by real and feigned escalation), above all his conviction that winning is the only thing that matters, and that excuses all manner of criminality. Reagan put a sunnier face on an even darker heart. Ditto the Bushes, less artfully. Alberta only picks up this digression in 2008, with the Sarah Palin boomlet, and 2009, with the Tea Party eruption, then goes on to show how Trump won the party over, delivering the one thing they craved most of all: winning. Of course, you know all of that, but Alberta puts you in the rooms as the party brass figures it out and comes to terms with their debasement. Some other recent books on how we got to Trump:

• Jim Acosta: The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America (2019, Harper).
• Dale Beran: It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office (2019, All Points Books).
• Barry Levine/Monique El-Faizy: All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator (2019, Hachette Books).
• Amanda Marcotte: Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Ratf*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself (2018, Hot Books).
• Joy-Ann Reid: The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story (2019, William Morrow).
• Rick Reilly: Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump (2019, Hachette Books).
• Nathan J Robinson: Trump: Anatomy of a Monster (paperback, 2017, Demilune Press).
• Michael Wolff: Siege: Trump Under Fire (2019, Henry Holt).

Binyamin Appelbaum: The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (2019, Little Brown): A history of the growing influence and power of economists from 1969, when economists were kept to the basement of the Federal Reserve, to 2008, when the world transformed by their fundamentalist faith in markets crashed and nearly burned. In between, business and political interests looked to economists for help, and many economists strove to service their masters. One line I noted: "Conservatism was a coalition of the powerful, defending the status quo against threats real and imagined." More recent books on economics:

• Abhijit V Banerjee/Esther Duflo: Good Economics for Hard Times (2019, Little Brown).
• David G Blanchflower: Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? (2019, Princeton University Press).
• Heather Boushey: Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It (2019, Harvard University Press).
• Thomas Philippon: The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets (2019, Belknap Press).
• Katharina Pistor: The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (2019, Princeton University Press).
• Robert J Shiller: Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral & Drive Major Economic Events (2019, Princeton University Press).
• Jean Tirole: Economics for the Common Good (2017; paperback, 2019, Princeton University Press).
• Janek Wasserman: The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (2019, Yale University Press).

Kathleen Belew: Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018; paperback, 2019, Harvard University Press): Locates the roots of the alt-right/white power movement less in opposition to the civil rights movement than in reaction against the loss of the Vietnam War -- though either way you can see how Richard Nixon's "silent majority"/"Southern strategy" conjured up the seething hatred of this movement, which Trump has only stoked further. More recent books on the racist right-wing fringe:

• Kyle Burke: Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (2018, University of North Carolina Press).
• George Hawley: The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know (paperback, 2018, Oxford University Press).
• Daryl Johnson: Hateland: A Long, Hard Look at America's Extremist Heart (2019, Prometheus).
• George Lipsitz: The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics (1998; revised and expanded edition, paperback, 2006; 20th anniversary edition, paperback, 2018, Temple University Press).
• Michael Malice: The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics (2019, All Points Books).
• Elizabeth Gillespie McRae: Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (2018, Oxford University Press).
• Angie Maxwell/Todd Shields: The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (2019, Oxford University Press).
• Jonathan M Metzl: Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland (2019, Basic Books).
• David Neiwert: Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (2017; paperback, 2018, Verso).
• Christian Picciolini: White American Youth: My Descent Into America's Most Violent Hate Movement -- and How I Got Out (paperback, 2017, Hachette Books).
• Eli Saslow: Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist (paperback; 2019, Anchor Books).
• Alexandra Minna Stern: Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination (2019, Beacon Press).
• John Temple: Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America's Patriot Militia Movement (2019, BenBella Books).
• Vegas Tenold: Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America (2018, Bold Type Books).
• Mike Wendling: Alt-Right: From 4Chan to the White House (paperback, 2018, Pluto Press).

Marcia Bjornerud: Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018, Princeton University Press): After my first wife died, I went through a period of several years where most of what I read was on geology, ranging from semi-popular books like John McPhee's I-70 quartet (later collected as Annals of the Former World) through some very technical texts on plate tectonics, plus a lot of paleontology and contemporary earth science. I suppose a big part of the attraction came from the vast time frameworks geologists routinely deal with, but I was also much impressed by the logic behind the science: how geologists work and think. Since 9/11, I've denied myself the indulgence of pursuing such pleasant interests. Otherwise this book would jump to the top of my reading list. Some other geology books that caught my eye:

• Michael J Benton: Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology (2019, Thames & Hudson).
• Marcia Bjornerud: Reading the Rocks: The Autogiography of the Earth (2005; paperback, 2006, Basic Books).
• Lewis Dartnell: Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History (2019, Basic Books).
• William E Glassley: A Wilder Time: Notes From a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice (paperback, 2018, Bellevue Literary Press).
• Mary Caperton Morton: Aerial Geology: A High-Altitude Tour of North America's Spectacular Volcanoes, Canyons, Glaciers, Lakes, Craters, and Peaks (2017, Timber Press).
• Donald R Prothero: The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution (2015, Columbia University Press).
• Donald R Prothero: The Story of the Earth in 25 Rocks: Tales of Important Geological Puzzles and the People Who Solved Them (2017, Columbia University Press).

Kate Brown: Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019, WW Norton): History of the 1986 nuclear plant explosion at Chernobyl, Ukraine, Soviet Union, but less on the explosion than on the disaster it spread, especially the faulty, fitful efforts to understand (or in some case not) the widespread effects of the radiation it left. Author has written a couple of books leading up to this one, and there's been a spate of recent books on Chernobyl and so forth:

• Svetlana Alexievich: Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (2005; paperback, 2019, Dalkey Archive Press): This is the classic book everyone draws on. The author later won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her oral histories of WWII and the postwar Soviet Union.
• Kate Brown: A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Hinterland (2004; paperback, 2005, Harvard University Press).
• Kate Brown: Dispatches From Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015, University of Chicago Press).
• Kate Brown: Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013; paperback, 2015, Oxford University Press).
• Charles A Castro: Station Blackout: Inside the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster and Recovery (2018, Radius).
• Adam Higginbotham: Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster (2019, Simon & Schuster).
• Andrew Leatherbarrow: Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster (paperback, 2016, Andrew Leatherbarrow).
• Serhii Plokhy: Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (2018, Basic Books).
• Silent Bill: Of Dust and Echoes: A Tour of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (paperback, 2019, self-published).

Elizabeth C Economy: The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (2018, Oxford University Press): A history of China since Xi Jinping came to power, bringing a series of reforms distinct enough from Deng Xioping's "second revolution" reforms to merit the title. I'm not really up enough on the subject to judge, but it seems that China has found a very different path to development -- one that Americans are especially ill-prepared to understand. Other recent books on contemporary China:

• Elizabeth C Economy/Michael Levi: By All Means Necessary: How China's Resource Quest Is Changing the World (2014; paperback, 2015, Oxford University Press).
• Graham Allison: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
• Yuen Yuen Ang: How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016, Cornell University Press).
• Yukon Huang: Cracking the China Conundrum: Why Conventional Economic Wisdom Is Wrong (2017, Oxford University Press).
• Sulimaan Wasif Khan: Haunted by Chaos: China's Grand Strategy From Mao Zedong to Xi Jiping (2018, Harvard University Press).
• Bruno Maçães: Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order (2019, Hurst).
• George Magnus: Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy (2018, Yale University Press).
• Dinny McMahon: China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle (2018, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
• Tom Miller: China's Asian Dream: Empire Building Along the New Silk Road (paperback, 2017, Zed Books).
• Carl Minzner: End of an Era: How China's Authoritarian Revival Is Undermining Its Rise (2018, Oxford University Press).
• Klaus Mühlhahn: Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping (2019, Belknap Press).
• Evan Osnos: Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (2014; paperback, 2015, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• William H Overholt: China's Crisis of Success (paperback, 2018, Cambridge University Press).
• Robert S Ross/Jo Inge Bekkevold, eds: China in the Era of Xi Jinping: Domestic and Foreign Policy Challenges (paperback, 2016, Georgetown University Press).

Richard J Evans: Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019, Oxford University Press): A big (800 pp) biography of a great historian, born in Egypt of 2nd generation British parents, orphaned at 14 in 1931, living in Berlin at the time, fleeing to England when the Nazis came to power, joined the Communist Party, went on to write major histories of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. The author is a notable historian in his own right, his writings including three major books on Nazi Germany (The Third Reich Trilogy).

Adam Gopnik: A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019, Basic Books): A staff writer for The New Yorker, seems like he's mostly written about innocuous topics, like art, travel, food, and (mostly) himself, so this foray into political philosophy ("a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition") comes as a bit of a surprise. Or maybe just to me, as his bibliographic note opens with a fairly long list of essays he has published on political figures. The central section of the book consists of three parts: a "manifesto," followed by chapters on "Why the Right Hates Liberalism" and "Why the Left Hates Liberalism" (the longest). If he's honest, the reasons are very different: the right fears any challenge to hierarchical order, while the left sees liberals as too willing to compromise their principles, because in a world of individualism self-interest is ultimately decisive. I recall being very critical of liberalism back in the late 1960s, when it seemed to be hegemonic. I've softened my stance since then: as the right has emerged as the greater threat, liberals offer a respectable stance and critique. Related:

• Richard Ebeling: For a New Liberalism (paperback, 2019, American Institute for Economic Research).
• Robert Kuttner: The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy (2019, WW Norton).
• Deirdre Nansen McCloskey: Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (2019, Yale University Press.
• James Traub: What Was Liberalism? The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea (2019, Basic Books).

Stanley B Greenberg: RIP GOP: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans (2019, Thomas Dunne Books): Pollster, worked for Clinton and Obama, seems like he's been peddling rosy futures to mainstream liberals for more than two decades now: Middle Class Dreams: Building the New Majority (1995, Crown); The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics (ed. with Theda Skocpol, 1997, Yale University Press); The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It (2004, Thomas Dunne Books); It's the Middle Class Stupid! (with James Carville, listed first, and probably to blame for the title, not least the missing comma; 2012, Blue Rider Press); America Ascendant: A Revolutionary Nation's Path to Addressing Its Deepest Problems and Leading the 21st Century (2015, Thomas Dunne Books). This one seems more plausible, as it shifts the focus to Republicans with their failing programs and declining demographics.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Case for Trump (2019, Basic Books): The author is supposedly expert on ancient Greek military history, but he's been such a shameless right-wing hack for so long his credentials don't carry much weight any more -- other than perhaps to make him the natural leader of the parade of hacks and hysterics with recent books defending their Fearless Leader, campaigning for him, and (most often) slandering his "enemies":

• Conrad Black: Donald J Trump: A President Like No Other (2018, Regnery).
• Don Bongino: Exonerated: The Failed Takedown of President Donald Trump by the Swamp (2019, Post Hill Press).
• L Brent Bozell III/Tim Graham: Unmasked: Big Media's War Against Trump (2019, Humanix Books).
• Tucker Carlson: Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018, Free Press).
• Jason Chaffetz: Power Grab: The Liberal Scheme to Undermine Trump, the GOP, and Our Republic (2019, Broadside Books).
• Jerome R Corsi: Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump (2018, Humanix Books).
• Alan Dershowitz: The Case Against Impeaching Trump (2018, Hot Books).
• John L Fraser: The Truth Behind Trump Derangement Syndrome: "There Is More Than Meets the Eye" (paperback, 2018, JF).
• Newt Gingrich: Understanding Trump (2017, Center Street).
• Newt Gingrich: Trump's America: The Truth About Our Nation's Great Comeback (2018, Center Street).
• Newt Gingrich: Trump vs China: Facing America's Greatest Threat (2019, Center Street).
• Sebastian Gorka: Why We Fight: Defeating America's Enemies -- With No Apologies (2018, Regnery).
• Sebastian Gorka: The War for America's Soul: Donald Trump, the Left's Assault on America, and How We Take Back Our Country (2019, Regnery).
• Charles Hurt: Still Winning: Why America Went All In on Donald Trump -- And Why We Must Do It Again (2019, Center Street).
• Gregg Jarrett: The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump (2018; paperback, 2019, Broadside Books).
• Gregg Jarrett: Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History (2019, Broadside Books).
• Corey R Lewandowski/David N Bossie: Trump's Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency (2018, Center Street).
• Lily Manchubel: Too Far Left: An Eroding United States Democratic Republic: Anecdotal Observations of President Obama's Administration Left Leaning Cultural Shift, Poor Foreign and Domestic Government Policies; Versus That of Trump's More Right of Center Programs (paperback, 2019, Lulu Publishing Services): Deserves some sort of award for cutest fascist title.
• Jeffrey Lord: Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and the New American Populism vs. the Old Order (2019, Bombardier Books).
• Matt Margolis: Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama's Legacy (paperback, 2019, Bombardier Books).
• Andrew C McCarthy: Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency (2019, Encounter Books).
• Bill O'Reilly: The United States of Trump: How the President Really Sees America (2019, Henry Holt).
• Jeanine Pirro: Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (2018, Center Street).
• Jeanine Pirro: Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge: The Left's Plot to Remake America (2019, Center Street).
• Allen Salkin/Aaron Short: The Method to the Madness: Donald Trump's Ascent as Told by Those Who Were Hired, Fired, Inspired -- and Inaugurated (2019, All Points).
• Michael Savage: Trump's War: His Battle for America (2017, Center Street).
• Roger Stone: The Myth of Russian Collusion: The Inside Story of How Donald Trump Really Won (paperback, 2019, Skyhorse).
• Kimberley Strassel: Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America (2019, Twelve).
• Donald Trump Jr: Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us (2019, Center Street).

Reed Hundt: A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining Decisions (2019, Rosetta Books): Inside adviser to Clinton (via Gore) in the 1990s, and to Obama from campaign to transition, recounts the personnel and policy decisions made by Obama during his transition and first few months which sharply limited the set of options that could be entertained to halt the collapse of the financial sector and to rebuild an economy that had been decimated by banking risks. One thing that was especially shocking was how little consideration was given to anyone other than Tim Geithner and Larry Summers for roles which ultimately prevented Obama from doing anything but protect the bankers who caused the recession. Hundt's own pet project during this period was setting up a program for infrastructure development, but it was killed by Summers on the assumption that the recession would be so short-lived that only short-term spending was needed. Other memoirs and assessments of the Obama years (skipping the most obvious right-wing rants):

• Brian Abrams: Obama: An Oral History (2018, Little A).
• Jonathan Chait: Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail (2017, Custom House).
• Pat Cunnane: West Winging It: An Un-presidential Memoir (paperback, 2018, Gallery Books).
• Michael D'Antonio: A Consequential President: The Legacy of Barack Obama (2017, Thomas Dunne Books).
• Andra Gillespie: Race and the Obama Administration: Substance, Symbols, and Hope (2019, Manchester University Press).
• Mark Greenberg: Obama: The Historic Presidency of Barack Obama: 2,920 Days (2017, Sterling): Photo blog.
• Valerie Jarrett: Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward (2019, Viking).
• David Litt: Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years (2017; paperback, 2018, Ecco).
• Alyssa Mastromonaco: Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House (2017; paperback, 2018, Twelve).
• Gautam Raghavan, ed: West Wingers: Stories From the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House (paperback, 2018, Penguin Books).
• Ben Rhodes: The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (2018; paperback, 2019, Random House).
• Pete Souza: Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents (2018, Little Brown).
• Beck Dorey Stein: From the Corner of the oval: A Memoir (2018, Spiegel & Grau).
• Julian Zelizer, ed: The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment (paperback, 2018, Princeton University Press). Previously edited The Presidency of George W Bush: A First Historical Assessment (paperback, 2010, Princeton University Press).

Nancy Isenberg/Andrew Burstein: The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality (2019, Viking): A dual biography of father and son, the second and sixth presidents of the US, each limited to a single, controversial term as they were the exceptions to the Virginia planters who dominated the early democracy, a forum they worked in if never totally approved of. Not sure what the "cult of personality" was -- Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson are mentioned, and they no doubt qualify. Isenberg previuosly wrote White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Burstein has written books on Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, and Washington Irving. His most intriguing title was Democracy's Muse: How Thomas Jefferson Became an FDR Liberal, a Reagan Republican, and a Tea Party Fanatic, All the While Being Dead (2015; paperback, 2017, University of Virginia Press).

Stuart Jeffries: Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (2016, Verso): A group biography of the Frankfurt School, an important intersection of German Marxist thinkers who came together around 1923, and remained outside of (and often opposed to) the Soviet circle, ultimately having great influence in the development of the New Left in 1960s Europe and America. The standard book on the subject is Martin Jay: The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research 1923-1950 (1973), which appeared when I was deeply immersed in these thinkers. Related:

• Perry Anderson: The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci (2017, Verso).
• Deborah Cook: Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West (paperback, 2018, Verso).
• Howard Eiland/Michael W Jennings: Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014; paperback, 2016, Belknap Press).
• Peter E Gordon: Adorno and Existence (2016, Harvard University Press).
• Martin Jay: Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (paperback, 2017, University of Wisconsin Press).
• Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno: A Biography (2004; paperback, 2009, Polity).
• Stefan Müller-Doohm: Habermas: A Biography (2016, Polity).
• Eric Oberle: Theodor Adoro and the Century of Negative Identity (paperback, 2018, Stanford University Press).

Eric Kaufmann: Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities (2019, Harry N Abrams): Tempted to file this in the long list of books about how threatened white identity is shaping American and European politics, but this is a much bigger (624 pp), broader, deeper, and presumably more nuanced undertaking. Still, the very subject lies somewhere between unsavory and offensive. The basic truth is that when Europe started its project to conquer and colonize the world, it became inevitable that the conquered peoples would seep back into Europe and eventually change it: domination never lasts.

Naomi Klein: On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019, Simon & Schuster): Bestselling Canadian whose critique of capitalism started with globalization -- No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000) -- and evolved as the neoliberal market engulfed politics -- The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) -- and the environment -- This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014). Her vision of the Green New Deal is way to fight back, but beneath it all is an ever-sharpening critique of capitalism.

• Kate Aronoff/Alyssa Battistoni/Daniel Aldana Cohen/Thea Riofrancos: A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (paperback, 2019, Verso Books): Foreword by Naomi Klein.
• Larry Jordan: The Green New Deal: Why We Need It and Can't Live Without It -- and No, It's Not Socialism! (paperback, 2019, Page Turner Books).
• Ann Pettifor: The Case for the Green New Deal (2019, Verso Books). Previously wrote: The Production of Money: How to Break the Bankers (2017; paperback, 2018, Verso Books).
• Jeremy Rifkin: The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth (2019, St Martin's Press).

Nicholas Lemann: Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (2019, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Profiles of "three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras": Adolf Berle (of FDR's "brain trust"), Michael Jensen (of Harvard Business School), and Reid Hoffman (a Silicon Valley venture capitalist). Presumably the first two correspond to the Roosevelt and Reagan eras. Harder to figure where that third avatar is dragging us, but as the title suggests, the author is looking not at where we want to go, but where how the era's great profiteers intend to con us.

Christopher Leonard: Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America (2019, Simon & Schuster): Focuses more on the business behind the political forces that Jane Mayer wrote about in Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016).

Jill Lepore: This America: The Case for the Nation (2019, Liveright): A short (160 pp) postscript, I would guess, to last year's massive These Truths: A History of the United States, described as an "urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century." Sees American history as a struggle between liberal and illiberal nationalism, and tries to buck up the former at a time when many liberal-minded folks see nationalism as an atavistic regression. Lepore's earlier The Story of America: Essays on Origins (paperback, 2013, Princeton University Press) started with the same problems, exploring them in scattered essays, as historians are prone to do.

Rachel Maddow: Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (2019, Crown): The MSNBC pundit's obsession with Russia has been aired so thoroughly since the 2016 debacle that this book is likely to rise to the level of self-parody, but somewhere along the line Maddow discovered that Russia is a petro-state, and broadened her aim to include the international oil industry, finding particularly juicy stories in Oklahoma earthquakes.

Daniel Markovits: The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (2019, Penguin Press): I thought the best previous book on "meritocracy" was Chris Hayes' Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, which made it clear that "meritocracy" was little more than a deceptive argument for maintaining the class dominance of established elites. Markovits takes the further step of arguing that "meritocracy now ensnares event hose who manage to claw their way to the top, requiring rich adults to work with crushing intensity, exploiting their expensive educations in order to extract a return." Related:

• James Bloodworth: The Myth of Meritocracy (2019, Biteback).
• Lani Guinier: The Tyranny of Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (2015; paperback, 2016, Beacon Press).
• Nicholas Lemann: The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999; paperback, 2000, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• Jo Littler: Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (paperback, 2017, Routledge
• Stephen J McNamee: The Meritocracy Myth (4th edition, paperback, 2018, RL).
• Michael Schwalbe: Rigging the Game: How Inequality Is Reproduced in Everyday Life (paperback, 2014, Oxford University Press).

Branko Milanovic: Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World (2019, Belknap Press): Economist, wrote Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Aims at a big picture, noting capitalism's considerable material benefits as well as its moral failings, trying to weigh such factors. Someone more optimistic might frame this as "post-capitalism," but he sees nothing beyond -- just a long struggle to keep from devouring ourselves.

Alexander Nazaryan: The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington (2019, Hachette Books): Attempts to look past Trump's personality and showmanship, but doesn't get deep enough to see the real effects of his administration. Rather, he offers us a rogues gallery of Trump's cabinet-level deputies, who more often than not turn out to reflect the vanity and avarice of their leader. Curiously, doesn't cover the whole cabinet, with scarcely any mentions at all of State, Defense, Justice, or Homeland Security. It might be interesting to contrast this with John Nichols' Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Giude to the Most Dangerous People in America, written and rushed into print almost as soon as the initial cabinet picks were announced.

Martha C Nussbaum: The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (2018, Simon & Schuster): Teaches philosophy in a law school, author of twenty-somebooks, won the 2016 Kyoto Prize ("the most presigious award available in fields not eligible for a Nobel" -- she accepted this the day after the Trump election, so it's a starting point), knows her Greeks and checks back with them regularly, also knows some psych and is not above folding in a little empirical research from the social sciences. Key concerns here are fear, disgust, and envy -- feelings which contribute to and exacerbate our struggles with everyday life, not least in politics.

Robert L O'Connell: Revolutionary: George Washington at War (2019, Random House): Looking for something to round out my evaluation of the USA's first president -- my gut tells me he presents a stark and illustrative counterpoint to the latest (or maybe last?) president -- I picked this up and found it fascinating. Far from hagiography, it presents us with a flesh-and-blood figure, molded by the events of war but always with a fine sense of political mission.

Daniel Okrent: The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America (2019, Scribner): Probably spent more time as an editor than anything else, first attracting notice for his baseball fandom, but lately has been writing substantial, sweeping books on history: Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center (2003), Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010), and now this book on the racist and xenophobic movement to pass the 1923 law that radically restricted immigration to the United States. As timely now as those working to resurrect that movement.

George Packer: Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (2019, Knopf): Major (608 pp) biography of the late diplomat, whose career started with the American War in Vietnam, and ended with his failure to make any headway as Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Along the way, he gained a modicum of fame for brokering the Dayton Accords which ended the war between Serbia and Bosnia. Reviewers have focused on how both author and subject supported the Bush War in Iraq despite knowing better -- for Holbrooke it was a calculated cost of his ambitions to become Secretary of State (had Hillary Clinton won in 2008; with Obama winning, she settled for that position, and wrangled Holbrooke the Afghanistan/Pakistan portfolio). I suppose it's naïveté that lets Packer think Holbrooke's a worthy subject for such a massive effort. In the end, though, Holbrooke is a prime example of the moral and political bankruptcy of "the American era." And Packer's too competent a journalist not to expose that, even if he doesn't want to admit it.

Raj Patel/Jason W Moore: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017; paperback, 2018, University of California Press): A sweeping critique of capitalism, the force that cheapens things, in this case: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. This may slight what strikes me as the main effect of cheapening, which is that it makes things more plentiful. Moore previously wrote Capitalism in the Web of Life (paperback, 2015, Verso), which treats capitalism as a "world-ecology," Patel previously wrote Stuffed and Sarved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (2008), and The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (2010).

James Poniewozik: Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America (2019, Liveright). TV critic for the New York Times, traces Trump's long history of promotion and exposure on the tube, alongside the evolution of television from three major networks to "today's zillion-channel, internet-atomized universe, which sliced and diced them into fractious, alienated subcultures." I've long suspected that too much TV isn't a good thing -- the classic treatment is Neal Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I've seen this likened to -- but fragmentation would seem to limit the appeal of someone like Trump. Indeed, it took no effort to ignore him until he ran for president, and the news masters found their love/hate obsession with him. So I suspect there are more levels to this than a mere TV critic can develop, although that may be a good place to start.

Corey Robin: The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (2019, Metropolitan Books): Author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (or, as recently reprinted, to Donald Trump), takes a shot at reconciling contradictions in the far right Supreme Court Justice, from his early embrace of black nationalism to the extreme conservatism he is known for -- another species of "reactionary mind," determined more by what he reacts so virulently to more than anything he believes in.

Brian Rosenwald: Talk Radio's America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States (2019, Harvard University Press): This goes back to 1988, when "desperate for content to save AM radio, top media executives stumbled on a new format that would turn the political world upside down." They may have only been seeking profits, but rage and reaction was quickly recognized as effective conservative propaganda, an easy way to move a mass of voters to support the right-wing agenda. After the Republican debacle in 2008, the dynamic changed, as mass rage wound up leading the politicians, and in Donald Trump ("the kind of pugnacious candidate they had been demanding for decades") they put their own chump in charge.

Bernie Sanders: Where We Go From Here: Two Years in the Resistance (2018, Thomas Dunne Books): These days most major election campaigns kick off with a book to introduce the candidate and set the tone for the campaign. But in 2016, Sanders waited until his campaign was over before releasing his, allowing him to open with a memoir, then tack a manifesto on at the end. He called it Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, and it was pretty credible for the genre. This one is reportedly sketchier, but even if he's just recounting his reaction to events, he's likely to give you insights you won't pick up from the usual sources. Elsewhere in the 2020 campaign wave (some are a bit old, more are on the way; some are by non-candidates, but fit the mold; I've written about Elizabeth Warren's book previously):

• Stacey Abrams: Minority Leader: How to Lead From the Outside and Make Real Change (2018, Henry Holt).
• Michael Bennet: The Land of Flickering Lights: Restoring America in an Age of Broken Politics (2019, Atlantic Monthly Press).
• Joe Biden: Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose (2017, Flatiron).
• Michael Bloomberg: Bloomberg by Bloomberg (2nd edition, 2019, Wiley).
• Cory Booker: United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good (2016; paperback, 2017, Ballantine Books).
• Pete Buttigleg: Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future (2019, Liveright).
• Julian Castro: An Unlikely Journey: Waking Up From My American Dream (2018, Little Brown).
• John K Delaney: The Right Answer: How We Can Unify Our Divided Nation (2019, Henry Holt).
• Tulsi Gabbard: Is Today the Day? Not Another Political Memoir (2019, Twelve).
• Kirsten Gillibrand: Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World (2014; paperback, 2015, Ballantine Books).
• Kamala Harris: The Truths We Hold: An American Journey (2019, Penguin Press).
• John Hickenlooper: The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics (2016, Penguin Press).
• Jay Inslee/Bracken Hendricks: Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy (2007, Island Press): Pre-campaign book, establishes his bona fides to run on climate change issue.
• Amy Klobuchar: The Senator Next Door: A Memoir From the Heartland (2015, Henry Holt; paperback, 2016, University of Minnesota Press).
• Jeff Merkley: America Is Better Than This: Trump's War Against Immigrant Families (2019, Twelve).
• Beto O'Rourke/Susie Byrd: Dealing Death and Drugs: The Big Business of Dope in the US and Mexico (paperback, 2011, Cinco Puntos Press): Old book, so not a campaign primer.
• Tim Ryan: Healing America: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Recapture the American Spirit (paperback, 2018, Hay House). Previously wrote A Mindful Nation (2012), and The Real Food Revolution (2014).
• Howard Schultz: From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America (2019, Random House).
• Joe Sestak: Walking in Your Shoes to Restore the American Dream (paperback, 2015, Infinity).
• Elizabeth Warren: This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class (2017, Metropolitan Books).
• Marianne Williamson: A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution (2019, HarperOne). Also note: Healing the Soul of America (20th anniversary edition, paperback, 2018, Simon & Schuster).
• Andrew Yang: The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future (2018, Hachette Books).

Isabel Sawhill: The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for a Divided Nation (2018, Yale University Press); Economist at the "centrist" Brookings Institute, stresses the importance of "mainstream values, such as family, education, and work." Detractors decry her as left wing nut job . . . the logic of know it all 5th grader and the mind set of a soviet thug." Chapters include "Why Economic Growth Is Not Enough," "The Limits of Redistribution," "A GI Bill for America's Workers," "A Bigger Role for the Private Sector" and "Updating Social Insurance." That all seems pretty modest to me, but "conservatives" can't so much as acknowledge the problem without flying off half-cocked. Makes one wonder why bother to appeal to them anyway.

Tom Segev: A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion (2019, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Big (816pp) biography of Israel's first Prime Minister, by one of Israel's most important historians. Few national leaders in our time have more completely defined their nations -- Attaturk comes to mind as the closest comparable figure, although Mao and Castro ruled longer and more forcefully. Even today, it's possible to map most currents in Israeli political life to one facet or another of Ben Gurion complex view of his mission. Other recent books relating to Israel:

• Seth Anziska: Preventing Palestine: A Political History From Camp David to Oslo (2018, Princeton University Press).
• Khaled Elgindy: Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, From Balfour to Trump (2019, Brookings Institution Press).
• Noura Erakat: Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (2019, Stanford University Press).
• Michael R Fischbach: Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (2018, Stanford University Press).
• Michael R Fischbach: The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (2019, paperback, Stanford University Press).
• Matti Friedman: Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel (2019, Algonquin Books).
• Micah Goodman: Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War (2018, Yale University Press).
• Daniel Gordis: We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel (2019, Ecco Books).
• Sara Yael Hirschhorn: City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (2017, Harvard University Press).
• Amy Kaplan: Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (2018, Harvard University Press).
• Susie Linfield: The Lions' Den: Zionism and the Left From Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (2019, Yale University Press).
• Shaul Mitelpunkt: Israel in the American Mind: The Cultural Politics of US-Israeli Relations, 1958-1988 (2018, Cambridge University Press).
• Ilan Pappe: The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories (paperback, 2019, Oneworld).
• Dennis Ross/David Makovsky: Be Strong and of Good Courage: How Israel's Most Important Leaders Shaped Its Destiny (2019, Public Affairs): Ben-Gurion, Begin, Rabin, Sharon ("a leader who tells the settlers to give up the dream").

JC Sharman: Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order (2019, Princeton University Press): They say "history is written by the victors," and for 500 years we've been reading about how Europe's maritime conquest of the world reflected superior technology (and, less fashionably these days, genes and religion). This thin (216 pp) book tries to flip that argument on its head, asserting that the conquest "is better explained by deference to strong Asian and African polities, disease in the Americas, and maritime supremacy earned by default because local land-oriented polities were largely indifferent to war and trade at sea." Some of these ideas resemble the ones Jared Diamond put forth in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), but both underestimate the amount of greed, bad faith, and knavery involved. The pattern I see most clearly is that European contact always started a corrosion of traditional social, economic, and political ties well before Europeans were able to seize control.

Jake Sherman/Anna Palmer: The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump's America (2019, Crown): Congress beat reporters for Politico report on the two year stretch when Republicans controlled both the White House and both houses of Congress, rehashing the jockeying behind the "repeal and replace" of Obamacare, the massive corporate tax giveaway, the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, and the partial government shutdown.

Matt Taibbi: Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another (2019, OR Books): Journalist, covers elections and other scandals for Rolling Stone, a path paved by Hunter Thompson, so he's all but expected to get a little gonzo. Outside the mainstream hive, he's written some of the sharpest analysis of the media's coverage of elections, starting with Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches From the Dumb Season (2005), but I thought his quickie book on 2016, Insane Clown Posse: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus failed to rise to the absurdity of events he was forced to cover. In some ways, this book looks like a do-over, but rather than stare straight into the sun, he's focusing on the mediaa, and how they got blinded not just by events but by their devil's bargain with the mega-corporations that employ them. Two appendices: "Why Rachel Maddow is on the Cover of This Book," and "An Interview with Noam Chomsky." I guess Sean Hannity's appearance on the cover (on the red side vs. Maddow on the blue) requires no further explanation. Taibbi has long had a habit of burnishing his independence by attacking both parties, or both right and left, even when there's no equivalence.

Astra Taylor: Democracy May Not Exist: But We'll Miss It When It's Gone (2019, Metropolitan Books): Ruminations on a much declaimed and frequently confused political principle, something we're taught to believe in, to pride ourselves in, yet not take too seriously, as it's been much abused by self-interested elites. That those abuses seem to increased, both in frequency and in crassness, in recent years is probably due to increasing inequality. Author also has a documentary film, What Is Democracy?, and another film on Marxian philosophe Slavoj Zizek.

Adam Tooze: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018, Viking): Economic historian, has a couple of major works: Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2007), and The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (2014). This sums up the decade following the 2008 crash. There have been a lot of books about the immediate causes of the crash.

David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019, Tim Duggan Books): A general primer on global warming, albeit one that goes beyond presenting what we know to look at, and take seriously, the worst case scenarios scientists imagine -- hence the title -- without blunting the impact by parading the usual list of "what we can do about it" palliatives. Reviews tend toward hyperbole: "the most terrifying book I have ever read," and "the most important book I have ever read." May be a good lead in for yet another list of recent climate books (I started one earlier under Jeff Goodell but they do keep coming):

• Mike Berners-Lee: There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years (paperback, 2019, Cambridge University Press).
• Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (paperback, 2017, University of Chicago Press).
• Andreas Malm: Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (paperback, 2016, Verso Books).
• Greta Thunberg: No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (paperback, 2019, Penguin Books).

Brenda Wineapple: The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019, Random House): This is probably number one on the short list of events that could have changed American history had it gone slightly differently. As it was, Andrew Johnson did much to weaken and undo plans to empower freed slaves and reconstruct the south more equitably. Those years he held power made it easier for white southerners to reclaim power and create a racist order that prevailed into the 1960s, with remnants still evident today. Wineapple previously wrote the broader period history, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877 (2013; paperback, 2014, Harper Perennial). More on impeachment history (expect more on impeachment news soon):

• Frank O Bowman III: High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump (2019, Cambridge University Press).

Other recent books noted with little or no comment:

HW Brands: Heirs of the Founders: Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants (2018, Doubleday; paperback, 2019, Anchor Books).

Bill Bryson: The Body: A Guide for Occupants (2019, Doubleday).

Gail Collins: No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History (2019, Little Brown).

Jay Cost: The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy (2018, Basic Books).

Kathleen Day: Broken Bargain: Bankers, Bailouts, and the Struggle to Tame Wall Street (2019, Yale University Press).

Larry Diamond: Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (2019, Penguin Press).

Robin DiAngelo: White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (paperback, 2018, Beacon Press).

Ronan Farrow: Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (2019, Little Brown).

Silvia Federici: Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (paperback, 2018, PM Press).

Aaron Glantz: Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream (2019, Custom House).

Garrett M Graff: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (2019, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).

Gerald Horne: The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean (paperback, 2018, Monthly Review Press).

Tom LoBianco: Piety & Power: Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House (2019, Dey Street Books).

George Monbiot: Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (paperback, 2018, Verso Books).

Philip Mudd: Black Site: The CIA in the Post-9/11 World (2019, Liveright).

Margaret O'Mara: The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019, Penguin Press).

Samantha Power: The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (2019, Dey Street Books).

Susan Rice: Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For (2019, Simon & Schuster).

Christopher Ryan: Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (2019, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).

Tatiana Schlossberg: Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have (2019, Grand Central Publishing).

Rebecca Solnit: Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters (paperback, 2019, Haymarket Books).

The Washington Post: The Mueller Report (paperback, 2019, Scribner).

Gary Younge: Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (2016; paperback, 2018, Bold Type Books).

Music Week

Expanded blog post, October archive.

Music: current count 32276 [32248] rated (+28), 224 [224] unrated (+0).

Birthday last week, so I lost a day to cooking, most of another to shopping and prep. I usually like to do something new and extraordinary, but had a terrible time settling on a theme and menu this year. Finally, the final decision was made by Laura, in favor of an idea Max Stewart floated: fire up the grill and made burgers. That seemed pretty ordinary to me, but in fact I can't recall ever grilling hamburgers (I've grilled or smoked pretty much everything else). Turned out to be a pretty good idea. I picked up a new cookbook (The Ultimate Burger), and came up with three variations: teriyaki pork burgers with grilled pineapple, salmon burgers with tomato chutney, and good old bacon cheeseburgers. Even took a shot at making some potato buns (although I bought more for backup, mostly brioche and pretzel buns).

For side dishes, I did baked beans, two potato salads, coleslaw, corn and tomato salad, and my standard cucumber-yogurt thing. And for dessert, I stuck with my original choice: Mom's coconut cake, served with vanilla ice cream. Had nine people, and everyone seemed pleased.

October archive (see link above) is wrapped up and indexed. Not much to say about this week's haul, except perhaps that The Daisy Age was the surprise A+ in Robert Christgau's first new Consumer Guide under his And It Don't Stop subscription newsletter, and the only new CD I've bought in 3-4 months (not that I couldn't have assembled the play list from Napster). Back when I was writing Recycled Goods, I tried to get on Ace Records' promo list, but never got so much as a reply. So I was pretty jealous when Bob told me a few years back that they had started sending him records. This looks like the tenth of their records he's reviewed since 2013. (If anyone cares, I'd review every damn one.)

Some of the old music this week were rap records from that vintage (1989-95). Also filled in some EST back catalogue, after reviewing their Live in Gothenburg as an A- last week (which makes it, in my humble estimation, their best record ever).

Best-reviewed albums from the week of 10-25 (according to my metacritic file (4+ counting my grades in brackets, but paren totals don't count my grades): Anna Meredith: FIBS (9); Rex Orange County: Pony (5); Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Colorado (5); Blaenavon: Everything That Makes You Happy (4); Cigarettes After Sex: Cry (4) [***]; Hana Vu: Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway (4). Also note: Kanye West: Jesus Is King (2).

Best-reviewed albums from 10-18: Floating Points: Crush (13); Foals: Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost (Part 2) (9); Caroline Polachek: Pang (9); Battles: Juice B Crypts (7); Clipping: There Existed an Addiction to Blood (7); Vagabon (7); Patrick Watson: Wave (5); Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis (3) [***].

New records I want to track down: The Bad Plus: Activate Infinity; Lakou Mizik: HaitiaNola; Nellie McKay: Bagatelles; Van Morrison: Three Chords & the Truth.

Also out since last week, previously graded: Randy Brecker/Ada Rovatti: Brecker Plays Rovatti: Sacred Bond [**]; Jeff Denson/Romain Pilon/Brian Blade: Between Two Worlds [*]; Laszlo Gardony: La Marseillaise (Sunnyside) [**]; Carmen Sandim: Play Doh (Ropeadope) [*]; Leo Sherman: Tonewheel (Outside In Music) [*]; Esbjorn Svensson Trio: EST Live in Gothenburg (2001, ACT -2CD) [A-].

New records reviewed this week:

• Big Thief: Two Hands (2019, 4AD): [r]: B+(**)
• The Nat Birchall Quartet: The Storyteller: A Musical Tribute to Yusef Lateef (2019, Jazzman): [r]: B+(**)
• Daniel Carter/Julian Priester/Adam Lane/Reggie Sylvester/David Haney: Live Constructions Volume 2 (2018 [2019], Slam): [r]: B+(*)
• Daniel Carter/Stelios Milhas/Irma Nejando/Federico Ughi: Radical Invisibility (2018 [2019], 577): [bc]: B+(**)
• Cigarettes After Sex: Cry (2019, Partisan): [r]: B+(***)
• Harry Connick Jr.: True Love: A Celebration of Cole Porter (2019, Verve): [r]: B+(*)
• Satoko Fujii/Joe Fonda: Four (2018 [2019], Long Song): [cd]: B+(***) [11-08]
• Binker Golding: Abstractions of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers (2018 [2019], Gearbox): [cd]: A-
• Kim Gordon: No Home Record (2019, Matador): [r]: B+(***)
• Homeboy Sandman: Dusty (2019, Mello Music Group): [r]: B+(***)
• Miles Okazaki: The Sky Below (2019, Pi): [cd]: B+(***)
• Anne Phillips: Live at the Jazz Bakery (2019, Conawago): [cd]: B-
• Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis (2019, Constellation): [r]: B+(***)
• Rocket 808: Rocket 808 (2019, 12XU): [r]: B
• Michael Jefry Stevens & the Mountain Chamber Jazz Ensemble: The Poet Is in the House (2019, ARC): [bc]: B
• Devin Brahja Waldman: Brahja (2019, RR Gems): [cdr]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• The Daisy Age (1989-94 [2019], Ace): [cd]: A
• Saadet Türköz/Elliott Sharp: Kumuska (2007 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Black Sheep: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (1991, Mercury): [r]: B+(**)
• Brand Nubian: Foundation (1998, Arista): [r]: B+(***)
• Fu-Schnickens: Greatest Hits (1992-95 [1995], Jive): [r]: B+(***)
• Esbjörn Svensson Trio: Plays Monk (1996, Superstudio Gul): [r]: B+(**)
• Esbjörn Svensson Trio: Winter in Venice (1997, Superstudio Gul; [1999], ACT): [r]: B+(*)
• Esbjörn Svensson Trio [EST]: From Gagarin's Point of View (1999, ACT): [r]: B+(**)
• Esbjörn Svensson Trio [EST]: Good Morning Susie Soho (2000, ACT): [r]: B+(***)
• E.S.T.: Leucocyte (2007 [2008], ACT): [r]: B+(**)
• E.S.T. [Esbjörn Svensson Trio]: 301 (2007 [2012], ACT): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Dave Douglas: Engage (Greenleaf Music) [11-08]
• Nick Dunston: Atlantic Extraction (Out of Your Head) [11-01]
• Johnny Griffin & Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis: Ow! Live at the Penthouse (1962, Reel to Reel) [12-06]
• Remy Le Boeuf: Assembly of Shadows (SoundSpore) [11-01]

Purchases:

• The Daisy Age (1989-94, Ace)

Weekend Roundup

Been distracted, so chalk this up as another week going through the motions, keeping open the option of looking back at this presidential term week-by-week as it unfolded. More time might have given me chance to group links on the same basic stories, as well as to build a bit more structure around everything. Started collecting on Saturday, after which the Baghdadi assassination story broke, John Conyers died, and Trump was greeted with boos and chants of "lock him up" at the World Series.

Some scattered links this week:

• Jared Bernstein/Dean Baker: Blame the economic policies, not the robots.

• Ryan Bort: Trump has officially weaponized the Justice Department to go after his rivals.

• Hannah Brown: A top Trump student loan official just resigned, calling for debt forgiveness. Related: Sarah Jones: Trump-appointed student loan official resigns: "Stop the insanity."

• Cristina Cabrera:

  • Trump claims ISIS leader's death is a bigger deal than the killing of Bin Laden.

  • Trump told Mattis to 'screw Amazon' in its bid for $10 billion Pentagon contract: The "cloud computing" contract was awarded to Microsoft this week.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: The GM strike has officially ended. Here's what workers won and lost.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Trump is almost certainly pushing China to smear Biden right now.

  • 'Abuse of power is not a crime': Trump's former Attorney General defines his credo.

  • Why Congress might impeach Trump and actually remove him from office: Chait continues to cling to the notion that Republicans still harbor a shred of decency, even ones who are well practiced at hiding it. ("Even the sycophantic Lindsey Graham left the door open more than a crack when asked by Jonathan Swan if he could imagine voting to convict.")

• Zak Cheney-Rice: Republicans want victimhood without being victimized.

• Jane Coaston: The right saw the outrage at Trump's "lynching" tweet as another example of liberal hypocrisy.

• Patrick Cockburn: The final outcome of the multiple Syrian wars is now in sight. By the way, a letter here notes that:

  Jeff Halper, in his 2015 book, suggested that people across the world exercising their democratic right to challenge their governments' misrule were becoming "Palestinianised" and the rulers were becoming "Israelised."

  For a case in point, the letter included a link to: Nasim Ahmed: 'Palestinanised' Chileans revolt against their "Israelised' government.

• Jonathan Cook: Tulsi Gabbard is right, and Nancy Pelosi wrong. It was US Democrats who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis.

• Jessica Corbett: Typhoon Hagibis kills dozens and causes "immense damage" in Japan.

• Max Fisher/Amanda Taub: The global protest wave, explained: "It's not your imagination, and the last few months are not an outlier: Mass protests are on the rise globally." Subheds:

  1. Democracy is stalling out
  2. Social media makes protests likelier to start, likelier to balloon in size and likelier to fail
  3. Social polarization is way up
  4. Authoritarian learning

  For more, Fisher and Declan Walsh also wrote: From Chile to Lebanon, protests flare over wallet issues. Fisher also wrote: The US turned Syria's north into a tinderbox. Then Trump lit a match. More articles on various ongoing protests:

  • Stephen K Hirst: Ecuador's unlikely revolution: "Indigenous communities stood up to the president and the IMF -- and won."

  • Joshua Keating: What the protests breaking out all over the world have in common: "Millions of people are taking to the streets. It might just be the beginning."

  • Lisa Khoury: An uprising in Lebanon.

  • Lili Loofbourow: Chile's people have had enough.

  • Andrew Richner/Abigail Gutmann-Gonzalez: Chile awakens.

  • Amy Wilentz: Haiti is in the streets.

• Quint Forgey: Trump warns US 'may have to get in wars': "The president specifically threatens to hit Iran 'like they've never been hit before' if the regime provokes Washington."

• Masha Gessen:

  • The Trump administration's war on the government is an "autocratic attempt".

  • Mark Zuckerberg doesn't know what the first amendment is for.

• Ryan Grim: Bernie Sanders vows to revive criminal prosecutions of CEOs for unfair trade practices.

• Sue Halpern: The problem of political advertising on social media.

• Benjamin Hart: President Trump is obsessed with stealing Syria's oil.

• Mehdi Hasan: Everyone is denouncing the Syrian rebels now slaughtering Kurds. But didn't the US once support some of them?

• Jeff Hauser/Eleanor Eagan: House Democrats are failing to protect farmers from Trump: "The administration is letting agribusiness monopolies run amok."

• Umair Irfan: Californians face more blackouts as fire risk remains high.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • We can't actually keep Syria's oil, but Lindsey Graham wants Trump to think we can: More paragraphs than I can quote here explain why the scheme is "preposterous." Still, it was the one trick that moved Trump to reverse his withdrawal, which is something Graham believes in more than reason:

    These geopolitical arguments didn't move Trump an inch. So Sen. Lindsey Graham -- Trump's most loyal political defender but also a fervent advocate for the Kurds -- shifted tactics to focus on something he figured the president would understand: finances. According to NBC News, Graham and Jack Keane -- an influential retired Army general who, back in 2007, persuaded President George W. Bush to order a "surge" of troops to Iraq -- brought maps into the Oval Office, showing Trump the network of oil fields across the region, including in Syria.

    The argument about oil was flimflam, and Graham and Keane knew it. Citing a defense official, NBC noted that "while the emphasis on oil in Syria is intended to convince the president that the U.S. military is valuable, securing the oil fields is not a military strategy. U.S. troops will not actually be guarding the oil fields."

    The ruse was reminiscent of the time, early in the administration, when Trump wanted to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, to the alarm of several officials. Trump paid no attention to arguments about counterterrorism or the balance of power, so the officials shifted tactics. Pentagon officials started talking about "rare-earth metals" in Afghan soil -- something that had never been in previous briefing books. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, then the national security adviser, showed Trump old photographs of Kabul in the 1970s, in which young women were seen wearing miniskirts. See, McMaster told the president, Afghanistan hasn't always been a graveyard of empires; it's been a "normal" country in the past, and it can be again.

    Trump not only reversed his decision to pull out -- he doubled the number of troops that President Barack Obama, toward the end of his term, had kept in.

    Graham, Keane, and many others wanted to keep some U.S. troops in Syria. Trump did not. So they made up a phony argument to get him to change his mind. It worked.

  • The US has 50 nuclear bombs in Turkey. Why?

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Federal judge rules impeachment inquiry is legal: I find it rather shocking that anyone even thought this needed ajudication.

  • Diversity will continue to be Democratic asset in 2020.

  • Clinton 2020? Say it ain't so, Hillary! If she can't even get a sympathetic hearing from someone like Kilgore, I'd say her chances are pretty negligible, even before you factor in the risk of getting beat twice by someone as unpopular and reviled as Trump.

  • Anti-abortion activist is rump's latest unqualified judicial nominee: Sarah Pitlyk. For more, see Dahlia Lithwick: The judges Republicans are doing it all for.

  • Trump sues California to kill cross-border cap-and-trade market.

  • Republicans storm closed meeting, demanding transparency for their stonewalling POTUS.

  • Voter enthusiasm for 2020 is off the charts -- especially for Trump fans.

• Jen Kirby:

  • The Justice Department's review of the Russia probe is reportedly now a criminal inquiry.

  • Prime Minister Boris Johnson to seek elections after Brexit deadlock: "British Prime Minister Boris Johnson couldn't get Brexit done by the end of the month like he'd promised he would -- so he's pushing for a general election instead."

• Markos Kounalakis: Trump's four horsemen: "The president is unleashing autocrats to create a Middle East apocalypse." Casts the "four horsemen" as Erdogan, Assad, Khamanei, and Putin, but he missed a few, especially the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and let's not forget Israel. Also Trump, who get criticized for stepping back then overcompensates by plunging forward, his "withdrawal" from Syria almost instantly reversed by an invasion to seize Syrian oil fields, while sending more forces to Saudi Arabia (once again, aimed at oil fields).

• Ivan Krastev/Stephen Holmes: How liberalism became 'the god that failed' in Eastern Europe.

• Eric Levitz:

  • 459,000 working-class white male Wisconsinites didn't vote in 2016. An untapped potential Trump resource in what's currently the key battleground state?

  • Recapping impeachment: Bill Taylor returns for one last mission.

  • Rudy and Hunter Biden both worked for the same Romanian kleptocrat.

  • USDA watchdog to investigate Department's alleged suppression of climate science.

  • How centrist Democrats botched the 2020 primary. I'd put less emphasis on the names than on bigger problems with the paradigm. The inescapable fact is that centrist Democrats -- Clinton, Obama, and their natural followers -- have failed on both fronts: they haven't been able to deliver real gains to the party rank and file, and even with their timid programs and compromises they haven't been able to keep the Republicans out of power. The left offers tangible answers to both problems: they promote real answers to the real problems faced by the party base, and they work hard to convince you that they'll follow through if given the chance. Also, one more reason: from the 1980s through Hillary Clinton in 2016, successful Democrats (like Republicans) were the ones most able to raise money from well-heeled donors. In 2016, Bernie Sanders came up with way to raise money that doesn't depend on PACs and fat cats, and Warren has followed his path. The whining you hear from centrists these days is mostly because the left is no longer dependent on their support. Of course, names do have some impact. Aside from Hillary and Biden, the two best-known pro-business centrists are probably Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emmanuel, but their failures and scandals have kept them from even running.

• Eric Lipton/Jesse Drucker: Symbol of '80s greed stands to profit from Trump tax break for poor areas.

• Josh Marshall: TPM's deep dive on the conservative deep state: A series of articles investigating right-wing political organizations, not necessarily within the state but trying to align state policy with their political interests. Some articles in this series:

  • Kira Lerner: How one conservative group plans to maintain Republicans' grip on state legislatures.

  • Bob Moser: Is the Koch Network winning its war on occupational licensing?

  • Sarah Posner: Inside the Christian legal army weakening the church-state divide.

  • David Walsh: It took decades, but the anti-New Deal crusaders have triumphed.

• Dylan Matthews: US air pollution deaths increased by 9,700 a year from 2016 to 2018.

• Nicole Narea:

  • The Trump administration just imposed another roadblock on low-income immigrants.

  • The Trump administration just admitted that it separated an additional 1,500 immigrant families.

• Anna North: Pennsylvania lawmakers want to ban abortion before many people know they're pregnant.

• Olivia Nuzzi: The zombie campaign: Joe Biden is the least formidable front-runner ever."

• Kelsey Piper: AI could be a disaster for humanity. A top computer scientist thinks he has the solution: "Stuart Russell wrote the book on AI and is leading the fight to change how we build it."

• Andrew Prokop: The week in impeachment inquiry news, explained.

• Corey Robin: The Obamanauts: Review of eight books on Obama in the White House, asking the question: "What was the defining achievement of Barack Obama?" Jonathan Chait thinks that's a dumb question, and tries to construct a defense of Obama against such "left-wing attacks."

• Aaron Rupar: Team Trump's efforts to spin Mulvaney's quid pro quo confession are not going well.

• Eugene Scott: Trump's lynching comparison shows there's no bottom to his sense of victimhood. Still, I take a certain gratification in that Trump seems to be acknowledging that lynching is a bad thing, although more likely with him it's more a matter of who's doing what to whom. (Same with witch hunts.)

• Liam Stack: Update complete: US nuclear weapons no longer need floppy disks. You know, I still have a couple of 8-inch floppy disk drives in the basement. Admittedly, I haven't used them since the 1980s. Also have the S-100 bus Z-80 computer I bought them for, with 64K of no-wait-state static RAM, and some orange plastic levers for toggling in binary boot programs. Also have a 1998-vintage computer with a 3.5-inch not-floppy removable disk drive. In between, there were 5.25-inch floppy disks. I have a bunch of those, but no computer I can read them in. Probably some marginally interesting baseball data on those. Maybe record lists, occasional scraps of writing.

• Matt Stieb: Trump's press conference announcing the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is peak deranged Trump.

• Peter Stone: William Barr, Trump's new Roy Cohn.

• Matt Taibbi: Everyone is a Russian asset. Hillary Clinton and her close supporters have been especially quick to make such charges. Taibbi doesn't talk about his own experience as a target of such slurs, but I've noticed he gets it a lot.

• Astra Taylor: Out with the old, in with the Young.

• Anya van Wagtendonk:

  • Trump's latest attempt to block impeachment inquiry testimonies faces a key court battle.

  • Top State Department official says ousting ambassador to Ukraine was a White House priority.

• Peter Wade:

  • World Series crowd serenades Trump with boos and 'lock him up' chants.

  • Replace me with a 'yes man' and 'you will be impeached' former Chief of Staff warned Trump.

• James D Walsh: 'The force of Trump's lying has ruptured the space-time continuum': Steve Schmidt on impeachment: Interview with Schmidt, an ex-GOP (Never Trump) pundit at MSNBC, who says:

  My perspective is that the Republican Party is profoundly corrupted by Donald Trump and it has been corrupted by a tolerance for all and any type of amoral and immoral behavior. Tolerance for astounding levels of corruption and exposure of hypocrisy from the religious far-right leaders like Falwell, to everybody who screamed and shouted about some perfidious act that Obama or the Clintons allegedly committed. Trump has remade the Republican Party into an isolationist, grievance-driven, resentment-driven political party.

  On the other hand, he still loathes the Democratic Party, and sees them as doomed. He notes, I think correctly, "A debate about stupid things benefits Donald Trump." He's specifically talking about Kamala Harris' argument that Trump should be banned from Twitter, but I see a much more pervasive example in the mass media, where every issue is reduced to stupid.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump's Baghdadi press conference shows how he ruins even his best moments.

  • The US is "committed" to staying in Syria -- to protect oil.

  • Top US diplomat to Ukraine testifies there was a quid pro quo.

• Sarah Westwood/Caroline Kenney: Mayor and college officials in city where Trump spoke Friday give changing numbers of student attendees at speech. Trump spoke in Columbia, SC, at "historically black" Benedict College, by invitation only to a crowd of 200. Note that: "only about 10 were actual students from the college." New York Magazine linked to this under the title, "Man of the white people."

• Robert Wright: What's good for Putin is not always bad for America: "Syria isn't a zero-sum game between Russia and the United States, so let's stop talking about it that way."

• Matthew Yglesias: It's time to broaden the impeachment inquiry: "The House should be asking questions about Trump's dealings with Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others." He's not broadening it much, and the three nations mentioned are easy to demagogue on, because they resonate with recent and/or ancient popular prejudices. But surely there's as much "smoke" around Israel, but no one wants to look in that direction (even though they wouldn't have to look much further than Sheldon Adelson).

Daily Log

Made birthday dinner. Had a horrible time trying to figure out what to do this year, then had a rough time trying to invite people. I've been wanting to make Mom's coconut cake, and that argued against most of the international cuisines I've explored in years past. Jerry came up with the idea of just grilling some hamburgers, and after I came up with a couple of alternatives, Laura voted for hamburgers. I looked around and picked up a copy of The Ultimate Burger, and there I found a few interesting new things to try, which I figured might fit in nicely with some old standby dishes. Final menu:

• Grilled bacon burgers
• Grilled teriyaki pork burgers: with grilled pineapple and onion.
• Crispy salmon burgers with tomato chutney
• Smoky grilled potato salad: with grilled onions and bacon.
• Smoked salmon vinaigrette: Russian potato salad recipe, with olives, capers, and dill.
• Buttermilk coleslaw
• Fresh corn and tomato salad
• Rebecca's baked beans: topped with bacon.
• Mast Va Khiar: Persian yogurt-cucumber with mint, scallions, sultanas, and black walnuts.
• Coconut cake: with vanilla ice cream.

I toyed with the idea of baking my own rolls, and I wound up trying to make a batch (8) of potato rolls. I screwed them up coming and going, but they weren't bad, and I used them with the salmon. But for backup, I bought two packages each of brioche buns and pretzel buns (8 of each). They were at least as good, and a lot more cost-effective. Also bought a package (4) of gluten-free (chia-rice) buns, which no one ate.

I bought two packages of Yoder thick bacon. Tried one batch of the cookbook recipe where you cover the bacon with water, then boil the water off and brown what's left. I can't say as it's a better method: definitely slower, may drain less fat off (you get less left over in pan).

Jerry ran the grill, and I was swamped inside, with various things running late. I had figured most of the hamburgers would be topped with blue cheese, but I also bought thick slices of colby, and that's what Jerry used. The pork burgers were to be topped with teriyaki sauce, but Jerry put the blue cheese on them. I tried reconstructing a pork burger according to recipe, and it was pretty good, but by then hardly anyone else was interested.

I forgot to serve the coleslaw. Wasn't missed, and frankly wasn't as good as the non-creamy slaw I've made before, but belonged with the dinner.

I undercooked the cake icing, so it thinned out a bit before serving (misremembered the temperature, so stopped the syrup at 232F, instead of 240F from past experiments). Cake was very moist. A guest brought a pan of brownies, so some guests opted for them.

Wound up with nine people after a string of last-minute invites all panned out (24 hours before it was looking like we'd just have 4). I got a little flustered in the endgame, but wasn't as worn out once it was served as I've been in recent years. Enjoyed the company.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, October archive (in progress).

Music: current count 32248 [32212] rated (+36), 224 [229] unrated (-5).

As of late Sunday. Monday's mail unpacked below but not counted above.

Last couple weeks I've barely been able to scratch out two A- records. In fact, only one of the last six weeks yielded more than three, but I'm up to a nearly unprecedented nine here (E.S.T. a late add). One reason is I did something different last week, in that I jotted down a list of seven "new records I most want to track down." I found all seven, and got four A- records there (Jaimie Branch, Chris Knight, L'Orange & Jeremiah Jae, Kelsey Waldon). Although I must admit that part of the reason I did that was that Knight and Waldon were riding multiple A/A- streaks, and L'Orange/Jae's previous also came in at A-. Nor was Branch much of a surprise. Had I looked further, I would also have flagged Crosscurrents Trio (Dave Holland has his own streak going), and maybe the two new Intakt releases.

Also got a couple pleasant surprises out of the promo queue. My other main source this week was Saving Country Music: I added their top-reviewed albums to my metacritic file, but the winners there were the expected ones from Knight and Waldon. Adds to this and my tracking file help keep me up to date. For instance, I can tell you the best-reviewed new records of the week (10-18): Battles: Juice B Crypts (6); Foals: Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost (Part 2) (6); Vagabon (6); Clipping: There Existed an Addiction to Blood (5); Floating Points: Crush (4); Caroline Polachek: Pang (4); Patrick Watson: Wave (4). Best-reviewed new records of the previous week (10-11): Big Thief: Two Hands (17); Kim Gordon: No Home Record (12); Elbow: Giants of All Sizes (9); Richard Dawson: 2020 (8).

New records I most want to track down: Homeboy Sandman: Dusty; Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis; Rocket 808.

Also out 10-18, listed below or previously graded: Gebhard Ullmann: MikroPULS [A-]; Michael Formanek: Even Better [***]; Petros Kampanis: Irrationalities [**]; Derel Monteith: Connemara [**]; Chris Speed: Respect for Your Toughness [**]; Chip Stephens/Stenn Wilson: Sadness & Soul [**]; John Yao: How We Do [**]; Rez Abbasi: A Throw of Dice by the Silent Ensemble [*]; Derel Monteith: Quantity of Life [*]; Carrie Wicks: Reverie [*]; Katerina Brown: Mirror [B]; Dan McCarthy: City Abstract [B].

Old records this week were mostly the result of collecting several recent decade-or-two best-of lists. I've started to copy these down, mostly to provide a checklist against my own listening. There weren't many titles I hadn't heard, but I had totally missed Chromatics and Joanna Newsom, so now I know something. You can find the lists with my grades here (original links in the files):

• Guardian: The 100 Best Albums of the 21st Century (2019)
• Paste: The 100 Best Albums of the 2010s
• Uproxx: All the Best Albums of the 2010s, Ranked (2019)

One more week left in October, promises to have more than the usual batch of distractions. Had a "furnace tuneup" last week, which left both the system and us pretty confused, so I need to call them back and get to the bottom of that. Weather itself has been up and down, enough so to remind me that as much as I hate the heat, the cold is actually more painful. Birthday coming up, so I'll take a day or two cooking something. I usually do a broad tasting menu from some exotic cuisine (started with Chinese, then Indian, then Turkish; finally got to French last year), but I'm feeling more like comfort food this year (or maybe I just really want to end it with Mom's coconut cake).

Last two big meals have been Hungarian, so I'm done with that for a while (although I still want to make the dumplings at some point, possibly the rabbit goulash and/or the venison meatballs, and for that matter the somloi trifle and/or the dobos torte -- the two insanely classic Hungarian desserts). Just not this week. Two more big projects are putting together a new computer, and doing a major cleanup/reorganization of the tools in the basement and garage.

Decided to buy the computer parts after my secondary machine temporarily crapped out a week ago. Eventually got it to boot, but it's been so slow I've dragged my feet something awful on website work. But rather than buy something cheap to replace the secondary machine, I figured I should jump whole hog into a new primary unit. Well, "half hog": went with the $200 AMD Ryzen 2700 CPU (8 cores, double the Passmark of my main machine), but much cheaper than the $565 Ryzen 3900 (twice again as fast); 64G of DDR 3000 SDRAM, instead of the 128G maximum; a 1TB M.2 slot SSD; on-board graphics (serious gamers could double the price of their computer here); a mid-range 750W power supply; and a relatively cheap box (because I still want a built-in DVD drive, which the fancy boxes no longer support). Where I did splurge was on a new 32-inch monitor UHD monitor. Should be relatively easy to put it together and load up Xubuntu. One resolution is to only do UTF-8 on the new box, so to get the extra speed, I'll have to convert the websites.

The basement/garage project will be a lot more work, and take a lot more out of my music time. I'm sick and tired of not being able to find tools I know I have. I expect to wind up with an inventory, in some kind of database or spreadsheet, with everything a bit neater. Perhaps success there will lead to a second project, to start to unburden the house of excess stuff, including a few books and CDs. At one point I thought of donating the latter to a library, and never went through with that (and feel less inspired every time they name another building after the Kochs). Open to ideas there.

Haven't done any significant work on my 2020 election book, but keep thinking about it. The book I'm currently reading on George Washington has some relevance, as he has one thing in common with Trump (extraordinary riches) but is otherwise Trump's polar opposite (well, aside from the race thing).

New records reviewed this week:

• Yazz Ahmed: Polyhymnia (2016-19 [2019], Ropeadope): [r]: B+(**)
• Michaela Anne: Desert Dove (2019, Yep Roc): [r]: B+(*)
• Bonnie Bishop: The Walk (2019, Thirty Tigers): [r]: B+(**)
• Jaimie Branch: Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise (2018 [2019], International Anthem): [r]: A-
• Chromatics: Closer to Grey (2019, Italians Do It Better): [r]: B
• Crosscurrents Trio [Dave Holland/Zakir Hussain/Chris Potter]: Good Hope (2018 [2019], Edition): [r]: A-
• Croy & the Boys: Howdy High-Rise (2019, Spaceflight): [r]: B+(**)
• Michael Formanek Very Practical Trio/Tim Berne/Mary Halvorson: Even Better (2019, Intakt): [r]: B+(***)
• Bill Frisell: Harmony (2019, Blue Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Abdullah Ibrahim: Dream Time (2019, Enja): [r]: B+(**)
• Gethen Jenkins: Western Gold (2019, 5 Music): [r]: B+(*)
• Georgette Jones: Skin (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Roger Kellaway: The Many Open Minds of Roger Kellaway (2010 [2019], IPO): [cd]: A- [11-01]
• Chris Knight: Almost Daylight (2019, Drifters Church): [r]: A-
• L'Orange & Jeremiah Jae: Complicate Your Life With Violence (2019, Mello Music Group): [r]: A-
• Doug MacDonald & the Tarmac Ensemble: Jazz Marathon 4: Live at Hangar 18 (2019, DMAC, 2CD): [cd]: B+(*)
• Dan McCarthy: City Abstract (2019, Origin): [cd]: B
• Mike & the Moonpies: Cheap Silver & Solid Country Gold (2019, Prairie Rose): [r]: B+(*)
• Joshua Redman & Brooklyn Rider: Sun on Sand (2019, Nonesuch): [r]: B+(**)
• Reut Regev R*Time: Keep Winning (2019, Enja): [r]: A-
• Chris Speed Trio: Respect for Your Toughness (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B+(***)
• Chip Stephens/Stenn Wilson: Sadness & Soul (2018 [2019], Capri): [cd]: B+(**)
• Gebhard Ullmann/Hans Lüdemann/Oliver Potratz/Eric Schaefer: MikroPULS (2017 [2019], Intuition): [cd]: A-
• Kelsey Waldon: White Noise/White Lines (2019, Oh Boy): [r]: A-
• Alice Wallace: Into the Blue (2019, Rebelle Road): [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Ernest Hood: Neighborhoods: Memories of Times Past (1975 [2019], Freedom to Spend): [r]: B
• Esbjörn Svensson Trio: E.S.T. Live in Gothenburg (2001 [2019], ACT, 2CD): [cd]: A- [10-25]
• Barney Wilen: Live in Tokyo '91 (1991 [2019], Elemental Music, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Chromatics: Kill for Love (2012, Italians Do It Better): [sc]: B+(***)
• Joanna Newsom: The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004, Drag City): [r]: B+(*)
• Joanna Newsom: Ys (2006, Drag City): [r]: B
• Joanna Newsom: Have One on Me (2010, Drag City, 2CD): [r]: B
• Reut Regev: This Is R*Time (2008 [2009], Ropeadope): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Calabria Foti: Prelude to a Kiss (Moco) [11-01]
• Jerome Jennings: Solidarity (Iola) [11-09]
• Per Texas Johansson: Stråk På Himlen Och Stora Hus (Moserobie)
• Fredrik Ljungkvist Trio: Atlantis (Moserobie)

Weekend Roundup

Half a week here, after my Midweek Roundup came out on Thursday. Still too exhausted to write an intro.

Some scattered links this week:

• Aaron Bady: Jedediah Purdy has an idea that could save us from capitalism and the climate crisis: Interview with Purdy about his latest book, This Land Is Our Land. Article doesn't live up to its premise, not all Purdy's fault, but I've never found his books all that satisfying.

• Riley Beggin: Tulsi Gabbard calls Hillary Clinton "the queen of warmongers" in her latest clash with top Democrats. A point which was pretty obvious after Clinton called Gabbard "the favorite of the Russians." Clinton is also still bear-baiting Jill Stein; see Tessa Stuart: Green Party torches Hillary Clinton for claiming Jill Stein is 'totally' a Russian asset. I've seen people attempt to defend Clinton on this (e.g., Charles P Pierce: Hillary Clinton is more than qualified to judge the effectiveness of foreign-influenced candidates), but they're rubbing salt into a still tender wound. Russian interference in 2016 is well established as a fact, but neither explains nor excuses Clinton's loss to Trump, nor does it make Trump unworthy (although lots of other things do) let alone brand him as some kind of Russian stooge. Moreover, such charges appear to have the intent of worsening US-Russian relations, at a time when better relations with Russia would be helpful on many issues. When Clinton attacks Gabbard and Stein as "favorites of the Russians," she's really warning Democratic candidates that Russia is bad and they should repeat her 2016 sabre-rattling mistakes. That the net effect of her attacks has been to increase Gabbard's popularity only underscores how irrelevant Clinton has become. For something much deeper on Gabbard, see Kerry Howley: Tulsi Gabbard had a very strange childhood. [PS: Robert Wright on Clinton's attacks: Virality and virulence. Another valuable Wright post: How the New York Times distorts our view of Syria.]

• Max Blumenthal: The US has backed 21 of the 28 'crazy' militias leading Turkey's brutal invasion of northern Syria: "Former and current US officials have slammed the Turkish mercenary force of 'Arab militias' for executing and behading Kurds in northern Syria. New data from Turkey reveals that almost all of these militias were armed and trained in the past by the CIA and Pentagon."

• Hannah Brown: Wildfires are raging in Lebanon. Experts say they saw this coming. "Fires are burning across Lebanon during a record heatwave."

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Trump writes unhinged 'legal' letter demanding that CNN pay him money.

  • 'We do that all the time, get over it,' Mulvaney boasts about Ukraine plot. Later: James Downie: Mick Mulvaney tries to clean up his mess, and fails.

  • Two candidates, two investigations, one deeply flawed agency: Review of James B Stewart's book: Deep State: Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law.

• Alvin Chang: The man who rigged America's election maps: "How Tom Hofeller shifted the balance of power by taking gerrymandering to the extreme."

• William D Cohan: "There is definite hanky-panky going on": The fantastically profitable mystery of the Trump chaos trades: "The president's talk can move markets -- and it's made some futures traders billions. Did they know what he was going to say before he said it?" Related: Jake Johnson: Democrats demand federal investigation of 'suspicious' stock sales linked to Trump's economy-shifting trade war moves. Also: Hey Securities and Exchange Commission, if you are watching. Someone is trading on insider info.

• Chas Danner: Ocasio-Cortez credits Sanders for her political awakening at Bernie's comeback rally in Queens.

• Warren Davidson: Trump is right: Ending the endless wars starts in Syria. This is a little mealy-mouthed, but not exceptionally so for a House Representative (R-OH): I'd reject "after 9/11, America had a clear cause for war in Afghanistan" and some of the chest-beating about America's military, but this shows that some Republicans are eager to claim the mantel of peace, especially when Democrats cede that ground. Also note: Dhrumil Mehta: Republican voters are largely backing Trump's withdrawal from Syria. Also note: Syria critic Lindsey Graham reverses stance, says Trump's policy could succeed. It's getting really hard to overstate how completely Trump has the Republican Party under his thumb.

• Anthony Faiola: Socialism doesn't work? An emerging middle class of Bolivians would beg to differ.

• Steve Fraser: Existential threat versus existential crisis: "The Great Depression and the Climate Crisis, New Deals then and now."

• Adam Goldman/William K Rashbaum: Review of Russia inquiry grows as FBI witnesses are questioned: After complaining about "witch hunts," Trump and Barr order up one more to their liking.

• Fred Hiatt: It's not news that Trump is corrupt. What's new is how he is succeeding in corrupting our government.

• Sean Illing:

  • Capitalism is turning us into addicts: Interview with David T Courtwright, author of The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business.

  • How propaganda works in the digital age: Interview with Jason Stanley, author of How Propaganda Works (2015). I've read, and recommend, Stanley later book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

• Christopher Ingraham: For the first time, workers are paying a higher tax rate than investors and owners: "The proximate cause of the shift was Trump's 2017 tax cut, which dramatically slashed taxes on corporate profits and estates."

• Sarah Jones: Bernie Sanders hasn't killed identity politics: Maybe not, but he's defined an identity that transcends the usual boxes that Democratic Party proponents of "identity politics" like to tick off, partly because he's revived an old identity "centrist" Democrats have been trying to wash their hands of (the working class), and partly because he has no desire to make those other distinctions.

• Mark Karlin: Trump isn't bringing any troops home. In fact, he has sent an additional 14,000 troops to the Mideast since May. It's just another con.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Kasich comes out for Trump impeachment.

  • Trump believes he has a mandate for tyranny.

  • Poll: Only a minority of Republicans are sure Trump is innocent.

• Jen Kirby: The UK Parliament just blew up Boris Johnson's Brexit plans: "Parliament just voted the make the prime minister seek a Brexit delay, even if his deal passes." Kirby previously wrote: The UK and EU have a new Brexit agreement. But it's not a done deal yet. More on Brexit:

  • Riley Beggin: In London, hundreds of thousands demand another chance to vote on Brexit; later: UK leaders insist Brexit will happen by Oct. 31 despite an extension request.

  • Rowena Mason: Labour seeks new alliance to kill off Boris Johnson's Brexit deal.

  • Amy Davidson Sorkin: Boris Johnson's bad Saturday and the contradictions of Brexit.

• Jeff Klein: Syria, the Kurds, Turkey and the US: Why progressives should not support a new imperial partition in the Middle East.

• Anita Kumar: Trump can't stop bragging to foreign leaders about his resorts.

• Eric Lach: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez make a show of force in Queens.

• Michael Laris: Messages show Boeing employees knew in 2016 of problems that turned deadly on the 737 Max.

• Eric Levitz: Biden's attacks on Medicare for All undermine the entire Democratic agenda.

• Eric Lipton: Trump's choice to bring G7 to his own resort would violate conflict-of-interest law, if he weren't President.

• Mujib Mashal/Thomas Gibbons-Neff: Civilian casualties reach highest level in Afghan War, UN says.

• Aaron David Miller/Eugene Rumer/Richard Sokolsky: What Trump actually gets right about Syria: First paragraph back peddles a bit: "Trump's assessment of the situation [in Syria] is not entirely wrong." Still, their main points are spot on, even if they aren't flattering to the American ego: "The US-Kurdish relationship was never going to last"; "Russia is the key power broker in Syria"; "Assad is here to stay"; "There won't be a second caliphate"; and "Syria is not a vital US interest." Turns out that Miller wrote a book back in 2014 (ergo, pre-Trump): The End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President. From a note on the book: "Americans are adrift in a kind of Presidential Bermuda Triangle suspended between the great presidents we want and the ones we can no longer have. . . . Indeed, greatness is too rare to be relevant in our current politics, and driven as it is by nation-encumbering crises, too dangerous to be desirable." Good thing he got this book written before Trump came around, else he would have had to incorporate a twist too deranged to anticipate: a "stable genius" with "unmatched wisdom" who blundered his way into crisis only to find himself totally lacking in whatever it takes for "greatness" to emerge.

• Ally Mutnick: Why Republicans should be worried about their chances of retaking the House.

• Adam K Raymond: World's least self aware person, Donald Trump Jr, attacks Bidens for nepotism.

• Jody Rosen: Staring down Donald Trump, the same elephant in every room.

  We are not "all Greta Thunberg," but all of us know what it's like to be ambushed by Donald Trump. He pops up on your social media feed with hateful words and impulsive policy announcements. He flickers on TV screens in bus terminals and airport departure lounges, forever looming over your shoulder. He barges unbidden into your dreams. It is a condition of being alive in America in 2019. No matter who you are or what you're trying to accomplish, whether you're a 16-year-old working to save the planet or an ordinary citizen trying to make it through the day with some peace of mind intact, you will inevitably confront the specter of Trump, drifting into the frame in a cloud of disorder and bad vibes. Even the president's most dedicated enablers scan the sky warily, awaiting today's cyclone, the next reckless, capricious twist of the plot. The door swings open, the president enters, all heads turn. The camera whips around, and suddenly, everything else -- better angels, higher ideals, common decency, common sense, beauty, truth -- blurs into the background.

• Matthew Rosenberg/Kevin Roose: Trump campaign floods web with ads, raking in cash as Democrats struggle.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's Dallas rally showed how untethered from reality his impeachment pushback is. Related here: Matt Stieb: 7 unhinged moments from Trump's Dallas rally.

  • Trump's move to host the G7 at his Doral resort takes self-dealing to new levels. [PS: I guess not. See Riley Beggin: Trump won't host the G7 at his Miami resort after all.]

• Alexander Sammon: The miseducation of Mean Pete: "Once the Rhodes Scholar version of Mister Rogers, Buttigieg has become the snarling incarnation of anti-left rage." You know, I've long suspect that a big part of the pitch centrist Democrats make to their donors, even if only implicit, is that they will help business by, among other favors, keeping the left contained. That's part of why Clinton and Obama hardly ever lifted a finger to help labor, and it's part of why they felt few qualms about surrendering control of Congress, thereby giving up any chance of implementing the progressive platforms they successfully ran for president on. Buttigieg has done an impressive job of raising money from those same donors, only he's having to be much more explicit about carrying their water, and in 2019 those donors are much more worried by the left than they are by Trump and the Republicans. His eagerness to do that has made him a viable niche candidate, but when it comes to converting money to votes he may find himself pinned down way too narrowly. A related article from June 25: Do Pete Buttigieg's donors know him better than we do?: "The South Bend mayor has become a darling to Silicon Valley and Wall Street elite. That alone is a red flag."

• Greg Sargent:

  • Internal Democratic poll suggests a new way to bleed Trump dry.

  • Mick Mulvaney's role in the latest Trump scandal just deepened.

  • John Bolton's eruption shows that Trump's defenses are collapsing.

• Jon Schwarz: What I learned from the debate: Democrats still can't level with voters about the American empire. Related: Alex Emmons: Trump's chaotic Syria exit puts anti-war 2020 Democrats in a delicate spot. Schwarz also wrote: The US is now betraying the Kurds for the eighth time.

• Philip Shenon: 'A threat to democracy': William Barr's speech on religious freedom alarms liberal Catholics.

• Gregory Shupak: Media alarmed by US pullout from Syria -- which didn't actually happen.

• David Smith: US justice department resumes use of death penalty and schedules five executions.

• Matt Stieb: As Trump fumes, GOP advances real party goal of making federal judiciary great again.

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: When the dream of owning a home became a nightmare: "A federal program to encourage black homeownership in the 1970s ended in a flood of foreclosures."

• Jeffrey Toobin: William Barr's wild misreading of the First Amendment.

• Paul Waldman: A new report suggests Trump may have committed financial crimes.

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells: The French economist who helped invent Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax: Gabriel Zucman.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump loves dictators. Erdogan is the latest to take advantage of that. I don't think it's right to call Erdogan a dictator. He holds his office due to winning a reasonably open election (although he has used surviving an attempted military coup as an excuse for consolidating power in ways that may undermine future democracy). Many of the other "dictdators" Trump seems to admire were also elected, including Putin (Russia), Modi (India), Bolsonaro (Brazil), and Duterte (Philippines), but so was the only one Trump has actually called a dictator: Maduro (Venezuela). Clearly, he has little appreciation of, or concern for, the democratic process -- no surprise, given that he was elected with the flimsiest popular mandate of any of the above, but also because right-wingers are always contemptous of democracy, perhaps because even they suspect that their rule is unwarranted.

  • The Syrian ceasefire the US brokered is already falling apart.

  • Top Trump official throws Giuliani under the bus in impeachment inquiry statement.

• Matthew Yglesias: Impeachment is too important to leave to Congress -- it's going to take mass mobilization. I don't want to rain on anyone's desire to march, but I don't really buy this, even before discounting the inapplicability of various foreign examples. If impeachment happens, it's going to be done on narrow legalistic grounds, and it's not going to change power dynamics in any way. Mike Pence would replace Trump as president, he's pretty much hand-picked the cabinet anyway, and Congress would remain divided and ineffectual as at present. Sure, it's merited, and sure, it would be a chastising lesson for future presidents. Most of all, it presents an educational opportunity. But nothing significant can change until the 2020 elections, so that's where most of that pent-up energy should be directed. Well, that and keeping the frameworks for the rest of the political struggle viable, because even if the Democrats win big in 2020, we're still going to need a peace and social justice movement, union organizing, environmental awareness, and so forth.

• Li Zhou:

  • Rick Perry, a key figure in Trump's dealings with Ukraine, will resign as energy secretary. Trump famously hired "only the best people" but over time, he's lost most of his first wave of political hacks, almost invariably replacing them with former lobbyists: in this case, Dan Brouilette. See Lisa Friedman: New Energy Secretary fits trend: Cabinet dominated by lobbyists.

  • The Senate fails to override Trump's veto on its national emergency resolution. Somehow a 53-36 majority isn't enough to stop Trump. This is democracy?

Midweek Roundup

Sometime Wednesday afternoon it occurred to me that I might as well go ahead and round up the first rush of Democratic debate links for the Weekend Roundup. Then I wondered whether I could just dispatch them early, in a Midweek Roundup (something I've done a couple times, but not often). So here's what I rounded up by bedtime. Not many comments, other than to note that the "conventional wisdom" on Syria is not only worse than what Tulsi Gabbard has to say, it's worse than Donald Trump (see, e.g., his dismissal of Lindsey Graham, below).

Some scattered links this week:

• FiveThirtyEight:

  • What went down in the fourth Democratic debate.

  • Who won the fourth Democratic debate?

  • The October Democratic debate in 6 charts.

• Cristina Cabrera: Graham threatens to become Trump's "worst nightmare" in escalating feud: This promises to be more fun than Graham's two-plus years of utter sycophancy, but amidst all the insanity Trump has spouted over the last week, he sure has Graham's number:

  Trump, however, doesn't seem to particularly care what his closest Senate ally thinks.

  "Lindsey Graham would like to stay in the Middle East for the next thousand years, with thousands of soldiers fighting other people's wars," Trump told reporters on Wednesday afternoon. "I want to get out of the Middle East."

  Trump said Graham ought to focus on "the judiciary" and investigating Trump's "deep state" conspiracy theory instead.

  "That's what the people of South Carolina want him to focus on," the President said. "The people of South Carolina don't want us to get into a war with Turkey, a NATO member, or with Syria. Let them fight their own wars."

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: No one has a damn clue how many jobs will be lost to automation.

• Matthew Chance: Putin is on a victory lap of the Middle East. I suspect this is overstated, and of little practical import, but it does reflect the fact that the US has seen its reputation as a benefactor and power erode after decades of incoherent, reckless, and obsessive actions (not least its subservience to Israel). Moreover, America's position is likely to deteriorate further, especially as American public opinion turns against Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, and Egypt -- a conjuncture of Islamophobia on the right and anti-authoritarianism on the left. Trump's unique contribution to this is that he's convinced many despots in the Middle East that they no longer have to choose between the US and Russia.

• Patrick Cockburn: Turkey's Syria invasion rapidly backfiring for Ankara.

• Jonathan Cook: Israel prepares to turn Bedouin citizens into refugees in their own country.

• Tom Engelhardt: American Brexit: "It's not just Britain headed for the subbasement of imperial history."

• Kareem Fahim: Turkey's Erdogan presses offensive in Syria boosted by a nationalist surge at home. Doesn't that often happen in the early days of a war, before blowback occurs and the consequences sink in?

• Tara Golshan: Bernie Sanders's plan to reshape corporate America, explained.

• Rebecca Gordon: Extorting Ukraine is bad enough, but Trump has done much worse.

• Ben Hubbard, et al: In Syria, Russia is pleased to fill an American void.

• Sean Illing: The racial pessimism of Clarence Thomas: Interview with Corey Robin, whose new book is The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.

• Sarah Jones: Trump 'surprised' the grieving parents of a British teen at the White House.

• Ed Kilgore: Moderators and rivals pound Warren on middle-class tax-hike evasions. It's a rather dumb question, implying that middle class people aren't paying for health insurance now, where in fact they're paying through the nose into a scheme that squeezes them harder every year.

• Jen Kirby:

  • 9 questions about Turkey, Syria, and the Kurds you were too embarrassed to ask.

  • Trump sanctions Turkey for the Syria invasion his troop withdrawal allowed.

• Ezra Klein: Sorry, but Democrats need to talk about Hunter Biden. "Trump won't be."

  In 2016, Bernie Sanders famously refused to attack Clinton's emails in the debates. "The American people are sick and tired about hearing about your damn emails," he said to applause. The result was that rather than Democrats realizing how damaging that story was -- and how ineffective Clinton was at putting it to rest -- during the primary, they found that out in the general election. And yes, the media deserves the blame for the coverage decisions, but Democrats can't simply assume the media won't make the same mistakes in 2020. The lesson of Clinton's emails is that unfair smears can help Donald Trump get elected.

  One thing that might help here would be to never let an answer to this question go more than one sentence without bringing up Trump and his family of leeches. Then feel free to point out more examples of families profiting from their genes, like the Bushs, the Cheneys, the Romneys, and (sure) the Kennedys. Nepotism is an endemic problem in America, but it's worse in times of greater inequality and corruption, like now. Maybe go on and offer a back-handed compliment to the Bidens, who at least have the decency to recognize that even the appearance of impropriety is something that needs to be avoided. Of course, this approach would work better if the candidate isn't Joe Biden, but even he could handle the question much better than he did in the debate.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Trump: Kurds are 'not angels.' In fact, they're 'worse at terror' than ISIS.

  • Bernie Sanders's campaign is alive and well.

• PR Lockhart: Forth Worth officer charged with murder in killing of black woman in her own home.

• Dylan Matthews, et al: 5 winners and 3 losers from the October Democratic presidential debate. Winners: Bernie Sanders; Elizabeth Warren; Pete Buttigieg; opioid epidemic activists; universal basic income. Losers: Tulsi Gabbard; Joe Biden; free trade. My biggest problem with these judgments concerns Gabbard. Zack Beauchamp charges her with "a series of blatantly false statements," but the first one he points out is "the regime change war we've been waging in Syria." He flatly asserts that "The US is not waging a war of regime chance in Syria (as Biden pointed out later in the debate)," but the US was an early supporter of anti-Assad forces, way before ISIS emerged as a factor in the war. ISIS gave the US an excuse to use air power and ground troops in Syria, but the US never wavered in its opposition to the Assad government (even while fighting ISIS undercut the opposition and helped Assad stay in power). Beauchamp repeats the "regime change war" canard several times, and applauds Buttigieg for his "succinct and devastating" putdown of Gabbard: "You can put an end to endless war without embracing Donald Trump's policy, as you're doing." But Gabbard has been much more consistently opposed to Trump on Syria than her critics, who seem to have forgotten how we got into this horrible, nasty war in the first place. You can read the debate transcript in Here's what the 2020 Democrats are saying about Trump's Syria policy. Warren's statement there isn't bad: "We need to get out but we need to do this through a negotiated solution." A President Warren might even be able to do that. Indeed, the best solution to all of America's many foreign policy problems would be negotiation, aimed at replacing the myopic projection of American power with mutually beneficial international frameworks. But Gabbard is less deluded by American myth than any other candidate, and that clarity helps her here. (Where she falls down is not having the commitment to justice that you see with Sanders, or for that matter with Warren.) But Trump is incapable of negotiating anything, not least because he has no sense of decency himself, so his own sloppy exit is probably the best one can hope for now. You could even say that what he's done is accidentally brilliant: by double-crossing first the Kurds then the Turks in rapid succession, he has pivoted US policy in favor of consolidating Assad's power, which is at present the only viable path to peace in Syria. No reason to think he was smart enough to figure that out himself, but maybe Vladimir Putin was. Trump's unique contribution was in being too insensitive to object.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual" punishment is in grave danger from the Supreme Court.

  • Trump keeps losing in court, but time is on his side.

• Ella Nilsen/Li Zhou: House Republicans joined Democrats in condemning Trump's actions in Syria. Vote was 354-60.

• Anna North: Ronan Farrow's new book is a reminder of how silencing women helped Trump get elected: Book is called Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. Also on the book: Daniel Lippman: Ronan Farrow: National Enquirer shredded secret Trump documents.

• Delia Paunescu: The fourth 2020 Democratic presidential debate, explained in under 25 minutes.

• Andrew Perez: Documents reveal hospital industry is leading fight against Medicare for All.

• Kelsey Piper: Tom Steyer shouldn't be running for president.

• Frank Rich: There are only 5 candidates still standing after the latest Democratic debate: He's counting Joe Biden out, which seems a bit premature, so you can probably guess the rest: Warren, Sanders, Harris, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. Assumption seems to be that the latter two-three will pick up "moderate" support as Biden falters/flails. I think that may misread much of Biden's support: what they like about him is that he comes off as a solid, old-fashioned Democrat, safe and respectable, at a time when Republicans have every structural advantage and have never been more dangerous. Others may have similar platforms, but no one else has that particular vibe, or comes close.

• David Roberts: California's deliberate blackouts were outrageous and harmful. They're going to happen again.

• Aaron Rupar:

  Michael Cohen's testimony about Trump's shady business practices just got strong corroboration: "A new ProPublica investigation found that Trump inflated and deflated his assets when convenient." See: Heather Vogell: Never-before-seen Trump tax documents show major inconsistencies. Vogell and Katherine Sullivan previously wrote (2018-10-17): Here are the Trump projects where Ivanka and her dad misled buyers.

  • Giuliani's $500,000 payout from Fraud Guarantee reveals the hypocrisy of his attacks on Hunter Biden: "Giuliani is staunchly opposed to cashing in on political connections -- unless he's doing it."

• Greg Sargent: Mick Mulvaney's role in the latest Trump scandal just deepened.

• Sabrina Shankman: Trump wants to erase protections in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, a storehouse of carbon.

• Emily Stewart: Kamala Harris's call to suspend Trump's Twitter account, explained. "It's complicated." I rather doubt that. Steve M. This is why it's not worth shutting down Trump's Twitter.

• Matt Stieb:

  • Trump has 'very serious meltdown' in meeting with Democrats: Following the House vote condemning his Syria moves. Trump's tweet version:

    Nancy Pelosi needs help fast! There is either something wrong with her "upstairs," or she just plain doesn't like our great Country. She had a total meltdown in the White House today. It was very sad to watch. Pray for her, she is a very sick person!

  • A fourth associate of Rudy Giuliani has been arrested: After Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Andrey Kukushkin, and now David Correia. As Molly Ivins liked to say, "lay down with dogs; wake up with fleas."

  • Rudy Giuliani pushed Trump to remove Turkish opposition leader from US: Report. Refers to: Carol D Leonnig, et al: Giuliani pressed Trump to eject Muslim cleric from US, a top priority of Turkish president, former officials say: Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan blamed for the 2016 coup attempt.

• Matt Taibbi: In Democratic debate, more evidence that Ukrainegate helps Biden: "The more Democrats rally around Joe Biden, the clearer Donald Trump's path becomes."

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Is this Elizabeth Warren's Democratic Party?

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump told 6 falseholds about Syria in 4 minutes.

  • "Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!": Read Trump's wild letter to Turkey's Erdogan.

  • Former White House official bolsters the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower's allegations: Fiona Hill.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Democrats' debate about automation missed the mark: "Both productivity and economic growth have slowed down, not sped up."

Music Week

Expanded blog post, October archive (in progress).

Music: current count 32212 [32183] rated (+29), 229 [229] unrated (+0).

Cutoff was Sunday evening, after posting Weekend Roundup. Didn't have all of the unpacking done, so unrated count is a bit low. The two A- records came early in the week. Both are available on Bandcamp: Drumming Cellist, Abdallah Ag Oumbadougou. There's a good chance that The Rough Guide to the Roots of Country Music might have hit A- on a second or third play, but not having the booklet, having to spend close to an hour checking dates, and the suspicion that I've heard everything there elsewhere didn't dispose me to be especially generous.

I saw a little bit (maybe 10%) of Ken Burns' Country Music PBS series. Not much there I didn't already know, but thought what I saw was pretty useful -- certainly didn't strike me as distorted and deceptive, like his Jazz series. As far as I can tell, the only product tie-ins are called The Soundtrack, available in both a 2-CD edition and a 5-CD box. I don't like streaming boxes -- actually, I don't have the patience, in large part because it's hard to break them up in to listenable chunks, and there's no booklet to help you keep score -- so I probably won't bother, but the tracklists look impeccable. Probably not as good as Classic Country Music: A Smithsonian Collection (also 5-CD), but better than Columbia Country Classics (from 1990, also 5-CD). Virtually no overlap with Rough Guide, for reasons that hardly need explication.

I read about the Exbats in last week's Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide. If the link doesn't seem to work, maybe you should subscribe? I was pleased to find my previous A- picks for Chance the Rapper and Tyler Childers as good or better. Also that he found more than I did in Black Midi, Chuck Cleaver, Rapsody, and Sleater-Kinney. Some folks have asked about XgauSez. It's on a new schedule, fourth Wednesday of each month, and subscribers will get it delivered to their mailboxes.

Continuing to plug things into my tracking and metacritic files, which is helping me keep up to date. For instance, I can tell you the best-reviewed new records of the week (10-11): Big Thief: Two Hands (15); Kim Gordon: No Home Record (12); Elbow: Giants of All Sizes (8). Best-reviewed new records of the previous week (10-04): Angel Olsen: All Mirrors (24) [*]; Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Ghosteen (22); Danny Brown: Uknowhatimsayin¿ (16) [***]; Wilco: Ode to Joy (10); DIIV: Deceiver (9). New records I most want to track down: Yazz Ahmed: Polyhymnia; Jaimie Branch: Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise; Bill Frisell: Harmony; Abdullah Ibrahim: Dream Time; Chris Knight: Almost Daylight; L'Orange & Jeremiah Jae: Complicate Your Life With Violence; Kelsey Waldon: White Noise/White Lines.

New records reviewed this week:

• Rez Abbasi: A Throw of Dice by the Silent Ensemble (2017 [2019], Whirlwind): [cd]: B+(*) [10-19]
• Mats Åleklint/Per-Åke Holmlander/Paal Nilssen-Love: Fish & Steel (2018 [2019], PNL): [bc]: B+(***)
• Simone Baron & Arco Belo: The Space Between Disguises (2019, GenreFluid): [cd]: B- [11-08]
• Katerina Brown: Mirror (2019, Mellowtone Music): [cd]: B [10-18]
• Cashmere Cat: Princess Catgirl (2019, Mad Love/Interscope, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Drumming Cellist [Kristijan Krajncan]: Abraxas (2019, Sazas): [cd]: A-
• David Finck: Bassically Jazz (2019, Burton Avenue Music): [r]: B+(*)
• Ras Kass: Soul on Ice 2 (2019, Mello Music Group): [r]: B+(***)
• Krokofant: Q (2019, Rune Grammofon): [r]: B
• Remy Le Boeuf: Light as a Word (2019, Outside In Music): [cdr]: B
• Little Brother: May the Lord Watch (2019, Imagine Nation Music/For Members Only/Empire): [r]: B+(**)
• Joe McPhee/Paal Nilssen-Love: Song for the Big Chief (2017 [2019], PNL): [bc]: B+(**)
• Bernie Mora & Tangent: No Agenda (2019, Rhombus): [cd]: C+
• Poncho Sanchez: Trane's Delight (2019, Concord Picante): [r]: B
• Louis Sclavis: Characters on a Wall (2018 [2019], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Mike Stern-Jeff Lorber Fusion: Eleven (2019, Concord): [r]: C+
• Tinariwen: Amadjar (2019, Anti-): [r]: B+(**)
• Kiki Valera: Vivencias En Clave Cubana (2018 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(***) [10-16]
• Rodney Whitaker: All Too Soon: The Music of Duke Ellington (2017 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(***) [10-16]
• Barrence Whitfield Soul Savage Arkestra: Songs From the Sun Ra Cosmos (2019, Modern Harmonic): [r]: B+(**)
• Carrie Wicks: Reverie (2019, OA2): [cd]: B+(*) [10-16]
• Young M.A: Herstory in the Making (2019, M.A Music/3D): [r]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• The Exbats: E Is 4 Exbats (2016-18 [2019], Burger): [r]: B+(***)
• Abdallah Ag Oumbadougou: Anou Malane (1994 [2019], Sahel Sounds): [r]: A-
• The Rough Guide to the Roots of Country Music: Reborn and Remastered (1926-33 [2019], World Music Network): [r]: B+(***)
• Cecil Taylor: Mysteries: Indent: Antioch College/Yellow Springs, Ohio/March 11, 1973 (1973 [2018], Black Sun): [r]: B+(***)
• Cecil Taylor: Mysteries: Untitled (1961-76 [2019], Black Sun): [r]: B+(**)

Old music:

• The Exbats: A Guide to the Health Issues Affecting Rescue Hens (2016, Burger): [r]: B+(**)
• The Exbats: I've Got the Hots for Charlie Watts (2018, Burger): [r]: B+(***)
• Rodney Whitaker: Ballads and Blues: The Brooklyn Sessions (1998, Criss Cross): [r]: B+(**)
• Barrence Whitfield & the Savages: Soul Flowers of Titan (2018, Bloodshot): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Binker Golding: Abstractions of Reality Past and Incredible Feathers (Gearbox)
• Dan McCarthy: City Abstract (Origin) [10-16]
• Mute: Mute (Fresh Sound New Talent) [12-13]
• One O'Clock Lab Band: Lab 2019 (UNT) [11-22]
• Kiki Valera: Vivencias En Clave Cubana (Origin) [10-16]
• Rodney Whitaker: All Too Soon: The Music of Duke Ellington (Origin) [10-16]
• Carrie Wicks: Reverie (OA2) [10-16]

Weekend Roundup

Trump has gotten a lot of flack this week for his decision allowing Turkey to invade Syria. Turkey's attack is directed not at the Syrian government or ISIS but at the Kurdish militias in norther Syria, which Turkish strong-man Erdogan regards as a potential security threat, as presumingly giving aid and comfort to Turkey's own Kurdish minority. The Kurdish militias had not only opposed the Syrian government, which hardly anyone in America has a kind word for, but also operated as allies or proxies in America's war against ISIS. Hence, the complaints you hear most often are that Trump has abandoned a trusted US ally, and that the invasion is likely to head to a humanitarian disaster -- the emphasis shifting from neocons to their liberal enablers. The only support Trump has found has come from paleocons like Rand Paul who want the US to draw back from foreign wars, but don't much care if the rest of the world destroys itself.

One problem is that Trump (or for that matter Obama) has never had a coherent strategy on Syria, or for that matter anywhere else in the Middle East. A reasonable goal would be to maintain peace among stable governments, biased where possible toward broad-based prosperity with power sharing and respect for human rights. Obama might have agreed with that line at the start of Arab Spring, but he soon found that ran against the main drivers of American Middle East policy: Israel's war stance, the Arabian oil oligarchies, Iranian exiles, arms merchants, and scattered pockets of Christians (except in Palestine) -- forces that had never given more than occasional lip-service to democracy and human rights, and were flat-out opposed to any whiff of socialism.

Obama was able to help nudge Mubarak aside in Egypt, but when the Egyptians elected the wrong leaders, he had second thoughts, and didn't object to the military restoring a friendly dictatorship. Obama had no such influence in Libya and Syria, so when their leaders violently put demonstrations down, some Americans saw an opportunity to overthrow unfriendly regimes through armed conflict. It is fair to say that Obama was ambivalent about this, but he wound up overseeing a bombing campaign that killed Qaddafi in Libya, and he provided less overt support to some of the Syrian opposition forces, and this led to many other parties intervening in Syria, with different and often conflicting agendas.

It's worth stressing that nothing the US has attempted in the Middle East has worked, even within the limited and often incoherent goals that have supposedly guided American policy, let alone advancing the more laudable goals of peace and broad-based prosperity. Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that the US is incapable of standing up popular government after invasion and civil war. Libya suggests that ignoring a broken country doesn't work any better. But Syria is turning out to be an even more complete disaster, as the ancien regime remains as the only viable government. Assad owes his survival to Russia's staunch support, but also to the US (and the Kurds), who defeated his most potent opposition: ISIS.

What needs to be done now is to implement a cease fire, to halt all foreign efforts to provide military support for anti-Assad forces, to reassert the Assad government over all of Syria, to convince Assad not to take reprisals against disarmed opponents, and to start rebuilding and repatriating exiles. Trump's greenlighting of the Turkish invasion does none of this, and makes any progress that much harder -- not that there is any reason to think that Trump has the skills and temperament to negotiate an end to the conflict, even without this blunder.

The only American politician who begins to have the skills to deal with problems like Syria is Bernie Sanders, because he is the only one to understand that America's interests -- peace, prosperity, cooperation everywhere -- are best served when nations everywhere choose governments that serve the best interests of all of their own peoples (socialism). Everyone else is more/less stuck in ruts which insist on projecting the so-called American values of crony capitalism and militarism, the goal to make the world subservient to the interests of neoliberal capital. In this regard, Trump differs from the pack only in his reluctance to dress up greedy opportunism with high-minded aspirations (e.g., Bush's feminist program for Afghanistan). Trump's freedom from cant could be refreshing, but like all of his exercises in political incorrectness, it mostly serves to reveal what a callous and careless creature he is.

Short of Sanders, it might be best to concede that America is not the solution to the world's woes, that indeed it is a major problem, so much so that in many cases the most helpful thing we could do is to withdraw, including support for other countries' interventions. Syria is an obvious good place to start. On the other hand, replacing American arms and aims with Turkish ones won't help anyone (not even the Turks).

PS: After writing the above, Trump ordered the last US troops out of Syria. That in itself is good news, but everything else is spiraling rapidly out of control. Meanwhile, Syrian Kurds are looking for new allies, and finding Assad (see Jason Ditz: Syrian Kurds, Damascus reach deal in Russia-backed talks).

Some scattered links on this (some of which are just examples of what I've been complaining about):

• Doug Bandow: America doesn't belong in Syria. A paleoconservative example; also note: Scott Ritter: Why the Syrian Kurds aren't necessarily our friends. Finding friends has been especially vexing for neocons out to intervene in Syria.

• Patrick Cockburn: Kurdish fighters always feared Trump would be a treacherous ally.

• Chas Danner: The Trump-blessed war in Northeastern Syria is already a full-blown disaster.

• Karen DeYoung/Dan Lamothe/Liz Sly: Trump orders withdrawal of US forces from northern Syria, days after Pentagon downplays possibility.

• Hassan Hassan: Trump and Erdogan risk a resurgent Isis thanks to their reckless in Syria.

• Fred Kaplan:

• Trump just gave Turkey an open invitation to slaughter the Syrian Kurds: "Trump's betrayal of the Kurds isn't just immoral -- there's no strategic reason for it."

• James LaPorta: Official who heard call says Trump got 'rolled' by Turkey and 'has no spine'.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Trump's betrayal of the Kurds may be the dumbest move of his presidency. Dumb, sure, but "dumbest" is a tall order.

  • Lindsey Graham said Syrian Kurds were 'threat' to Turkey in prank call.

  • Turkey: Trump knew 'precisely' the scope of our attack plans in Syria.

  • Trump's (insane) conflict of interest in the Turkey-Syria dispute.

• Wesley Morgan: Pentagon sends new wave of troops to Saudi Arabia even as Trump calls for ending wars.

• Paul R Pillar: Donald Trump's Syria withdrawal: Are we asking the right questions?

• Heidi Przybyla/Anna Schechter: Donald Trump's longtime business connections in Turkey back in the spotlight.

• Adam K Raymond: Trump defends Syria policy in series of wild, authoritarian tweets.

• Michael Safi/Bethan McKernan/Julian Borger: US warns Turkey of red lines as Syria offensive death toll mounts.

• Eric Schmitt/Thomas Gibbons-Neff/Ben Hubbard/Helene Cooper: Pullback leaves Green Berets feeling 'ashamed,' and Kurdish allies describing 'betrayal'.

• Jonah Shepp: Trump and Erdogan are only increasing the odds of an ISIS comeback. Not that that is something they might worry about.

• Robin Wright:

  • Defying the world, Turkey launches a war against a US ally in Syria.

  • Trump's muddled Syria policy opens the way for more war in the Middle East.

Some scattered links this week:

• Andrew Bacevich: High crimes and misdemeanors of the fading American Century.

• Jared Bernstein: The climate crisis and the failure of economics.

• Jonathan Blitzer: Why Trump's fourth Secretary of Homeland Security just resigned: Kevin McAleenan, "acting" Secretary for six months now..

• John Cassidy:

  • Rudy Giuliani's two indicted associates could have a lot to say.

  • What Ed Meese's Presidential Medal of Freedom says about the GOP and impeachment.

    Yes, that Ed Meese: the longtime Reagan aide and conservative legal activist who, when serving as Attorney General, from 1985 to 1988, was directly implicated in not one but three major scandals -- the secret sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, a corruption scam involving efforts by the construction firm Bechtel to build an Iraqi oil pipeline, and an even bigger scam involving the allocation of U.S. military contracts to a New York company called Wedtech. Meese was never charged with any crimes, but the evidence suggested that he misled Congress about Reagan's knowledge of the Iran-Contra scheme, which Oliver North ran out of the White House; turned a blind eye to the bribery of foreign governments in the Bechtel case; and did favors from the White House for his close friend E. Robert Wallach, a lobbyist for Wedtech, who, in 1989, was sentenced to six years in prison for racketeering and fraud. In 1988, half a dozen senior Justice Department officials, including the Deputy Attorney General and the head of the criminal division, resigned to protest Meese's leadership of the department.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani under criminal investigation.

  • Trump bored by his own speech, just wants to talk about TV shows.

  • Republicans: Don't impeach Trump for one mistake he promises to keep doing.

  • In deranged, quasi-legal rant, Trump calls impeachment unconstitutional.

  • Why impeaching President Trump is popular.

• Nancy Cook: Impeachment tentacles spread throughout Trump's team.

• Judy Fahys: What the BLM shake-up could mean for public lands and their climate impact.

• John Feffer: Trump's undeclared state of emergency: "Trump is counting on his base to endorse his increasingly open law-breaking."

• Tara Golshan: Trump signed an executive order about how much he hates Medicare-for-all: "The order's intent is to promote Medicare Advantage but it has a lot of vague language" -- mostly intended to undermine the Medicare Trump claims he defends.

• Constance Grady: Ellen DeGeneres, George W Bush, and the death of uncritical niceness.

• Umair Irfan:

  • Hot, dry, and windy conditions in California have sparked big fires.

  • PG&E's power shutoff in California shows the inequities of climate risks.

• Sarah Jones:

  • Beto O'Rourke doesn't know much about the Constitution: Specifically, First Amendment clauses on freedom of religion and speech.

  • Nobody should be friends with George W Bush.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • John Bolton is gone, but somehow he's still killing perfectly good arms-control treaties: The Open Skies Treaty.

  • How Trump's domestic scandals make international crises worse.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Trump had a bad day in the courts.

  • Why Trump's evangelical allies are enraged over his betrayal of the Kurds.

• Jen Kirby: US and China reach a "phase one" trade deal: "President Donald Trump announced an agreement to delay tariffs and for China to buy agricultural products."

• PR Lockhart: "They murdered this woman": Texans outraged after an officer shoots a black woman in her own home.

• German Lopez: The case for prosecuting the Sacklers and other opioid executives.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • Trump claims Congress can't investigate his finances. He just lost big in court.

  • Trump's resistance to the impeachment inquiry is a genuine constitutional crisis.

  • Trump claims he is immune from criminal investigation. A federal judge just smacked that claim down.

  • The new Supreme Court term starts today. Expect fireworks on abortion, LGBTQ rights, and immigration.

• Ella Nilsen: Bernie Sanders takes aim at the DNC with his new anti-corruption plan.

• Charles P Pierce:

  • This is going to be the worst, most racist presidential campaign since 1868.

  • The political systems of this country are woefully unprepared to deal with the climate crisis.

  • The Ukraine scandal was the lid on the Trup sewer and now it's all spilling out.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • CNN reports that Rudy Giuliani's financial dealings are under investigation by prosecutors.

  • Rudy Giuliani's fixers for the Ukraine caper just got arrested: "Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were arrested for campaign finance violations while trying to leave the country."

  • Gordon Sondland, the ambassador at the center of the Trump impeachment inquiry, explained.

  • Trump just refused any cooperation with the House impeachment inquiry.

• Robert Reich: Donald Trump: xenophobe in public, international mobster in private.

• David Roberts: This climate problem is bigger than cars and much harder to solve:

  Heavy industry is responsible for around 22 percent of global CO2 emissions. Forty-two percent of that -- about 10 percent of global emissions -- comes from combustion to produce large amounts of high-temperature heat for industrial products like cement, steel, and petrochemicals.

  To put that in perspective, industrial heat's 10 percent is greater than the CO2 emissions of all the world's cars (6 percent) and planes (2 percent) combined. Yet, consider how much you hear about electric vehicles. Consider how much you hear about flying shame. Now consider how much you hear about . . . industrial heat.

  Not much, I'm guessing. But the fact is, today, virtually all of that combustion is fossil-fueled, and there are very few viable low-carbon alternatives. For all kinds of reasons, industrial heat is going to be one of the toughest nuts to crack, carbon-wise.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's Minneapolis rally was a window into how ugly his 2020 campaign will be.

  • The latest Fox News impeachment poll contains remarkably grim news for President Trump.

  • The talking points Republicans are using to defend Trump are at odds with reality.

• Basav Sen: Dig beneath the world's far-right governments -- you'll find fossil fuels.

• David K Shipler: Punishing the poor for being hungry: "The Trump administration wages war on food stamps."

• Jesse Singal: Anti-free-speechers still aren't taking their own arguments seriously. A critique of Andrew Marantz, author of Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, as excerpted in Free speech is killing us: "Noxious language is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?"

• Matt Taibbi: We're in a permanent coup. Getting a little paranoid here, arguing that as bad as Trump is, the "U.S. intelligence community" that seems out to get him is actually more sinister.

• Nick Turse: The forgotten trauma of a forgotten war: "As the world looks away, death stalks the Democratic Republic of Congo."

• Anya van Wagtendonk:

  • Hunter Biden resigns from a Chinese firm amid controversy over his business dealings.

  • As the Ukraine probe heats up, Trump and Giuliani are sticking together. Mostly.

  • The former ambassador to Ukraine says she was ousted because of her anti-corruption work.

• Kenneth P Vogel: Giuliani's Ukraine team: In search of influence, dirt and money.

• David Walsh: It took decades, but the anti-New Deal crusaders have triumphed: "A decades-long campaign by a handful of well-heeled foundations has succeeded in laundering ideas through academia into law."

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump says he's ending the US role in Middle East wars. He's sending 1,800 troops to Saudi Arabia.

  • Lindsey Graham is leading a Senate bill to punish Turkey with crushing sanctions.

  • Trump may soon ban Russian observation flights over US military bases. That's a bad thing. "Prepare yourself for the death of the Open Skies Treaty." That treaty also allows the US observation flights over Russian military bases, which is the main thing the US would lose in ending the treaty. It also requires that observation data be shared among signatory nations, so it makes it possible for (e.g.) Ukraine to monitor Russian military positions.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Texas isn't a swing state -- but it matters.

  • The raging controversy over the NBA, China, and the Hong Kong protests, explained.

  • 9 scenarios for how the Trump-Ukraine impeachment process could end.

Daily Log

Update: Actual configuration, purchased 10/15:

• AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 8-Core 3.7GHz Socket AM4 PM 16976: [$199.99]
• ASRock X570 Steel Legend AM4 AMD X570 Motherboard Combo w/CPU: $379.98
• G.SKILL TridentZ 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 3000: $289.99
• Intel 660p Series M.2 2280 1TB PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 3D2, QLC SSD: $99.99
• Corsair RM750 750W ATX12V v2.52/EPS12V v2.92 Full Modular Power Supply: $114.99
• Lite-On DVD Burner Black SATA iHAS124-14 OEM: $16.99+$1.99

Thought I'd do a little new computer shopping (Newegg). Possible configuration:

• CPU: Compare to 2012: AMD Fx-8150 PM 8250 $199.99; top passmark now: 32,946; best sub-$200: 16,976 (AMD Ryzen 7 2700X):
  • AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core 3.8GHz Socket AM4 PM 31847: $564.99
  • AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core 3.6GHz Socket AM4 PM 23883: $329.99
  • [*] AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 8-Core 3.7GHz Socket AM4 PM 16976: $199.99
  • AMD Ryzen 7 2700 8-Core 3.2GHz Socket AM4 PM 15080: $178.99
  • AMD Ryzen 7 1700X 8-Core 3.4GHz Socket AM4 PM 14812: $169.99
  • AMD Ryzen 5 2600X 6-Core 3.6GHz Socket AM4 PM 14362: $159.99
  • AMD Ryzen 5 2600 6-Core 3.4GHz Socket AM4 PM ?: $119.99
  • AMD Ryzen 5 1600 6-Core 3.2GHz AM4 PM 12279: $114.82
  • AMD Ryzen 3 3200G 4-Core 3.6GHz AM4 PM 8016: $94.99
  • AMD Ryzen 3 2200G 4-Core 3.5GHz AM4 PM 7324: $87.99
  • AMD Ryzen 3 1200 4-Core 3.1GHz AM4 PM 6792: $59.99
  • AMD FX-8350 Vishera 8-Core 4.0GHz Socket AM3+ PM ?: $197.29
  • AMD FX-6350 PM 6954: $?
• AM4 Motherboards: All AMD4 ATX, most X570 chip set:
  • ASUS ROG STRIX X570-E Gaming: 4x288 memory slots (128GB Max), 2xPCI Express 4.0x16, 1xPCI Express, 8xSATA 6GBs, Radeon Vega Graphics, multi-VGA, SupremeFX High Definition Audio, 2.5G LAN, Wireless 2x2 Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth, 7xUSB 3.2: $326.99
  • ASRock X570 Taichi: $299.99
  • ASRock X470 Taichi: $269.99
  • [*] ASRock X570 Steel Legend WiFi: $199.99
  • ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Plus: $199.59
  • ASUS Prime X470-Pro: 64GB RAM max (DDR4 4x288, 2400-3600), video, audio, 1GB LAN: $149.99
  • ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4: $148.99
  • ASUS ROG STRIX B-450-F Gaming: 64GB Max, PCI Express 3.0x16, : $129.99
• AM4 Motherboards: All AMD4 Micro-ATX:
  • ASUS TUF B-450M-Plus Gaming: AMD 8450 chipset, 4x288 DDR4 (64GB max), 1 PCI Express 2.0x16, 1 PCI Express 2.0x1, 2+4xSATA 6GB/s, Radeon Vega graphics, 10/100/1000 LAN: $99.36
• RAM: DDR4 SDRAM:
  • Corsair Vengeance LPX 128GB (4x32GB) DDR4 2400: $579.99
  • Corsair Vengeance LPX 64GB (2x32GB) DDR4 3000: $324.99
  • Corsair Vengeance LPX 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 3200: $319.99
  • Corsair Vengeance LPX 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 3000: $285.99
  • G.SKILL TridentZ 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 3600: $329.99
  • [*] G.SKILL TridentZ 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 3000: $289.99
  • G.SKILL Ripjaws V 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 3600: $289.99
  • G.SKILL Ripjaws V 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 3200: X[$249.99] $322.05
  • G.SKILL Ripjaws V 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 2666: $269.99
  • G.SKILL Aegis 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 2133: $219.99
• SSD:; SSD PCI Express 4.0 Hyper M.2 SSD is faster:
  • Samsung 860 EVO 2.5" 1TB SATA III: $129.99
  • Western Digital 3D NAND 2.5" 1TB SATA III: $114.99
  • Intel 660p M.2 2280 1TB PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 3D2: $109.99
  • Samsung 860 EVO 2.5" 500GB SATA III: $74.99
• Cases: ATX
  • Corsair Crystal 570X Glass Mid Tower: $189.97
  • LIAN LI PC-011 Dynamic Razer Edition Mid Tower: $164.99
  • Phanteks Eclipse P600S Antracite Gray Steel/Tempered Glass Mid Tower: $149.99+$6.99
  • Thermaltake Core X71 Tempered Glass Full Tower: $142.52
  • Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel Mid Tower: $132.90
  • Phanteks Enthoo PH-ES614P_BK Black Steel/Plastic Full Tower: $99.99+$6.99
  • Antec Performance Series P110 Luce Mid Tower: $99.99
  • Antec Three Hundred Two Black Steel Mid Tower: $94.77
  • Corsair Carbide SPEC-06 Black Steel/Plastic/Tempered Glass Mid Tower: $89.99
  • Corsair Carbide SPEC-05 Black Steel/Plastic/Acrylic Mid Tower: $65.99
  • DIYPC D480-W-RGB White Mid Tower: $58.99
  • Fractal Design focus G White Mid Tower: $54.97+$7.99
• Power Supplies: ATX12V/EPS12V, full modular:
  • Corsair RMx series: 1000W: $199.98; 850W: $129.99; 750W: $119.89; 650W: $114.99; 550W: $99.99
  • Corsair RM series: 850W: $124.98; 750W: $114.99; 650W: $104.99
  • Corsair CX series: 550W: $64.99; 450W: $59.99
  • EVGA SuperNOVA: 1000W: $184.37; 850W: $139.99; 750W: $160.99, 650W: $161.98; 550W: $109.99
  • Thermaltake Toughpower Grand: 850W: $124.00; 750W: $94.99; 650W: 92.99
  • Thermaltake Smart Pro: 750W: $86.00
• CD/DVD Burners: SATA
  • ASUS DRW-24B1ST: $22.94

Music Week

Expanded blog post, October archive (in progress).

Music: current count 32183 [32156] rated (+27), 229 [219] unrated (+10).

Slow start on the week, partly because I flushed Monday's listening out in September Streamnotes, and ended this Sunday night. Partly because the Kevin Sun 2-CD album sat in the changer four days while I slowly made up my mind. Sun's album never quite matched his Trio debut, nor is the George Coleman album quite as terrific as his The Master Speaks, but in the end both came close enough. Among the also-rans, Laurie Anderson's spoken word over Tibetan ghost music came closest, and might deserve further attention. Turns out Phil Overeem likes the album a lot (number 9 on his latest list. Also found my two good vault albums there. More to follow next week.

I added those and a few others to my metacritic file. In turn I checked out several of the better-rated albums I hadn't bothered with, but didn't find I enjoyed it much. Most I'm pretty sure of, but artists like Angel Olsen, Bon Iver, and Jessica Pratt just make me wonder if I'm getting too old for this shit. Also in the "don't do it for me" category are fairly ordinary rockers like Cherry Glazerr, Sleater-Kinney, and Girl Band.

Got a lot of mail last week (today's take is listed below but not counted above). I'm noting future release dates as I get them, also when I do reviews. The queue is usually sorted FIFO, as I suspect keeping it sorted by release date would be a big hassle. Upcoming week may be less than usual, as I have some house projects, plus a bit of cooking coming up. Then some medical shit, before Trump takes that away, too.

New records reviewed this week:

• Laurie Anderson/Tenzin Choegyal/Jesse Paris Smith: Songs From the Bardo (2019, Smithsonian Folkways): [r]: B+(***)
• Ben Bennett/Zach Darrup/Jack Wright: Never (2018, Palliative): [bc]: B+(*)
• Bon Iver: I,I (2019, Jagjaguwar): [r]: B
• Danny Brown: Uknowhatimsayin¿ (2019, Warp): [r]: B+(***)
• Cherry Glazerr: Stuffed & Ready (2019, Secretly Canadian): [r]: B
• George Coleman: The Quartet (2019, Smoke Sessions): [r]: A-
• The Comet Is Coming: The Afterlife (2019, Impulse!): [r]: B+(*)
• Kris Davis: Diatom Ribbons (2018 [2019], Pyroclastic): [r]: B+(***)
• Girl Band: The Talkies (2019, Rough Trade): [r]: B+(*)
• Robert Glasper: Fuck Yo Feelings (2019, Loma Vista): [r]: B+(*)
• Mika: My Name Is Michael Holbrook (2019, Republic/Virgin EMI): [r]: B+(**)
• Simon Nabatov: Readings: Red Cavalry (2018 [2019], Leo): [r]: B+(*)
• Simon Nabatov: Readings: Gileya Revisited (2018 [2019], Leo): [r]: B+(*)
• Angel Olsen: All Mirrors (2019, Jagjaguwar): [r]: B+(*)
• Jessica Pratt: Quiet Signs (2019, Mexican Summer): [r]: B-
• Carmen Sandim: Play Doh (2019, Ropeadope): [cd]: B+(*) [10-25]
• Sleater-Kinney: The Center Won't Hold (2019, Mom + Pop): [r]: B
• Tyshawn Sorey and Marilyn Crispell: The Adornment of Time (2018 [2019], Pi): [cd]: B+(**)
• Kevin Sun: The Sustain of Memory (2019, Endectomorph Music, 2CD): [cd]: A- [11-15]
• Tegan and Sara: Hey, I'm Just Like You (2019, Warner Brothers): [r]: B+(**)
• Andrés Vial/Dezron Douglas/Eric McPherson: Gang of Three (2019, Chromatic Audio): [cd]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Fania Goes Psychedelic (1967-71 [2019], Craft Latino): [r]: B+(***)
• World Spirituality Classics 2: The Time for Peace Is Now (1970s [2019], Luaka Bop): [r]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Bertrand Denzler Cluster: Y? (1998 [2000], Leo Lab): [r]: B+(***)
• Bertrand Denzler/Norbert Pfammatter: NanoCluster 02/2000 (2000, Leo Lab): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Rez Abbasi: A Throw of Dice by the Silent Ensemble (Whirlwind): October 19
• Katerina Brown: Mirror (Mellowtone Music): October 18
• Drumming Cellist [Kristijan Krajncan]: Abraxas (Sazas)
• Lorenzo Feliciati/Michele Rabbia: Antikythera (RareNoise): cdr, October 25
• Satoko Fujii/Joe Fonda: Four (Long Song): November 8
• Francesco Guerri: Su Mimmi Non Si Spara! (RareNoise): cdr, October 25
• Roger Kellaway: The Many Open Minds of Roger Kellaway (IPO): November 1
• Doug MacDonald & the Tarmac Ensemble: Jazz Marathon 4: Live at Hangar 18 (DMAC): October 15
• Bernie Mora & Tangent: No Agenda (Rhombus)
• The Niro Featuring Gary Lucas: The Complete Jeff Buckley and Gary Lucas Songbook (Esordisco): November 8
• Northern Ranger: Eastern Stranger (self-released, EP)
• Miles Okazaki: The Sky Below (Pi): October 25
• Anne Phillips: Live at the Jazz Bakery (Conawago)
• Chip Stephens/Stenn Wilson: Sadness & Soul (Capri): October 18
• Dave Stryker: Eight Track Christmas (Strikezone): November 1
• Esbjörn Svensson Trio: E.S.T. Live in Gothenburg (2001, ACT, 2CD): October 25
• Gebhard Ullmann/Hans Lüdemann/Oliver Potratz/Eric Schaefer: MikroPULS (Intuition): October 18
• Brahja Waldman: Brahja (RR Gems): cdr

Weekend Roundup

Once again, ran out of time before I could get around to an introduction. The impeachment story rolls on, and Trump is getting weirder and freakier than ever. Meanwhile, more bad shit is happening than I can get a grip on. And what's likely to happen when the new Supreme Court gets down to business. Once you tote up all the damage Trump's election directly causes, you need to look up "opportunity costs."

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem: A second whistleblower on Trump and Ukraine is coming forward.

• Michael Amia: Trump wants to shoot people in the legs. The United States' closest ally already does that. It's long been clear to me that a big part of the love US right-wingers have for Israel is envy: they wish their own country to become as brutal, as imperious, as militarist as Israel has proven to be.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • The economy is slowing down. That's bad for Trump.: "The latest jobs report is . . . not great." For more, see: Dean Baker: Job growth remains slow in September.

  • Trump just expanded drug testing to hundreds of thousands of workers.

  • Warren just released the most ambitious labor reform platform of the 2020 campaign.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • The only issue left is Trump's 'absolute right' to solicit collusion.

  • Trump just committed more high crimes on the White House lawn.

  • Trump recommends many books but never says he actually read them.

  • Pence: I participated in the Ukraine Plot but only as a patsy.

  • Intelligence Inspector General to GOP: You know nothing of my work; alt title: "Trump-picked Intelligence I.G.debunks GOP conspiracy theory."

  • Is William Barr going after Trump's 'Deep State' enemies?

• Michelle Chen: The US border security industry could be worth $740 billion by 2023. A shocking number, but it was already worth $305 billion in 2011.

• Jelani Cobb: Why Trump, facing impeachment, warns of civil war.

• Andrew Cockburn: Just how swampy are US-Saudi arms deals?

• Patrick Cockburn: The post-Saddam Hussein settlement in Iraq is on the brink of collapse.

• David Daley: How to get away with gerrymandering.

• Ryan Devereaux: Mining the future: Climate change, migration, and militarization in Arizona's borderlands.

• Jason Ditz: US test fires ICBM, declares it a 'visible message of national security' ("which flew 4,200 miles from California to the Marshall Islands"): a non-story compared to North Korea test-firing smaller missiles or China "showing off arms in a parade," despite being pointed toward China and North Korea.

• Harry Enten: Trump's impeachment polling is historically unprecedented.

• James K Galbraith: This 50-year-old economic book helps explain the corporate republic we live in: On James K Galbraith's The New Industrial State (1967).

• David Gardner: Donald Trump's 'maximum pressure' campaign against Iran has backfired.

• Matt Gertz: Team Trump's 2020 strategy is Clinton Cash all over again. But wouldn't the likelihood of it working be dependent on the Democrats nominating a candidate like Hillary Clinton?

• Masha Gessen: The difference between leaking and whistle-blowing in the Trump White House. Refers to a new book by Tom Mueller on the history of whistle-blowing: Crisis of Conscience, and notes:

  An effective whistle-blower stays below the radar while methodically collecting information; staying power and an ability to remain inconspicuous are key. The person who blew the whistle on Trump and Ukraine appears to possess both of these qualities, and others: the complaint is meticulously documented and worded with exquisite care. By its very existence, the document blows the whistle on the Trumpian style -- hasty, sloppy, overblown, and unsubstantiated.

  Other opponents of Trumpism within the government have leaked rather than blown the whistle. No sooner was the President inaugurated than members of the White House staff told reporters that the President acted like a "clueless child," had no interest in intelligence reports, spent his time watching TV, and was largely kept out of the decision-making process. These stories, which began in January of 2017, quickly grew familiar, and the more bizarre the reality they described, the greater their normalizing effect.

• Tara Golshan/Ella Nilsen: Elizabeth Warren's new remedy for corruption: a tax on lobbying.

• Dana Goodyear: Trump's war on California and the climate.

• Conn Hallinan: How the Saudi oil field attack overturned America's apple cart: "For all their overwhelming firepower, the U.S. and its allies can cause a lot of misery in the Middle East, but still can't govern the course of events."

• Sarah Jones:

  • Who ordered this Clinton comeback tour: "All she is doing is making herself radioactive."

  • What Bret Kavanaugh means to conservatives.

• Peter Kafka: The 2 companies that place all those ads at the bottom of webpages are combining: "Taboola is buying Outbrain."

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Some impeachment-shy Democrats just fear it will backfire, as do some impeachment-shy "progressive" pundits. One worry is no doubt Trump campaign to drop bomb on Biden in early voting states: Trump's reelection effort "will air over $1 million in anti-Biden commercials in Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada" -- probably the most blatant attempt to influence other party primary voting since Nixon's "dirty tricks" campaign against Edmund Muskie in 1972. This almost looks like Trump baited the Democrats into impeaching him, just for the free publicity.

  • What will Republicans do if Trump goes down? A rather silly exercise in handicapping the Republican bench. Trump is more likely to die suddenly or become debilitated than to be convicted by this Senate, in which case Republicans could scramble but would probably figure Pence the best shot at saving Trump's legacy. The fact is that Trump not only owns the public perception of the Party, he's the only one with proven ability to convince a significant bloc of far-from-wealthy voters to cut their own throats. Kilgore also contributed to Is there any chance the GOP is about to turn on Trump? Uh, no.

  • Here we go: Supreme Court accepts first big post-Kavanaugh abortion case.

  • Will progressive Democrats 'move to the center' when facing Trump? Could be, but Sanders and Warren have spelled out their platforms so extensively that it will be hard for them to run on anything else -- at most, they'll concede that some things they want will be lesser priorities as long as significant numbers of Democrats aren't on board. Should they is another question. It looks to me like Trump's going to try to run to the left of centrist Democrats, presenting them as corrupt and himself as the champion of working people and as the defender of Social Security and Medicare. Moreover, he'll make mincemeat of any Democrat as hawkish as Hillary Clinton. Sure, it will all be lies, but he's done it before, and it's not clear how much credibility four years of broken promises has cost him. The one Democrat he can't feint left of is Sanders, and in that case he may not try, figuring red-baiting will do the trick. The big advantage that Sanders has, even over Warren, is that no one doubts his sincerity or his integrity, and up against Trump those are the characteristics that matter most. Of course, compared to Trump, any Democrat should be able to score those points, but moving to the lame, corrupt, ineffective center won't help them. Only moving to the left will.

  • Nixon's defenders claimed he was a victim of a 'coup.' So did Clinton's. Only a story now because Trump's claiming that too -- started, in fact, back during the Mueller inquiry.

• Carolyn Kormann: How oceans rise and die on a warming planet: As Jane Lubchenco, a former US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator, puts it: "The ocean today is higher, warmer, more acidic, less productive, and it holds less oxygen."

  As a result, coral reefs are bleaching a ghostly white, and, although some can recover, others are dying at a rapid rate. Monster storms are persistent. Marine heat waves -- projected to increase fiftyfold if current trends continue -- are depleting fisheries. Ocean acidification is severely harming all sorts of species, which then harms people, too, since many of these species are critical to local economies. Glaciers are melting faster with consequences for people in the mountains and on the coasts alike.

• Anita Kumar: A Trump hotel mystery: Giant reservations followed by empty rooms: "The House is investigating whether groups tried to curry favor with Trump by booking rooms at his hotels but never using them."

• Jonathan Lethem: Snowden in the labyrinth: Review of Edward Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record.

• Eric Levitz:

  • The president is a corrupt, bloodthirsty tyrant, reports suggest.

  • Left-wing policies aren't risky for Democrats. Unpopular ones are.

  • Harvard's affirmative action for rich white exposes myth of meritocracy.

• Dylan Matthews: Why almost no one is guilty of treason, explained: "Adam Schiff isn't guilty of treason, nor is Donald Trump, and neither is just about any other person you can think of." Then why not just expunge the word from our vocabulary?

• Jane Mayer: The invention of the conspiracy theory on Biden and Ukraine.

• Ian Millhiser: Trump's DOJ just escalated the fight over whether religion is a license to discriminate.

• Jeremy Mohler: This California highway boondoggle shows why we need more infrastructure funding: And why "public-private partnerships are a poor replacement for robust federal investment in infrastructure."

• Benjamin Mueller: Jeremy Corbyn or no-deal Brexit? The UK might have to choose.

• Ella Nilsen:

  • Democrats have subpoenaed the White House in the next phase of their impeachment inquiry.

  • Warren and Sanders raised significantly more money than Biden in the third quarter. Biden came in fourth, also trailing Pete Buttigieg. Or, as ABC put it, Warren surpasses Biden in latest fundraising haul but falls short of Sanders. I've seen a meme (probably from the Sanders campaign, but I can't find a viable link) which lists the "top donors by profession" for Biden (president of company, managing partner, real estate developer, lawyer, investor), Warren (psychologist, scientist, editor, librarian, psychotherapist), and Sanders (teacher, nurse, farmer, truck driver, waiter/waitress, construction). For a similar breakdown along these lines, see Karl Evers-Hillstrom: Sanders or Warren: Why gets more support from working-class donors?

• Toluse Olorunnpia/Amy Goldstein: Trump attacks Democrats' health care plans and pledges to protect Medicare during political speech to Florida retirees. The big lie is on, but note that Trump is signaling that he intends to run to the left of Democrats on health care, even though what he means is something completely different.

  President Trump blasted his potential Democratic presidential rivals in a highly political speech here Thursday, telling a group of senior citizens that "maniac" Democrats would rip away their health care, decimate their retirement accounts and prioritize undocumented immigrants over U.S. citizens.

  "All of the Democrat plans would devastate our health care system," Trump said during a visit to The Villages, where he signed an executive order designed to expand the private-sector version of Medicare that Republicans favor.

  Here's what Charles P Pierce wrote about the same Trump speech: The President* is a blight, but watch what the conservative movement's up to behind him: "They're coming for Medicare, folks." Pierce blogs more often than I feel like citing, but some of his best titles last week:

  • Eric Trump just penned one of history's greatest philosophical texts: "The Really Not Smart One strikes again, this time citing The Gladiator."

  • This is a John LeCarré novel starring the Marx Brothers. It's also a smoking arsenal. "Every Republican in Congress now looks like a fool or a crook. There is no alternative."

  • Nothing's over in the Ukraine mess until Giuliani's done breaking things: "Kurt Volker, former US special envoy to Ukraine, provided Congress with more background on Rudy's antics Thursday."

  • Florida just got a sneak peek of coming attractions in the climate crisis: "Those Chinese climate hoaxsters sure are working hard."

  • The Secretary of Agriculture just came out and said America is for Big Business: "Interesting tack at a meeting of small farmers who are already in trouble."

  • Freedom Caucus loon Mark Meadows is now embroiled in a creationist dinosaur dig controversy.

• Brittany Packnett: The real reason Amber Guyger was convicted. An off-duty white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man in his apartment in Texas. Against odds, she was charged and convicted of murder.

  Police officers have killed over a thousand people a year in recent years: Of those killed by police since 2005, less than 100 officers have been arrested, only 35 officers have been convicted -- and, as of March, only three of them of murder. Less than 1 percent of all officers are convicted when their victim is Black -- even though Black people are three times more likely than white people to be killed by police.

  Packnett credits the verdict to a fully integrated jury. However, before you start thinking that justice is starting to work in America, note: Anya van Wagtendonk: Joshua Brown, a key witness in the murder trial against Amber Guyger, was fatally shot.

• Troy Patterson: A new book argues that Trump is television in human form: On James Poniewozik's Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America.

  Poniewozik almost wants to rate Trump as a great postmodern thinker, but the problem is that Trump does not think. Nonetheless, Trump is a great postmodern feeler, who intuits and responds to the stimuli of electronic media with the dark brilliance of an idiot savant, in the sure belief that only suckers care about objective truth. Poniewozik calls Trump's daily performance qua Trump a manifestation of "lizard-brain postmodernism -- the salesman's intuition that the cartoon of a thing was more powerful to people than the thing itself."

• William Rivers Pitt: Trump is spreading fear because he fears impeachment: The one thing about the impeachment inquiry that I find most perplexing is why Trump has reacted with such crazed panic. Surely he knows that the Republican Senate will never remove him from office. And given that there is zero chance of the Republican Party denying him nomination for a second term, the only contest that really matters is the 2020 election. Yet every day he squirms, rants, raves, acting out in ways that not only don't offer any practical defense against the charges but really make most people question his competency and even sanity.

• Peter Pomerantsev: Rudy Giuliani welcomes you to Eastern Europe: "So much about the Trump administration seems pulled from the playbook of a post-Soviet kleptocracy." Other Putin critics, like Masha Gessen, have said much the same thing, most likely because that's what they're used to seeing. I doubt Trump is consciously taking Putin as a model (no matter how sympathetic he is). Rather, cynical oligarchs don't have many options in how to spin their corruption.

• Andrew Prokop: The incredibly damning Ukraine texts from State Department officials, explained.

• Richard V Reeves: Now the rich want your pity, too: "If the wealthy are so stressed out, whose fault is that?"

• David Remnick: "Stupid Watergate" is worse than the original. A game effort to make the case, anyway, not least by pointing out that both scandals started as efforts to rig elections and as such were attacks on our faith in democracy. But even though I don't doubt that a Trump dictatorship would be even more malign than a Nixon one, the only dimension where Trump is way ahead of Nixon is stupid, and I don't see how that makes it worse. What might make it worse is that most Republicans today are so shameless and so desperate to cling onto power that they've lost the capacity to understand when their president breaks bad.

• Doyle Rice: The Earth just had its hottest September on record: For what little it's worth, Wichita bucked the trend all summer long, but got with the program for September: possibly not a record, but hottest month we've had all year, still above 90F on 9/30 (but 49F as I write this).

• David Rohde: How disinformation reaches Donald Trump.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Mike Pence's stunning hypocrisy on foreign election interference, in one quote.

  • Trump insists he just wants foreign countries to tackle "corruption." Here's why that's absurd.

  • America's top election official explains why Trump may be committing crimes.

  • Irony is dead: The Trump sons are doing everything possible to make corruption a major 2020 issue.

  • 48 hours illustrating how Trump's abuse-of-power scandal has split Fox News.

• Eric Schmitt/Maggie Haberman/Edward Wong: Trump endorses Turkish military operation in Syria, shifting US policy: What's the Kurdish word for people who are recruited, used up, and carelessly discarded? Once "comrades-in-arms," now more like "losers."

• Jeremy Singer-Vine/Kevin Collier: Political operatives are faking voter outrage with millions of made-up comments to benefit the rich and powerful. Case in point: 22 million public comments submitted to FCC on net neutrality regulations.

• Danny Sjursen: Impeach all presidents: Sure, it's hard to think of any recent US president who hasn't committed high crimes along the way, especially in using the US military to kill people in other countries. Even Nixon's Watergate crimes paled in comparison to other things he did, like his coup in Chile and his escalation in Indochina. Some Democrats will tell you that Trump forced them to impeach, but it's always been a process that has been selectively used for distinct political purposes. On the other hand, when you can impeach, why not? The charges brought against Clinton were bullshit, but at the time I urged convicting him, because he had done other things that merited removing him from office (e.g., his bombing operations in Iraq, which his Republican foes usually applauded).

• Jeff Stein/Tom Hamburger/Josh Dawsey: IRS whistleblower said to report Treasury political appointee might have tried to interfere in audit of Trump or Pence.

• Jonathan Swan: Mulvaney predicts post-impeachment landslide. "Mulvaney also believes that the longer the impeachment process drags on, the better it is, politically, for Trump." Impeachment also seems to be spurring small donors, which is not a resource Trump had in 2016. I don't doubt that Mulvaney's attitude exists, especially among Trump's inner circle of sycophants, but I think it's more likely that less-committed voters will get sick and tired of all the noise, especially given how erratic Trump has been acting.

• Matt Taibbi: The 'whistleblower' probably isn't: "It's an insult to real whistleblowers to use the term with the Ukrainegate protagonist."

• Anton Troianovski/Chris Mooney: Radical warming in Siberia eaves millions on unstable ground.

• Anya van Wagtendonk: Rick Perry's spent a lot of time in Ukraine. Now he's caught up in the impeachment inquiry. For more on Perry, see: Chas Danner: What we know about Trump's bizarre attempt to blame Rick Perry for the Ukraine call.

• Alex Ward:

  • Mike Pence is officially part of the Trump impeachment investigation.

  • The Ukraine scandal exposes the Trump crony Pompeo really is.

  • The right-wing conspiracy theories behind Trump and Barr's outreach to foreign leaders.

• Robin Wright: Trump's close-call diplomacy with Iran's President.

• Christopher Wylie: How I helped hack democracy: An excerpt from the author's book, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytics and the Plot to Break America.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • William Barr's 4-country effort to discredit the Trump-Russia inquiry, explained.

  • Hunter Biden, the black sheep who might accidentally bring down Trump, explained.

  • Trump's Twitter tirades about treason and civil war reveal a dangerously unfit president.

• Li Zhou/Hannah Brown: 1999 vs. 2019: Senate Republicans' attitudes on impeachment sure have changed a lot: Many examples, first two Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell.

Daiy Log

Zhanna Pataky visited Eastern Europe this summer, and came back wanting to cook something Hungarian. We had previously collaborated on a couple of Russian dinners, and I'm always game for a new cuisine. Did some shopping at Amazon, and wound up buying one cookbook: Silvena Johan Lauta: The Food & Cooking of Hungary. Here's a first stab at a possible menu:

• Hungarian Goulash: a beef stew, with onion, tomato, green bell pepper, potatoes, spices (paprika, caraway), served with Hungarian Dumplings. Alternative: Rabbit Goulash Stew: as above but with rabbit instead of beef, chicken stock, potatoes or dumpling on side; or Venison Goulash: similar, with venison shoulder instead of beef, chicken stock, carrot and parsnip, potatoes or dumpling on side.
• Hungarian Dumplings: egg, flour, herbs; serve with bacon and butter. Alternative: any other dumpling dish, like Oregano and Cumin Dumplings, Transylvanian Dumplings with Olives, Herb Semolina Dumplings, or Pinched Noodles.
• Feta and Paprika Bruschetta: ciabatta bread slices, toasted, topped with feta, cream cheese, spices (mustard, cumin, paprika); suggest serve with tomato salad (not in recipe; picture shows red onion garnish, with tomatoes and cucumbers on side).
• Transylvanian Stuffed Mushrooms: button (or baby portabella?) mushrooms, stuffed with ricotta, thyme, bacon); suggest serve with green salad.
• Hungarian Cold Buffet Salad with Mustard: cooked and diced ham, frankfurters, potato, carrot, peas, eggs, green beans, gherkins, with dijon mustard, parsley, and mayonnaise (home-made).
• Pan-fried Pike with Cream and Dill Sauce: white fish fillets, flour, fried in butter with wild mushrooms; sauce, on side, is fish stock, white wine, cream, and fresh dill. Alternative: Trout in Horseradish Sauce: trout, poached with root vegetables (carrot, parsnip, onion), with sour cream, horseradish; serve with boiled potatoes and steamed green vegetables.
• Hungarian Chocolate Almond Torte: cake with dark chocolate, butter, eggs, brown sugar, ground almonds, 2 tbs. flour (so not quite flourless); topped with ganache and almond topping. Alternative: Hungarian Pancakes with Pecan Filling: thin pancakes filled with pecans, golden raisins, lemon zest, apricot jam, cinnamon, sugar; and/or a fruit dessert, like Walnut Baked Prunes: prunes, orange juice and zest, sour cream, bread crumbs, walnuts, butter; or Roasted Pears With Honey: pears, butter, rosemary, balsamic, honey. Other options from elsewhere (see below) include Somloi Trifle ("Hungary's favorite dessert") and Dobos Torte (from The Gourmet Cookbook).

Some other dishes that caught my eye, but are probably de trop:

• Chicken and Paprika Stew with Sour Cream: cubed chicken breast, onion, tomato, green bell pepper, sour cream, paprika.
• Venison Meatballs: ground venison and veal, bread crumbs, egg, formed into meatballs, dusted with flour, fried; sauce with chicken stock, sour cream, paprika, herbs.
• Pancakes with Creamy Feta Cheese and Wild Garlic: crepes, filled with feta, yogurt, sour cream, wild garlic leaves.
• Pearl Barley Salad with Grapes and Pistachio Nuts: pearl barley (cooked), tomato, green bell pepper, cucumber, white seedless grapes, parsley, mint, toasted pistachio nuts.

I've previously made goulash from the recipe in The Gourmet Cookbook. It's a bit more complicated than this one, but similar. It's one of only four Hungarian recipes in the book. Chicken Paprika is another -- again, similar to above, but calls for thighs. The other two are desserts: Chocolate-orange Dobostorte, and Hungarian chocolate mousse cake bars. The former is very complex and ornate, with eight layers of sponge cake (white, with orange zest), glazed with orange syrup, separated by layers of chocolate buttercream, topped by a layer of caramel, the sides covered with buttercream and hazelnuts. The bars are also quite complex, with chocolate cake layers, apricot jam, a chocolate mousse filling, a whipped cream filling, and a chocolate glaze. The cake layers are baked in a 10x15 pan, then cut into bars after assembling.

Most of the goulash recipes I see on the internet call for ground beef and elbow macaroni (some adding cheddar cheese) -- some of these are explicitly labeled American Goulash. Flat egg noodles are sometimes used. Ones explicitly labeled "Hungarian Goulash" start with beef cubes. The most minimal is just beef, onion, and paprika. Others add tomato, bell pepper, carrot and/or potato, also extra flavors (one has brown sugar and balsamic vinegar). Most are served over separately-cooked egg noodles.

Lots of soups in the cookbook, but since it's at most practical to serve one, and since Goulash counts (as would Chicken Paprika), I've ignored the others.

Some other recipes I've noticed while searching for Hungarian recipes:

• Sour Cherry Soup
• Strawberry Soup
• Beef Paprikash with Fire-Roasted Tomatoes
• Hungarian Short Ribs
• Garlic Pork Rib Roast with Parsley Potatoes
• Grandma Schwartz's Rouladen: beef top round
• Meat Stew (Porkolt)
• Shepherd's Noodles (Pasztortarhonya): bacon, sausage, tarhonya (some kind of noodle).
• Crispy Pork Belly
• Baked Garlic Paprika Chicken
• Butternut Goulash
• New World Stuffed Cabbage
• Beef & Rice Stuffed Cabbage Rolls
• Cucumber Salad: sour cream or vinegar.
• Hungarian-Style Green Beans
• Layered Potatoes (Rakott Krumpli): potatoes, eggs, sausage, sour cream, cheese.
• Potato Pancakes (Lapcsznka)
• Pickled Sweet Peppers
• Stuffed Peppers (Toltott Paprika)
• Vegetable Stew (Lecso): a paprika stew, variations: egg, sausage.
• Fozelek: another vegetable stew (no translation).
• Cabbage & Noodles (Haluski)
• Horseradish Deviled Eggs
• Fried Dough (Langos): topped with sour cream and cheese; note this tops several lists.
• Palacsinta (Crepes)
• Cheese Noodles (Turos Csusza)
• Fried Cheese (Rantott Sajt): Swiss or mozzarella dredged in egg and breadcrumbs, then fried.
• Apple Strudle
• Cardamon-Blackberry Linzer Cookies
• Cookie Crust Deep-Dish Apple Pie
• Hungarian Nut Rolls
• Hungarian Walnut Cookies: more like rugelach.
• Layered Pastry (Flodni): walnut, apple, poppyseed, jam.
• Somloi Trifle (Somloi Galuska): three types of sponge cake (plain, walnut, chocolate), raisins, walnuts, drizzled with dark chocolate rum sauce, topped with whipped cream.
• 5 Layer Cocoa Slices
• Mezes Kremes: a layered cake with glaze and filling.
• Kugler Cake: ground almond cake with chocolate filling.
• Zserbo/Gerbeaud Slice: multi-layered torte with chocolate top.
• Hungarian Decadent Chocolate Cake

PS: Talked with Zhanna today. She wants to cook two recipes: a thick goulash, using her mother's recipe (Russian, from Kazakhstan, I think), and something with sausages and noodles. She suggested I do chicken paprika, a salad, and a cake. I want to do one of the dumpling recipes, or maybe just the pinched noodles. Adding the chicken (and sausage) leaves no room for fish or meatballs. I still like the feta bruschetta, but think I'll pick the pearl barley salad over the cold buffet salad (which could really be a one-dish meal). I'll probably go with the chocolate almond torte, although the somloi torte is still tempting. Agreed on Friday, October 18 as the date.

Sep 2019