Over at the Hedgehog Review (NB: sadly, they don’t actually review hedgehogs), Steve Lagerfeld assesses the rise of the contrarian crowd—then utterly eviscerates the democratization of outsiderness:

Much of what social critics decry as rampant individualism in contemporary America is really rampant crowd behavior. It is herds of people busily declaring that they are not part of the herd. Whether you’re a Satanist or an alt-right activist, you sign up for a total lifestyle package that includes a limited menu of approved ideas, clothing styles, and other badges you can choose from to express your individuality. What you get in return is an intense sense of belonging and identity—we’re all pariahs here! Americans once derived the satisfactions of association from traditional institutions—family, community, church, state, employers, unions. As the hold of these institutions has weakened, we have parceled out our belonging to ideas, images, and ideologies that allow us to feel part of a larger whole. Our commitment to them may not amount to much more than pasting a bumper sticker on the family SUV. Many people weave together an array of looser group identities, becoming Prius-driving vegan Democrats or hoodie-wearing tech libertarians, elaborating their identities with the clothes they buy, the foods they eat, and other badges of affiliation. A tattoo or perhaps a piercing may top off the ensemble, giving it all an overtly outlaw edge. Others opt for the more intense commitment and rewards of belonging to a contrarian crowd. And in recent years, even many casual affiliations have hardened into something more tribal and adversarial. Partisan loyalty, for example, was once a loose form of membership that most people inherited like the family photo albums. Now it is becoming more like a uniform one puts on to signal an array of commitments and defiant self-declarations.

“Banding together is a healthy human impulse,” Lagerfeld concludes. “Banding together in knots of narcissistic fury is not.”

As with most things of cultural significance or sociological import, however, our own Skooch was there first when he blogged in this very space about the mainstreaming of hipsterdom. And that was in August 2017, before it was cool.

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“From certain angles,” writes Nick Davidson over at Outside magazine, “it looks like we’re hanging over the precipice. Climate change-fueled disasters like monster hurricanes, megafires, and 100-year droughts are becoming ever more frequent. A solar superstorm could wipe out the grid, the New Madrid fault might go at any moment, and, of course, there’s always potential for a zombie flu epidemic.”

Still, in this era in which Everything Is Terrible™, it’s nice to know that some of us are focused on the important things in life. Like, say, how many exclamation marks are required in order to seem genuinely enthusiastic.

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Donald Hall died over the weekend. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, start here.

“Fashions have always come back around again, but now we are living through a kind of Dadaist cut-up of eras, in which brands and companies borrow from, adapt and disrupt any and all time periods; it’s all up for grabs, provided it’s old.” More on hipster nostalgia.

Madness from the American Library Association.

“What little we know for sure about [Jean-Michel] Basquiat can be said simply: An extraordinary painterly sensitivity expressed itself in the person of a young black male, the locus of terror and misgiving in a racist society. That, and rich people love to collect his work.”

“[T]he passing of another milestone on the road to true AI….”? Yawn.

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Apparently Swiss-born British philosopher and “writer of essayistic books” Alain de Botton knows me personally: “Work finally begins,” he says, “when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”

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This, folks, is how you hook a reader:

Start with Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, and a robot that loves you no matter what. Add a knighted British physicist, a renowned French neuroscientist, and a prominent Australian philosopher/occasional blues singer. Toss in a bunch of psychologists, mathematicians, anesthesiologists, artists, meditators, a computer programmer or two, and several busloads of amateur theorists waving self-published manuscripts and touting grand unified solutions. Send them all to a swanky resort in the desert for a week, supply them with lots of free coffee and beer, and ask them to unpack a riddle so confounding that it’s unclear how to make progress or where you’d even begin.

Then just, like, see what happens.

I mean really—how can you not want to continue? Read the rest of Tom Bartlett’s “Has Consciousness Lost Its Mind?” over at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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After the first two waves of Operation Steinbock, the Nazi’s final bomber offensive of WWII, “nearly 100 Londoners were wounded or dead. It was just the beginning of a deadly four-month air onslaught against Great Britain the likes of which the country hadn’t seen since the war’s grim early days.”

The novelist George Beardmore, who had been declared medically unfit for military service, was spending the war documenting its effects on his fellow Londoners. In a journal entry dated June 12, 1944—two weeks after Operation Steinbock ended and seventy-four years ago today—Beardmore reminds us of the totality of the devastation:

Other side-effects of bombs are the stripping of leaves from wayside trees, the deaths by blast of sparrows, chaffinches, etc., and the awful things that happen to cats and dogs. We had a man complain that thirty of his forty-odd small birds in a backyard aviary had been killed by blast, half a mile or so away from where the bomb had landed.

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On a day in which we mourn the passing of the inimitable Anthony Bourdain and learn that Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has just weeks to live, we’re also reminded, via the cesspool that is Twitter, that there exist on this Earth an inordinate number of assholes—people who revel in the misfortune of anyone they disagree with politically.

If you’re tempted to go down that path, maybe take just a moment to read Ian Marcus Corbin today. “Politics,” he writes, “may be a necessary evil—but talking incessantly about politics and viewing your countrymen solely through a political lens is an evil that we’re actively choosing, day by day. We should stop.”

Okay. Last politics post for a while, folks. Pinky swear.

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We don’t normally do politics around here. But “The High Price of Stale Grievances” by Coleman Hughes is a serious, well-written analysis of the tribalism that threatens to tear us apart. It’s definitely worth your time.

Not concerned about the possibility of racial balkanization? Think the recent breakdown in civil discourse is no big deal? Convinced the pendulum is about to swing the other way?

Maybe so—but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. A werewolf was photographed outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin.

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