Design’s Bull Market, N.I.L. on the Hill, Prada Futurism
Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to Puck’s best new reporting. Here’s what you need to know… and stick around for Bill’s exclusive interview with 60 Minutes’s Lesley Stahl.
Dry Powder: After the firing of several top 60 Minutes journalists and producers at the end of May, legendary correspondent Lesley Stahl faced a difficult choice: stay with the storied newsmagazine, or let this be the end of the line. Bill Cohan sits down with Stahl to discuss the hardest chapter of her 50-year career and the behind-the-scenes conversation at CBS News. [Read More]
In the Room: Just before the weekend, Stahl and fellow correspondents Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim announced they would return to 60 Minutes—though their leaked memo was hardly a vote of confidence in the Weiss/Bilton administration. Dylan Byers reveals an earlier draft that was even more critical. [Read More
The present day Apologists for the 2014 Ukraian Coup have elided from History this document authored by Neo-Con Timothy Snyder, and his fellow travelers, named in the section named ‘Locations’!
Ukraine: Thinking Together Kyiv, 15-19 May Manifesto
The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy is located in the Podil’ neighborhood, on Kontraktova Square; the entrance to the Center for Polish and European Studies is on Voloska Street 8/5; the Culture and Arts Centre is on Illinska Street 9. The Diplomatic Academy is in central Kyiv, at Velyka Zhytomyrska Street 2. The Hotel Ukraine is on Instytutska Street 4. The InterContinental Hotel is on Velyka Zhytomyrs’ka Street 2A. Practical solidarity: This gathering was the initiative of Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic and Timothy Snyder of Yale University and was made possible by the willingness of colleagues to heed their call and agree to participate in great haste, and by the creativity and hard work of Tatiana Zhurzhenko and Oksana Forostyna. A number of partner institutions helped transform an idea into an event: the Batory Foundation, the Embassy of Canada, the Embassy of France, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, the Embassy of the United States of America, the European Endowment for Democracy, the European Forum for Ukraine, the Network of European Cultural Journals Eurozine, the Goethe-Institut, the Institut Français d’Ukraine, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), the International Renaissance Foundation, the Ukrainian cultural journal Krytyka, the National University “Kyiv Mohyla Academy,” the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the National Endowment for Democracy, The New Republic, the Open Ukraine Foundation, the PinchukArtCentre, the Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies “Tkuma,” the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, and the Visual Culture Research Center.
Editor: Reader here is the latest iteration of Neo-Con Propaganda
Since Donald Trump’s call with Vladimir Putin on 12 February and a series of other diplomatic moves aimed at kicking off Russia–Ukraine peace talks, the war in Ukraine has returned to the top of the international media agenda. For outsiders, observing the war from a safe distance like an increasingly monotonous TV series, the plot has acquired finally a new turn, reviving flagging interest and sparking intense debate. But for Ukrainians, Trump’s ‘peacemaking’ initiatives are just another reminder of their subaltern, ‘pawn’ role on the geopolitical chessboard. The writing was already on the wall after Trump suggested that Ukraine ‘may be Russian someday’ (a reason to exploit Ukrainian rare earth minerals in advance); after vice president JD Vance insisted that ‘this war is between Russia and Ukraine’ (and that US military interference would not ‘advance American interests and security’); and after defence secretary Pete Hegseth stated that Ukraine should abandon its push to reclaim all Russian-occupied territory and forget about joining NATO. To add insult to injury, the US responded to Volodymyr Zelensky’s earlier offer of privileged access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in return for support with a virtually colonial demand for almost everything for almost nothing in return. The Daily Telegraph, which obtained a draft of the pre-decisional contract, called it ‘a new Versailles’: ‘If this draft were accepted, Trump’s demands would amount to a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles Treaty.’ Volodymyr Zelensky in Munich, February 14, 2025. Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett. Source: Wikimedia Commons Normally, the paper pointed out, such terms are imposed on aggressor states defeated in war. But Trump ‘seems willing to let Russia of the hook entirely’. Besides the purely economic issues, there was also the moral question whether it would be ‘honourable to treat a victim nation in this fashion after it has held the battle line for the liberal democracies at enormous sacrifice for three years. Who really has a debt to whom, may one ask?’
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Editor under the rubric of : ‘A new Molotov-Ribbentrop pact’, at the least ‘The Munich Agreement’asso often used by Neo-Cons of the ‘West’ is absent! Mykola Riabchuk essay lends a more nuanced Historical tone?
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s ‘peacemaking’ initiatives were met in Ukraine with a mixture of anger, despair and black humour. Zelensky cancelled his visit to Saudi Arabia, scheduled for 20 February, two days after the Rubio–Lavrov meeting in Riyadh. He stated openly that he did not want to legitimize that meeting and its ‘decisions’. The fact that he was not invited to these talks, nor even consulted by the American partners beforehand, does not bode well for Ukraine’s eventual role in ‘big boys’ conversation. As an old saying goes, ‘if you are not at the table then you are on the menu’. While Zelensky tries to keep a brave face in bad game, Ukrainian media are overwhelmed with sarcasm, metaphors (the copulation of a frog with a snake might be the most graphic) and caustic cartoons. One of them – featuring Trump as a bride and Putin as a groom – bore a striking resemblance to cartoons showing a newly-wed Hitler and Stalin in 1939. As a Ukrainian publicist put it succinctly: ‘It’s not Munich 2.0. It’s more like a new Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.’ ‘We are entering a difficult, surreal state’, declared Olga Rudenko, the editor-in-chief of the Kyiv Independent. ‘Our key ally, led by Donald Trump’s new administration, is turning against us and siding with our enemy.’ But the danger of Trump’s reckless cowboy diplomacy goes far beyond the fate of just Ukraine. His susceptibility to Putin’s arguments (partly because of ignorance, partly because of affinity) threaten the whole European continent if not the global order as a whole. After Vance’s speech in Munich and Trump’s arrogant and nonsensical statements the day after, Europeans can no longer neglect a responsibility that they have habitually outsourced to American partners. How far and how effectively this motley crew of thirtyplus nations will move remains to be seen. But at least it gives Ukraine a chance to survive in the new environment, even though it would require even more painful efforts – both diplomatic and military. So far, the Ukrainians have not blinked – as both Zelensky’s and society’s reaction to the mounting challenges indicate
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Editor: The final paragraph of Mykola Riabchuk essay is a daming repudiation of ‘Western Values’! Is there a possible cutural, political affinity between Mykola Riabchuk and Aleksandr Dugin?
“The Globalists are the Racists:” Russian Analyst Aleksandr Dugin on the Loss of Cultural Identities”
Ignorance about Ukraine and the region in general is something that Trump shares with most international politicians and intellectuals educated in the framework of Russian ‘imperial knowledge’, which is normalized in both international academia and popular culture. A much bigger problem, however, is Trump’s mindset, which has little to do with rule of law and liberal democracy and a lot with the realpolitik favoured by dictators confident that might makes right, and that international politics is primarily about accumulation of power and wealth. Ignorance can be enlightened and mitigated, but cynical authoritarianism is very unlikely to change. This means that moralistic discussions with Trump and his lieutenants will not help Volodymyr Zelensky and his European partners. Instead, they must speak from a position of strength. This is perhaps the only point on which they fully agree with the American president.
(Journalist and author Robert Scheer is a prominent progressive critic of quantitative easing (QE), which he views as a massive wealth transfer from working-class taxpayers to Wall Street. [1, 2] Robert Scheer’ comments, after John Oliver)
John Oliver has not dedicated a standalone Last Week Tonight main segment entirely to Quantitative Easing (QE). However, he has touched on the topic tangentially during broader financial and macroeconomic discussions. [1, 2, 3]
John Oliver and the National Debt
During his episode on the National Debt, Oliver explored how central banking, federal spending, and economic interventions work. Economists and online communities often point to this episode when discussing the implications of quantitative easing, as Oliver breaks down how U.S. government debt works, who holds it, and why a country’s debt operates differently from a personal credit card. [1, 2, 3]
For insights into the context and ongoing discourse from the segment:
Read the community reactions and economic breakdowns on the AskEconomics Reddit Thread to see how his take on federal spending aligns with quantitative easing.
In a segment fact-checking the 2016 Green Party platform, Oliver discussed the Federal Reserve. During the segment, he criticized the economic feasibility of using quantitative easing (or “printing money”) to unilaterally cancel student debt, a claim that sparked significant debate among economists. [1, 2, 3]
If you want to understand more about the video where he discusses the National Debt and Federal Reserve policies, let me know:
Would you like an explanation of how quantitative easing works generally?
Do you want to dive deeper into the differences between federal debt and consumer debt?
I can provide a straightforward breakdown of how these monetary tools function.
Journalist and author Robert Scheer is a prominent progressive critic of quantitative easing (QE), which he views as a massive wealth transfer from working-class taxpayers to Wall Street. [1, 2]
Core Critiques by Robert Scheer
Corporate Bailout: Scheer argues that by buying toxic mortgage-backed securities, the Federal Reserve shielded financial elites from the consequences of their reckless behavior.
Mugging Main Street: He asserts that QE rewarded the banks responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, while millions of everyday Americans were left to face foreclosure and economic hardship.
Systemic Inequality: Scheer contends that flooding the financial sector with cheap money inflated asset prices and corporate profits without addressing the structural poverty and wage stagnation affecting working-class Americans. [1, 2]
Published Works and Context
“The Great American Stickup”: In his book, The Great American Stickup, Scheer explores how both Republican and Democratic administrations deregulated the financial sector, paving the way for the Fed’s QE policies to reward the architects of the financial crash.
Journalism: As a contributing editor for The Nation and the founder of Truthdig, he frequently criticized leaders—from the Bush era through the Obama administration—who championed these monetary policies. You can explore his commentary further in The Nation archives. [1, 2, 3]
Mariana Mazzucato : Founding Director and Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value | UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). (Read added information)
The Financial Times hired Anand Menon, the director of UK in a Changing Europe to provide a rather colorless apologetic for Starmer’s newly elected government:
If you’re as old as me, you’ll remember it well. A new prime minister, beaming from ear to ear, charming fellow European leaders and beating them all as they cycled through the streets of Amsterdam. Tony Blair’s diplomatic debut was an unalloyed triumph. Twenty-seven years on, another new Labour prime minister has a chance to shine among his neighbours, this time on home soil.
The European Political Community — that travelling circus of 47 European states — arrives at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire on Thursday. Sir Keir Starmer will be chairing it.
Editor: some selective quotation of Menon’s essay:
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The meeting will give Starmer a chance to showcase a “reset” of UK relations with its neighbours.
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Tone matters, and it will be striking — and perhaps a little discombobulating — to watch the interactions with his European peers of a prime minister who does not see the relationship with the EU as inherently competitive or zero sum.
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Domestically, Starmer rules supreme. While the machinations of Conservative leadership candidates provide some light relief, they matter not a jot for national policy.
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The devil will be in the detail: can the UK persuade the EU to relax rules blocking British participation in schemes such as the European Defence Fund that are intended to foster greater collaboration in the development of military capabilities?
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Will talks over a veterinary agreement drag on as the European Commission haggles over minutiae? Will the EU’s mantra of “strategic autonomy” continue to force it to view the UK as a competitor and a rival?
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For all his charm, Blair ultimately failed the latter test… he promised to run a campaign to persuade the British public of the benefits of EU membership. This never materialised, and we are living with the consequences.
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Editor: Anand Menon trades in political clichés:
Blenheim represents a golden opportunity to begin Labour’s reset with the EU. But a change in tone, while welcome, is merely the precursor to the real work. Winning the bike race is not enough.
Editor: the question that Anand Menon misses is that of Mariana Mazzucato and her political cadre’s very strong twitter presence. And their collective political imperative of re-branding Neo-Liberalism!
Mission-oriented industrial strategy: global insights | policy report no. 2024/09
Authors:
Mariana Mazzucato : Founding Director and Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value | UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)
Sarah Doyle : Director’s Chief of Staff / Director’s Head of Policy | UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)
Luca Kuehn von Burgsdorff : Senior Policy Advisor to Professor Mariana Mazzucato | UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)
Summery
Industrial strategy is experiencing a renaissance. Getting the details right matter. Mission-oriented industrial strategy needs to be more than words if we want to avoid missions becoming part of the problem, not the solution. This report is based on research conducted over the past several years, led by Professor Mazzucato and her team at IIPP. It offers practical insights gained from work with governments around the world – on opportunities ranging from healthy and sustainable housing estates in our local Camden Council to the ecological transition in Brazil – that are advancing new approaches to bring economic, social, and environmental policy goals into alignment at the centre of their growth strategies. The report offers a one-stop-shop for how to design, implement, and govern mission-oriented industrial strategies and examines the tools, institutions, partnerships, and capabilities governments need to deliver transformative change.
Beware of the manifesto bearing Public Intellectual/Politician or should we call Mr. Taylor by his actual name? a former ‘ Chief Adviser on Political Strategy to the Prime Minister’? See Mr. Taylor’s impressive CV here:
The temptation is to compare Mr. Taylor’s fascination with Professor Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Entrepreneurial State, with Mrs. Thatcher’s penchant for passing out copies of Road to Serfdom? If Utopianism is the object of the Right’s contempt for Marx and his epigones, and even Keynes or Piketty, where might the thinking reader put Mr. Taylor’s enthusiasm? Here are some links about Professor Mariana Mazzucato and her book:
The Economist is a bit fretful of Professor Mazzucato’s thesis, yet after the initial repetition of press release chatter, in the end warms to the notion of The Entrepreneurial State: that oscillates politically between Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian imperatives and a control of the costs of ‘entitlements’ as a measure of necessary reforms. The last paragraph of the review is telling:
Quibbles aside, Ms Mazzucato is right to argue that the state has played a central role in producing game-changing breakthroughs, and that its contribution to the success of technology-based businesses should not be underestimated. She is also right to point out that the “profligate” countries that are suffering the most from the current crisis (such as Greece and Italy) are those that have spent the least on R&D and education. There are many reasons why policymakers must modernise the state and bring entitlements under control. But one of the most important is that a well-run state is a vital part of a successful innovation system.
Jeff Madrick, at the NYRB has unstinting praise for Professor Mazzucato: ‘ It is one of the most incisive economic books in years.’ Mr. Madrick doesn’t share Mr. Wortsell’s penchant for concise and clear definitions. He also reviews ‘Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation and the State’ by William H. Janeway. Insights are many and worth your time and attention, although his almost worshipful stance to Janeway reaches to the level of the obsequious- he seems star struck, dazzled by Janeway’s ability to make money. The real insights offered by Mr. Madrick is that he devotes time to Mr. Janeway’s book that offer a history of government involvement with innovative technologies. A long excerpt worthy of quotation:
Mazzucato claims not that business entrepreneurs and venture capitalists did not make crucial contributions, but that they were, on balance, more averse to risks than government researchers. One successful venture capitalist, William Janeway, fully acknowledges the fundamental contributions of government research in his book, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy. He is concerned that the antigovernment attitudes of recent decades may prove dangerous. “The very success in ‘liberating’ the market economy from the encroachment of the state,” he writes, which defines today’s conventional economic wisdom, as the quote by Summers suggests, “has potentially dire consequences for the Innovation Economy.”
Janeway is a well-informed economist as well as a successful venture entrepreneur, and he argues for the importance of government in the nation’s economic growth. With the development of huge, highly profitable corporations in steel, oil, aluminum, chemicals, and communications by the late 1800s, he notes, crucial research was increasingly dominated by the private sector. Janeway cites the business historian Alfred Chandler to show that this is not an example of the free market at work. Rather, the huge, unchallenged profits of large oligopolistic companies enabled them to make long-term investments in research. Chandler called it the “visible hand.” Still, while Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, as well as research labs at General Electric, DuPont, and Alcoa, among others, made important, even legendary discoveries, they were also partly financed by Washington.
See Mr.Tim Worstall‘s rather tart dismissal at Forbes, as he looks at the idea of ‘public goods’ as argued by Professor Mazzucato. His conclusion is expressed as kind of doubt that is hard to argue with.
But if we’ve got a patent there then it’s not a public good any more, is it? For the patent itself means that whatever it is is now excludable. This is an either or proposition. Either something is a public good because we cannot exclude people from it and therefore it must be that we cannot get a patent on it. Or, alternatively, we can get a patent, it is excludable, therefore it is a private, not public, good. It cannot be both patented and also a public good.
And it’s on the basis of this sort of argumentation that she wants to upend the system of fostering innovation and invention. I think not, don’t you? Whether we agree or not with the State taking a larger role let’s at least wait until someone comes up with some logically consistent arguments.
One could wonder, out loud, whether Professor Mazzucato’s book is a predictor of the Political Corporatism, that, in America, is the course charted by President Obama and his Republican allies in Congress? The TPA and TPP?
With my exploration of Professor Mazzucato’s book/Progressive Manifesto, Mr. Taylor returns, in his essay, to the political world of Labour politics, and a very sophisticated plea for a leadership headed by the ‘Progressive’ Ms. Kendall not by ‘Left Wing Firebrand’ Mr. Corbyn, to foreshorten it!
FT: Zelenskyy relayed proposal for direct talks to Putin via Abramovich
07 June 2026 20:12
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used an indirect channel in May to signal his willingness to meet with Vladimir Putin directly, according to a Financial Times report citing sources familiar with the matter.
As part of this effort, Zelenskyy invited sanctioned businessman Roman Abramovich to Kyiv and sought to use him as an intermediary to convey a message to the Kremlin. The Ukrainian leader aimed to persuade Putin to agree to face-to-face negotiations at the level of heads of state.
According to the report, Kyiv’s approach was intended to underscore Ukraine’s seriousness about pursuing direct peace talks. At the same time, Ukrainian authorities рассчитывают that developments on the battlefield — including a potential halt to offensive operations at the front and an increase in strikes deep behind opposing lines — could create stronger incentives for a ceasefire.
Editor: The first two paragraphs of this execise, in a bubious approximation, of the intellectual giant Bagehot?
In retrospect, the signs were there. In February 2025 Peter Mandelson was asked by the Financial Times about his relationship with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The soon-to-be British ambassador to America offered a forthright response. “I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?”
Exactly a year on, Lord Mandelson has gone, and Sir Keir Starmer’s government is embroiled in Britain’s worst political scandal of this century. The peer lost his job in September, after emails emerged in which he questioned Epstein’s conviction for procuring a minor. On January 30th another tranche of emails revealed an intimate relationship. Lord Mandelson and Epstein giggled about strippers and joked about “a well hung young man”, in between discussing multi-million-dollar jobs post-politics and casually leaking confidential government documents. A political embarrassment has become a criminal investigation. Lord Mandelson’s behaviour raises depressing questions about the past but a more intriguing one about the present. What is the point of Sir Keir staying in office?
Editor: Let me engage in a bit of self-serving prestidigitation! The Reader might even conjecture, that I follow the well worn a pastisch of what an ‘actual Bagehot’ might opine?
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“Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR,” a driverless train in east London, which has a pretend control panel for the enjoyment of toddlers. Somehow the Starmer train has still crashed.
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To add insult, former ministers shuffled to the backbenches last year were surprised to learn that Lord Mandelson had offered advice on the reshuffle, in between canapés at the White House. It is one thing to lose your job; it is another to do so at the behest of a man who will go down as a 21st-century John Profumo, a Tory minister whose exit because of sex, lies and spies became the benchmark for government-crushing scandal.
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Sir Keir’s failings on Lord Mandelson were common across parts of the Labour Party, which could never resist the charms and talents of the former minister, despite his flaws. More gifted politicians than Sir Keir have fallen prey to them.
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In a rare bout of clear-eyed analysis, Sir Keir saw the damage being done by the Mandelson scandal. He warned his cabinet that “the public don’t really see individuals in this scandal, they see politicians.” For all the prime minister’s failings, he understands the seriousness of the moment, even if he does not himself possess the means to meet it. Sir Keir is correct that the shamelessness personified by Lord Mandelson is a fatal poison for the body politic. But if he truly believed what he said, he too would go.
Editor: The Reader of this essay might even come to the unwelcome conclusion, that David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Kier Starmer represent the utter failure of the whole British Political Class! How telling that Jeremy Corbyn was/is a possible represetative of a politics of reliability, and steadfastness, that even the shade of Bagehot might have found …?
Reader: With all its faults Los Angeles Times on its editorial pages provinded space to Robert Scheer, Walter Lippmann and Arianna Huffington, Erwin Chemerinsky!
Hollywood Boulevard’s glory days bullshit rules the political present!
Nicky Hilton, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Nick Cannon during the “Young Hollywood” heyday. (Michael Caulfield Archive)
After months of AI-generated disaster porn on the sad state of Los Angeles, something decidedly more gentile took over my feed this week as the city waited for all the ballots to be counted.
It was a simple, strangely calming 2-minute, 48-second video showing Hollywood Boulevard on a clear morning 20 years ago, cars and buses passing, shots of tourists milling around landmarks like the Chinese Theater, Capitol Records tower and Hollywood & Highland complex. No explosions. No SWAT situations. No overt political perspectives.
But this was L.A. on election week, and the video quickly became just one more vessel for that eternal question: Is the city doomed? Some commenters cited it as an example of L.A.’s long-lost golden days, before the hellscape. Their message: Hollywood Boulevard in 2006 was a lot better than Hollywood Boulevard in 2026.
Is it true?
A double-decker sight-seeing bus in Hollywood in 2025 (Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
‘Young Hollywood’ rises from the ashes
There is no doubt that 2006 was a pivotal year for Hollywood. It was the beginning of a building boom that altered the district’s skyline with new luxury condos, luring some entertainment types back from the Valley and Westside.
Buildings were set on fire during the L.A. riots. Movie palaces closed. The construction of the Red Line subway caused portions of the Hollywood Walk of Fame to collapse. Crime was such a hot topic that Paramount Pictures released “Jimmy Hollywood,” in which Joe Pesci plays a down-on-his-luck actor turned attention-starved vigilante who takes on the bad guys after his car radio is stolen. “This place used to sparkle. [You] could rub shoulders with movie stars walking along the Boulevard,” Jimmy laments. “Look at Hollywood now.”
But by 2006, Hollywood was roaring back, and yes, that included celebrities. A new generation of stars dubbed “Young Hollywood” rediscovered the Boulevard, and a crop of nightclubs and restaurants became destinations for them and the paparazzi. It was a golden age for celebrity tabloids: Editors awoke each morning to pore over the overnight photos and write about what trouble Paris, Nicole and Britney got into the night before.
“If you said five years ago that Paris Hilton was going to get into a car accident in Hollywood, no one would have believed you, because Paris Hilton wouldn’t have been in Hollywood,” then-Councilman Eric Garcetti told the paper in 2006.
My former colleague David Pierson embarked on a series of stories that year to capture the transformation. One it-club of that era was cycling through so many models, actors, musicians and sports figures each night, it needed a sophisticated logistics system to make it work.
In another story, he chronicled the legions of young people from around the country who rode the “Holly Trolley” all night and morning, hitting various clubs and hoping to share some shots with Leo.
“Coming from Oregon, Hollywood had a reputation for being ghetto,” said one young woman on the circuit. “It actually has a different persona. I love it.”
Hollywood Boulevard was so ascendant during that period that it was stealing thunder from the granddaddy of L.A. nightlife, the Sunset Strip, which suddenly felt so old. Pierson went to the Strip’s most famous hotel and found signs of Hollywood envy, writing “the girl in the glass tank at the Standard lobby is looking needy.”
Losing the cool factor
There have been many stories written about the decline of the “Young Hollywood” scene, with the rise of the iPhone, social media and annoying influencers often cited as among the culprits.
By 2017, E! News concluded, “A-listers no longer have to rely on a [Hollywood club] sighting to stay in the news cycle; they can give us pre-selected tidbits on Instagram whenever they want.”
On top of that, the district began struggling with the same issues challenging so much of L.A.: Homelessness, gentrification and the affordability crisis. 2020 was a grim year. The tourist economy dried up. Many businesses shuttered, including some icons like the ArcLight theater. Things have gotten better in recent years, but most people say Hollywood still has a long way to go.
The international tourist trade — a key source of Hollywood foot traffic — had a tough 2025 amid the fires and Trump’s foreign and trade policy gambits. “It used to be shoulder to shoulder out here,” one merchant told Cerys Davies.
The L.A. Times broadcasts a livestream of Hollywood Boulevard on our website. I checked it out on a split screen with that 2006 video. The current boulevard didn’t look terrible. Some of the big landmarks, like the Virgin Records Megastore, were gone. There were more big new buildings.
Editor: I recall the times I got lost in Pickwick Book Shop!
Pickwick Book Shop was an independent bookstore located at 6741-6745 W. Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California. The store was popular with many film and literary figures, and was known as the “supermarket of books.”
‘The West’s Greatest Innovation—An Independent Judiciary Trump is returning America to the dark days of personalist rule.’ Fukyama erases Shelby County v. Holder & RBG Telling Dissent?
This coming weekend marks the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday, so it’s an appropriate time to survey the state of voting rights in America. The short version: Not good. For the past 15 years, the Supreme Court has been on an anti-voter tear. Before it hands down its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a redistricting case that is likely to weaken the 1965 Voting Rights Act even further, let’s shine a light on the man who made so much of it possible: Chief Justice John Roberts.
You may recall that during Roberts’s confirmation hearings in 2006, he was asked about his position on the law, often referred to as the crown jewel of the civil-rights movement. “The existing Voting Rights Act, the constitutionality has been upheld, and I don’t have any issue with that,” he said.
In retrospect, it’s clear the Voting Rights Act — one of the most transformative laws in American history — was doomed the moment Roberts was confirmed as chief justice.
Roberts’s animus toward the act, and toward the broader struggle to address centuries of racial discrimination in America, has been in plain sight since he served as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, drafting memos attacking the law and devising legal arguments to undermine it.
The significance of the Voting Rights Act cannot be overstated. Its passage was the long-overdue realization of the 15th Amendment’s guarantee, a century before, that no one’s right to vote could be denied or abridged on account of race. And yet from his earliest days, Roberts has expressed more concern about the unequal treatment of states than the unequal treatment of people. As he put it in one 1982 memo, the law represents “the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.” That same year Congress voted to reauthorize it; crucially, it added to Section 2 of the law the provision, known as the “effects test,” that is at issue in the Callais case.
This test was a response to a 1980 ruling by the Supreme Court which determined that Section 2 required evidence that a state voting law was passed with the intent to racially discriminate before it could be blocked. Following this interpretation, lawmakers, especially in the South, got wise about masking their intent, so the act needed to be updated. Its protections would be of little use if they only worked when lawmakers said out loud, “I want to keep Black people from voting.” The new test applied to any state law that would have a racially discriminatory effect, regardless of any evidence of intent to discriminate. The revision was, effectively, a rebuke of the Supreme Court’s narrow interpretation of the Voting Rights Act.
The update was a success: The number of cases brought under Section 2 increased rapidly, from 3 in 1981 to 175 in 1988. Notably, a huge percentage of these cases were brought by voters themselves, which enhanced the enforcement of the statute. The next time the Voting Rights Act came up, in 2006, it passed by a unanimous vote in the Senate and an overwhelming majority in the House. The process went as it was supposed to: the people’s elected representatives holding months of hearings and considering reams of data before reaffirming a longstanding and popular law.
But John Roberts wasn’t going to let it go that easily. 2006 was his first year as chief justice, and he is nothing if not a patient man. He knew his chance would come before long. In a 2009 case, he flagged another key part of the Voting Rights Act, Section 5, as raising “serious constitutional concerns.” Section 5 provides for the federal oversight of states and jurisdictions, most of them in the South, with a history of racial discrimination in voting. In those places, officials are required to seek approval from the federal government before making any changes to their voting laws.
Roberts believed that the map used to determine who had to go through this “preclearance” process was badly out of date and did not reflect current realities on the ground. Racism was not as bad as it had been in 1965, he believed — after all, didn’t America just elect a Black president?
Four years later, in 2013, he got his first clear shot at the law, and he took it. Writing for a bare majority of the court in Shelby County v. Holder, he effectively destroyed Section 5 by invalidating the preclearance map. “Things have changed dramatically” in the South, Roberts wrote. And because the states have “equal sovereignty” (a principle he more or less pulled out of a hat), it was not fair to continue to subject some of them to the trouble and, more important, the humiliation of extra screening without evidence that they were still practicing discrimination. Congress was free to draw up a new map based on current circumstances, he said.
The chief justice was being disingenuous. He knew as well as anyone that in 2013, a sharply divided Congress was not going to manage that. He was also confronted with mountains of evidence showing that while things had indeed improved, voting discrimination continued to be a chronic problem in the South and other covered areas, one that might worsen without Section 5. Nonetheless, he had succeeded in killing off the heart of the Voting Rights Act based on a made-up principle and at the same time deflected the blame onto another branch.
Meanwhile, states that had spent decades under the preclearance requirement acted like they were the beneficiaries of a jailbreak; some enacted new discriminatory voting laws with a speed unheard of among legislatures, making a mockery of Roberts’s high-minded claims about how much they had changed.
But Roberts’s disingenuousness about Congress and the states paled in comparison to another part of his Shelby County decision, one in which, you might say, the chief was masking his own intent. Anticipating the charges that the Voting Rights Act would be hobbled without a functional Section 5, Roberts reassured readers of the continued power of Section 2 — the provision he had attacked three decades earlier. Unlike Section 5, he wrote, “Section 2 is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”
Today, barely more than a decade since those words, Roberts and the other right-wingers are almost certain to disable Section 2 in Callais like they did Section 5 before it.
What happened? You might say that things have changed dramatically. Or, perhaps more accurately, nothing has changed. The chief justice’s reassurance about Section 2 in 2013 was roughly as believable as was his defense of the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act at his confirmation hearing.
None of this should be surprising. With Shelby County, Roberts’s four-decade project to unburden America of its commitment to racial and political equality finally came to fruition. Did anyone really think he’d drop the ball at the one-yard line? To the contrary, he and his right-wing colleagues have spent the last several years doing an end-zone dance on the back of voting rights.
In 2019, the justices ruled that state legislators can gerrymander their districts as much as they please, disenfranchising tens or hundreds of thousands of their own voters in order to hold onto power, and the federal courts can’t do a thing about it.
In 2021, they began hacking away at Section 2 itself — the last meaningful leg of the VRA. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, involved a challenge to two Arizona voting policies that had been found to discriminate against voters of color. The Ninth Circuit ruled for the challengers and blocked the Arizona policies, but the now-supermajority of right-wing justices reversed. In the process they announced new standards, again out of thin air, that make it far harder to bring challenges under Section 2’s effects test. So hard, in fact, that while there were dozens of successful Section 2 lawsuits in the first two decades of this century, only one has succeeded at the Supreme Court since Brnovich.
Even before Callais is decided, we can see the impact of Roberts’s anti-voting crusade. A 2024 Brennan Center report found that the participation gap between white and black voters has been growing steadily since 2012, after narrowing for decades thanks to the Voting Rights Act. One way to illustrate the impact of this gap is that without it, 9 million more ballots would have been cast in the 2020 presidential election — more than Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the popular vote. And the gap is growing fastest in the parts of the country that had been covered by Section 5. So much for “things have changed dramatically.”
John Roberts has taken pains to cast himself as a kinder, gentler version of his ideological predecessors, most notably William Rehnquist, the chief justice for whom he clerked before joining the Justice Department in the early 1980s. Rehnquist opposed much of the civil rights movement, insisting that Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided and defending the odious principle of “separate but equal.” He held a similar disdain for the Voting Rights Act itself. “The enforcement provisions of the Civil War Amendments were not premised on the notion that Congress could empower a later generation of blacks to ‘get even’ for wrongs inflicted on their forebears,” Rehnquist wrote.
Roberts doesn’t speak so bluntly, but the sentiment that the Voting Rights Act is about “getting even” — as though its purpose is revenge instead of basic racial equality — is a through line of both men’s jurisprudence. And because Rehnquist and Roberts together have combined to lead the Supreme Court for the last 40 years and counting, we are now faced with two divergent trends in American law and politics: On one hand, Congress (present session excepted) for years responded to an increasingly diverse nation by passing laws to make voting more accessible and less discriminatory; on the other hand, the Supreme Court has repeatedly played the role of reactionary counterweight, first under Rehnquist and then under Roberts.
While the American people’s elected representatives have sought, however imperfectly, to redress centuries of racial discrimination by passing laws for a fairer future, the highest court has been steered for nearly half a century by two men who appear intent on undoing as much of that progress as possible, dragging us back to a darker, more unequal past.
LOVE IN A TIME OF HATE: Art and passion in the shadow of war, 1929–39
Translated by Simon Pare
As a reader of ‘The Brothers Mann: The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1871-1950 by Nigel Hamilton of 1975.
And Thomas Mann’s ‘Diaries, 1918-1939’ of 1982:
I had some knowledge of the milieu, the persons/characters and their shared fates, that is the subject of the the two books under review. This final paragraph of Chamberlin’s review is evocative of the that whole milieu:
They were all enemies of Nazism, certainly. But what kind of politics, what kind of society, would have best suited this licentious, aesthetic-minded generation, with its gigantic artistic talents and potential for deep moral waywardness? Presumably, our ultra-liberal own. Perhaps that’s why Illies remains so reserved in his moral judgements, finding the antisemitic vamp Alma Mahler pretty nasty, but only the Hitler-loving film-maker Leni Riefenstahl (“there was a strong streak of elitism to her nymphomania”) “diabolical”. He’s rather lenient, to this reviewer’s mind, and rather hard on Thomas Mann’s “noun-heavy moralizing”. I would have liked to hear him call Brecht not only a great artist, but also a pernicious moral fraud. Illies engages with some relish in his tale, where Wittstock, two generations older, is outraged and sad. In making these observations, though, I may be the product of a staider generation. So let me conclude by saying that, for all the compelling studies on the Weimar Republic, no one will want to miss either of these well-translated books on Weimar writers and Weimar in love.
Let me recommend Chamberlain’s ‘Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia’.
The First two paragraphs of Marcus Wheeler’s essay seem to contradict what Mark Lilla offers in The New York Times review , below this entry:
Headline: Motherland: a Philosophical History of Russia by Lesley Chamberlain
Sub-headline: Marcus Wheeler is provoked by Lesley Chamberlain’s history of Russian philosophy.
This book is a tour de force if only in that it encompasses an enormous subject – the ‘long tradition’ of Russian philosophical thought from 1815 to 1991 – in fewer than 350 pages. The author is not a professional or academic philosopher but a writer and journalist: she has however studied Russian and German language and literature and philosophy, and the present work is informed by a deep understanding of these three intellectual disciplines. When she writes on the last page that Russian philosophy “is a branch of German philosophy, perhaps even of German poetry”, she restates, albeit in a deliberately provocative way, what British philosophy students used to be told fifty years ago – that philosophy in Russia was wholly derivative from Hegel and German Idealism (and, by implication, not worth bothering with). Like many of us, Lesley Chamberlain was first drawn to 19th century Russian thought by the writings of Isaiah Berlin – his celebrated articles in Encounter on “A Marvellous Decade” and these and the other essays assembled in Russian Thinkers and elsewhere. Chamberlain surprisingly presents Berlin himself as a philosopher in the Russian tradition: in fact, his claim to fame rests far less on his original, recognisably Western-style contributions to philosophy than on his work as a historian of social and political ideas.
Chamberlain owes much not only to Berlin but to more systematic historians of Russian thought, such as Andrzej Walicki, Frederick Copleston and James Scanlan (though she does not mention Derek Offord, who has published extensively in this field in recent years). She sets herself however the ambitious and original aim of distinguishing in the Russians between social and political ‘thought’ and ‘philosophy’ proper and of relating their teachings to the general tradition of Western philosophy from Descartes to present-day post-modernism. To this end she has divided the book into four parts. Part I – entitled “The Making of the Intelligentsia” – is a lucid and straightforward sequential summary of the principal figures and movements from 1815 to 1917 – Chaadaev, Westernisers and Slavophiles, Populists, Marxists and fin-de-siècle ex-Marxists and religious thinkers. The title of Part II – ‘The Making of Russian Philosophy’ – leads the reader to expect a parallel treatment of the evolution of philosophical views, but its three component chapters are more or less discrete self-contained essays. In the first of these, as at intervals throughout the book, Hegel appears prominently. The author is thoroughly versed in his teachings (to her credit, since in British universities Hegel and Idealism have been virtually mothballed since World War II) and explains cogently why his view of society as constantly subject to change through conflict appealed to young Russians suffocated by their static autocracy; as also why his identification of reality and rationality came to offend Belinsky and others by seeming to ignore human suffering and injustice. She presents nearly all the Russian dissident liberals (whom, confusingly, she later calls “anarchists”) as “Counter-Rationalists” preaching a “Counter-Enlightenment”. This, since she describes herself as a “Cartesian rationalist”, may account for her harsh judgment that Russian philosophical history amounted to “two short centuries of intellectual and moral defeat for Russia.”
Now, understanding the soul is also well and good. But what happens when soulfulness stands in the way of rational philosophy and science? Isn’t there a price to be paid? That is the question Lesley Chamberlain poses in “Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia.” The question is not new, nor are most of her answers. There are very fine studies of 19th-century Russian thought available in English — by Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Frank, E. H. Carr, Martin Malia — and the interested reader will want to turn to those first. But by focusing specifically on how Western philosophical ideas from Descartes through Marx were absorbed into Russian thinking, Chamberlain does complicate the received picture somewhat. As she sees it, the decisive struggle was not simply between Westernizers and anti-Westernizers, but between Russians who stood by the philosophical legacy of France and England, and those who drew sustenance from the far murkier thinkers of modern Germany.
…
What did the Russians learn from the Germans? This is hard to make out from the badly confused accounts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling given by Chamberlain, an English journalist and novelist. The main story, though, she gets about right. What the 19th-century Russian intellectuals found in, and partly projected onto, Germany was a romantic alternative to the supposedly cold, heartless logic of Descartes and his progeny. They were especially drawn to F. W. J. Schelling, whose philosophy of nature, a hash of intuition and metaphysical speculation, was closer to theosophy than to modern science. (Lots about “life,” nothing about the pancreas.) Schelling’s doctrines proved to be infinitely adaptable and unfalsifiable, and thus served as useful defenses against French and English rationalism. Like Napoleon’s troops, the modern ideas of Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Hume were turned back at the gates of Moscow and beat a slow retreat through the snow.
…
Marcus Wheeler seems to contradict Mr. Lilla’s assertions that somehow Chamberlain is less of an Historian than ‘ Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Frank, E. H. Carr, Martin Malia’? Does the question regarding Chamberlain reading of that History, about Lilla’s preference for himself and his brother Historians were more reliable? In the long quotation by Marcus Wheeler, above, I’ve placed in a bold font, his comment on Chamberlain reliance on Berlin’s scholarship. As a subscriber of The New York Review Of Books, of the time, I too read Berlin’s ‘Russian Thinkers’ and others.
Here is Chamberlain’s review of ‘Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia’ by Victoria Frede in 2012.
Headline: Between Belief and Despair
Sub-headline: A group of thinkers tried to explain Russia to a West that could understand it only in terms of “communism” or “freedom.”
We are used to thinking of a great parting of the ways dividing the Russian 19th century unevenly in half, from around 1860, with a rather uncouth and propagandizing atheism of “New Men” taking over from the subtle rhetoric of their more spiritual predecessors. Something of the kind did happen under the influence of materialist philosophies spreading from the West. But partly too—as Ms. Frede shows in a highly original study of minor figures attending the revolutionary Petrashevsky Circle in 1849—it happened because nonbelief was a daring political move in a cruel, inert country. No great theory of personal conduct or philosophical insight was required. Nonbelief itself could be a simple act of defiance. Dostoevsky, another young participant in the Circle who was nearly executed for his apparent political intentions, would later evoke doubt as an essential feature of Russian spiritual life.
Ms. Frede ends her study with a portrait of the radical critic Dmitri Pisarev, a man of the 1860s who is remembered, if at all, for once declaring that a pair of boots was more valuable than the works of Shakespeare. Pisarev deserves his rediscovery by Ms. Frede as the psychologically complex figure he is. Desperate to extract himself from a controlling family, Pisarev latched onto doubt, and the materialism of the body, as the only way he could secure his personal freedom. He spent time in prison and had a mental breakdown and might be best re-imagined as a figure in some unwritten novel, representing one of the many possibilities of Russian dissent.
“Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia” is an encouraging example of what the end of the Cold War has meant for Russian scholarship. In both Russia and the West, vested interests have been removed from the business of “atheism.” We can see much more clearly now how Lenin, who needed the commitment of the old spiritual intelligentsia but not their inwardness, used atheism as a tool. We can also see how Western historians upholding Enlightenment values underplayed Russian doubt, confusing it with irrationality and missing an enduring clue to what was culturally at stake.
I purchased and read “Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia” onChamberlain’s recommendation. Victoria Frede’s book was revelatory, to say the least! Chamberlain is part of a long and indispensable tradition, of Writers, Book Reviewers, Critical Intellectuals, who before the Internet nourished my mind in the Age Of Print, and into the Political Present!
Below is a link to Jochen Hellbeck’s ‘Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin’ an example of a revelatory History of the Soviet Union, with its focus on individual lives of its citizens.
