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☆ Opinion | My Fantasy Bookshelf
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-26 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

After filing last week’s newsletter comparing “Succession” to a work of “Game of Thrones”-style fantasy, I recorded a podcast episode with Razib Khan in which we talked about our shared affection for actual fantasy novels, our experience as early George R.R. It was a wide-ranging conversation, but one that stayed mostly with the big names of the genre — Martin, J.R.R. To be clear, this isn’t a list of my all-time favorites or even a list of “fantasy novels that should be adapted for TV instead of making more seasons of ‘The Rings of Power.’” It’s just me turning a glance at my bookshelf into a newsletter. You can think of this list of novels, maybe, as various inspirations for that imagined perfection. Hobb’s hero, Fitz, is one of the most successful examples of character-building and compelling interiority in recent fantasy.

☆ Opinion | Can the Writers’ Strike Fix Hollywood?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-20 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

A somewhat more pessimistic analysis, offered by writers like Sonny Bunch and Jessa Crispin, emphasizes that the superhero-sweatshop corporate strategy evolved because it’s giving audiences what they want. And so even if the strike is an opportunity for reconsiderations, it’s probably not a lever that can change the system as a whole. Personally I would like to see the strike lever a different Hollywood system into being. (HBO’s “Westworld,” for instance, or lately Showtime’s “Yellowjackets.”) Sometimes they play like thin imitations of the previous decade’s antihero dramas. Or they take on the character of the theatrical experience but somewhat worse — with too-big-to-fail franchises that nobody really enjoys.

☆ Opinion | Why ‘Succession’ Is a Work of Fantasy
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Between the Dominion Voting Systems settlement and the Tucker Carlson firing, we’ve had a lot of real-world Fox drama lately, and the contrast between reality and fiction tells us something interesting about how art depicts our politics — and how the nature of democratic politics can resist successful dramatization. In the world of “Succession,” the key election-night dilemma is somewhat similar — when to call a crucial state — but the dynamics are quite different. The show’s presidential election is disrupted by a fire (arson?) at a Milwaukee precinct that destroys thousands of ballots, leaving the right-wing candidate ahead pending litigation, and his campaign wants ATN (the show’s Fox News) to call Wisconsin for him immediately. With two episodes left, the dice seem loaded for the second outcome: Failsons and a faildaughter lose their company and, oops, bring down the American republic along the way.

Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com or leave us a voice mail message at (212) 556-7440. Follow our hosts on Twitter: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT) and Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen). “Matter of Opinion” was produced this week by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Derek Arthur. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Pat McCusker, Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud.

☆ Opinion | Legalizing Marijuana Is a Big Mistake
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

But Lehman explains in detail why the second-order effects of marijuana legalization have mostly vindicated the pessimists and skeptics. But Lehman argues that there is also no good evidence so far that legalization reduces racially discriminatory patterns of policing and arrests. Most casual pot smokers won’t have this experience, but the legalization era has seen a dramatic increase the number of non-casual users. Because of all the years of prohibition, a mature and supple illegal marketplace already exists, ready to undercut whatever prices the legal market charges. So to make the legal marketplace successful and amenable to regulation you would probably need much more enforcement against the illegal marketplace — which is difficult and expensive and, again, obviously uncool, in conflict with the good-vibrations spirit of the legalizers.

☆ Opinion | Trump’s Lesson for the Media and Ron DeSantis
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-13 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Two groups can learn something from the experience: first, network producers and executives thinking about how to conduct interviews and host debates with Trump; second, rival Republican presidential candidates trying to envision a path to beating him. What the TV professionals should learn is that they have two choices in dealing with another Trump primary campaign. In part, as Ramesh Ponnuru suggests, that means drilling into Trump’s presidential record on conservative terms rather than liberal ones — asking about, for instance, the failure to complete the border wall or the surge in crime in the last year of his administration. The utility of this last line of questioning is also something that Trump’s prospective rivals, Ron DeSantis especially, can draw out of the CNN experience, since they can tee up those kinds of conservative-friendly challenges if the media does not. But the most basic lesson to be drawn by Republican politicians from watching Trump’s town hall is the importance, for any would-be Trumpian successor, of demonstrating that you too can engage with the mainstream press and come away a winner.

☆ Opinion | SATs and Measuring Merit in College Admissions
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-13 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

To the Editor:Re “Can College Meritocracy Survive?,” by Ross Douthat (column, April 30):Good riddance to the SAT. It is a simplistic yardstick of performance — and tests a certain type of intelligence, whereas there are many. Though even as the SAT fades in importance, we must recognize that its diminishment alone does not render the college admissions process fair — in fact, it is obscene in its bias. By and large, those whose parents had legacy status, connections and/or gave large donations received acceptance letters from Ivy League schools. Those who lacked these resources — acquired by birth and not merit — were left to pick up the scraps thrown from the table.

☆ Opinion | Introducing ‘Matter of Opinion’
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Premiering May 11“Matter of Opinion” is a new weekly podcast from New York Times Opinion. Each week, four Opinion writers talk through an issue in the news, culture or in their own work, and try to make sense of what is a weird and fascinating time to be alive. The show features four of Opinion’s signature voices: Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen. Meet the HostsMichelle Cottle is a member of the New York Times editorial board, focusing on U.S. politics. She joined the editorial board in 2018 after reporting on the nation’s capital as a contributing editor for The Atlantic.

☆ Opinion | Are Anti-Trump Republicans Doomed to Repeat 2016?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-06 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

First, there’s the limits of ideological box-checking in a campaign against Trump. Part of DeSantis’s advantage now, compared with Cruz’s situation in 2016, is that he has seemed more congenial to the party’s bigger-money donors. Remember how nothing remotely like that happened among Republicans in 2016? This reflects another tendency that helped elect him the first time, the weird fatalism of professional Republicans. In 2016 many of them passed from “he can’t win” to “he can’t be stopped” with barely a way station in between.

☆ Opinion | Why Journalists Have More Freedom Than Professors
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

The new cultural liberalism in the media reflects the views of senior staff members and is opposed by affinity groups and young employees. That’s important, because surveys consistently find that “woke” values are twice as prevalent among younger leftists than among older leftists. Over eight in 10 undergraduates at 150 leading U.S. colleges say speakers who say B.L.M. What’s more, seven in 10 think a professor who says something that students find offensive should be reported to their university. First, the media is, by definition, an outward-facing, audience-driven enterprise, dependent on some kind of mass market for its viability.

☆ What the Steep Decline of the SAT Means for the Modern Meritocracy // Will the Decline of the SAT Sink the Meritocracy? // SAT and the College Meritocracy//tk - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-29 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The rapid abandonment of the SAT and ACT as requirements for college admissions, to the point where more than 80 percent of four-year colleges didn’t require a standardized test for admission in the coming fall, is a milestone in the history of the modern meritocracy. What remains to be seen is whether it’s a marker on the road to the meritocracy’s demise. From the beginning meritocratic culture and standardized testing have been inextricably intertwined. For a long time meritocracy’s skeptics, left and right, have noted that the new system created an upper class that seems as privileged and insular as the old one. There are reasons to be doubtful of this account.

☆ Opinion | In Defense of Nostalgia
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

The Columbia University professor Mark Lilla, a perspicacious liberal critic of the contemporary right and left, has an essay in the latest issue of Liberties Journal analyzing the appeal and perils of nostalgia. Lilla illustrates this peril with a long discussion of the role that nostalgia and imagined pasts played in the rise and shape and savagery of National Socialism in Germany. The fascists were heirs to Augustan Rome not because of an affinity between their worldviews, but because Augustan Rome had a lot of would-be heirs. And it had all those heirs and imitators because the phenomenon Lilla describes, the redirection of nostalgia for past greatness toward a vision of the future, is an essential part of human civilization-building. Or alternatively, nostalgic rediscoveries are often necessary to humanize and tame the excesses of progress, to maintain continuities that might otherwise be shattered by social or technological shifts.

☆ Opinion | The Tucker Realignment
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-25 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The master key to understanding Tucker Carlson’s programming wasn’t ideology; it was suspicion. Then something changed — after the Iraq war, after Jon Stewart helped kill “Crossfire,” he gradually became disillusioned, radicalized. But Carlson wasn’t like the right-wing personalities — a Mark Levin, say — who surrendered to Trumpism reluctantly because that’s where their listeners wanted them to go. Which is why his show was the farthest right on cable news but also sometimes the farthest left. These forays were not in tension with his willingness to entertain the far right’s “Great Replacement” paranoia about immigration or fixate on a possible F.B.I.

☆ Opinion | Will Biden Face a Democratic Challenger?
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-22 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Biden has also avoided the kind of gambits and defeats that might leave a large constituency ready to revolt. None of this eliminates the difficulty of imagining his campaign for four more years. But it’s outstripped by the difficulty of seeing how any serious and respectable force inside the Democratic Party could be organized to stop it. However, as the Trump era has taught us, the serious and the respectable aren’t the only forces in American politics; disreputability has potency as well. Right now there’s no clear opening for a major rival like Newsom to replace Biden as the Democratic nominee.

☆ Opinion | Trump Didn’t Doom the G.O.P. Neither Would DeSantis.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-21 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

The Republican Party is hardly a juggernaut. It struggles mightily to win presidential-level popular vote majorities. The Republican Party has championed unpopular causes, it has picked widely hated nominees, it has pioneered new forms of self-sabotage and political malpractice. has won the popular vote in four of them. Indeed, you could argue that they indicate how lucky the Democrats have been that the G.O.P.

It’s something related to insulting someone, basically, in a way that is apparently illegal in India. And he basically is gonna be thrown out of parliament for this and will be ineligible to run for prime minister, because of this. I mean, you know, there’s a very different thing happening in America, and we still, I think, do have an independent judiciary. Like, it’s not as if Trump was convicted of a misdemeanor and then he can’t run for president. But it is interesting to think about the way in which the world is watching us and what lessons will be taken from this episode.

☆ Conservatives scoff at Trump's 'leftist plan' to build 10 new American cities featuring flying cars
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-19 | by ( Eliza Relman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Trump recently announced a plan to build up to 10 new American cities on federal land. But some right-wing critics have attacked it as a "leftist plan" to create walkable "15-minute cities." Fox News left its in-house comedian, Greg Gutfeld, to handle the coverage of Freedom Cities. A conservative member of the UK parliament recently called 15-minute cities an "international socialist concept" that "would take away your personal freedoms." But Freedom Cities don't sound like 15-minute cities at all.

☆ Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take 'control of human evolution.'
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-17 | by ( Julia Black | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +40 min

"We are the Underground Railroad of 'Gattaca' babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids," Malcolm told me. Ellison, meanwhile, who has two children in their 30s, has reportedly resumed having kids — with his 31-year-old girlfriend. "The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children," Simone said. The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children. Before she met Malcolm, Simone was convinced she wanted to live her life single and child-free.

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☆ The biggest blockbusters aren't in movie theaters right now — they're on TV: from 'The Rings of Power' to 'House of the Dragon'
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-07 | by ( Travis Clark | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

The blockbusterization of TV has reached a peak with "The Rings of Power" and "House of the Dragon." Meanwhile, movie theaters are experiencing a dire lack of new releases. In fact, the future of "Star Wars" is largely streaming TV — a big loss for movie theaters. "The Rings of Power" is the most expensive TV series ever made, with a production budget of $465 million for the first season. Some examples: Apple is making a TV series set in the same universe as "Godzilla vs. Kong," and Disney is readying its own King Kong series.

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