Revolution and Ruin Book Club: Mary Shelley's The Last Man
Release Date: 04/24/2025
We're Talking About the Christian Nationalists Again
The Culture We Deserve
Following our earlier discussion of the documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics, Jessa and Nico get into the spread of Evangelicals in power -- not only in the United States but also where missionaries have established bases overseas. Like every other truly terrible contribution the US has made, this is all about the Cold War. Shownotes and references: http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com
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Revolution and Ruin Book Club: Honore de Balzac's Lost Illusions
The Culture We Deserve
Welcome to the creative economy, which is built to strip mine from your body and soul any glimmer of talent, skill, or genius you might possess and exploit it. Our unlucky men, Lucien and David, a poet and an inventor, are looking to make their riches in pre-1848 France, only to find the world is not built to tolerate, let alone celebrate, people like them. They try their luck. It doesn't go well. But at least Balzac spends a lot of time telling us about what kinds of velvet they were wearing along the way. Joseph and Jessa discuss why Marx loved Balzac, why a fool makes a frustrating...
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Video Killed the Journalist Star
The Culture We Deserve
We are all pivoting to video. Podcasters, journalists, editors are getting out their ring lights and their botox and they are staring intently into the camera to talk to YOU about what's going on. Is the human and tactile being offered as the antidote to the artificial AI slop? Or is this just surrendering to the influencer economy? Jessa and Nico make a solemn pledge, never to show the listeners what we wear or what our hair is doing while we are recording, and discuss the implications of a news media that wants to make stars and influencers out of reporters. Shownotes and references:...
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Taking Up Arms
The Culture We Deserve
With the expansion of ICE and the flood of untrained, unprepared, un-uniformed officers on the street, things are likely to get confusing and potentially violent. Nico and Jessa discuss the Trump admin's embrace of militia culture, why Colombia doesn't have militias, and what Jessa's weird obsession with Timothy McVeigh is all about. Shownotes and references: http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com
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Touristification
The Culture We Deserve
It's summer, the time of year each nation flings its most obnoxious and provincial citizenry into the rest of the world on cruise ships and discount airlines. And the rest of the world responds to the binge drinking, the clacking of roller suitcases, and public displays of ignorance with, "Why are these people my problem exactly?" It's the annual Gringos On the Move episode, this time covering mass tourism at Jonestown, the Disneylandification of Kyoto, and the anti-tourist and expat protests in Mexico City, Venice, and Barcelona. Shownotes and references:...
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The Antichrist Has Risen
The Culture We Deserve
Why is everyone so worried about the Antichrist again? After 9/11, the Evangelicals were afraid the Antichrist would take over the United Nations. Now Peter Thiel thinks this demon of destruction might be Greta Thunberg, but it's possible he just took psychedelics while watching Constantine and got scared. Jessa and Nico discuss why we're afraid of the apocalypse again, and whether Trump will ever give us a good Mamdani nickname. Shownotes and references: http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com
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The Corrosion of Character
The Culture We Deserve
America doesn't really make things. Even in its financial system, the highest rewards go to those who speculate, making bets on things that other people have created but creating nothing real or tangible in itself. Jessa and Nico discuss the difficulty in reversing the trend toward service and virtual production as well as the effects that working in the spectral rather than material realms has on a human. Shownotes and references: http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com
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Revolution and Ruin Book Club: George Sand's Indiana
The Culture We Deserve
Indiana is married to a brutish man who bullies and abuses her. She is followed around by her cousin Ralph, who loves her but remains a loyal friend to the man who stomps her on the face and kills her dog. Then there is Raymon, the scoundrel, who loves Indiana but is also sleeping with her maid Noun. It's a love pentagon, and somehow no one is having a very good time. George Sand's Indiana is a story about how women have adapted to and managed their lack of rights or ability to leave terrible husbands, but it's also a comedy about the impossibility of love under patriarchy. Join the book club...
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A Lack of Vision
The Culture We Deserve
Greg Grandin, author of the new book America, América, said in an interview this week, “You don't beat fascists by calling fascists, fascists. You beat fascists by offering an alternative and a broad vision of social democracy.” But that vision is stalled or mired in nostalgia. Nico and Jessa consider how people on the left from Chris Murphy to Gustavo Petro seem stuck in a 20th century leftism instead of envisioning 21st century solutions. Shownotes and references: http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com
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Do I Have to Have Empathy for Men?
The Culture We Deserve
The day that Nico arrived in Colombia this week a presidential candidate was shot, reigniting old fears of perpetual chaos and instability. Meanwhile, Marines are on the streets of Los Angeles. When the Menswear guy gently suggested on social media that if people really cared about immigrants they should spend their time on real immigration cases and policy instead of burning cars, he was swiftly denounced as insufficiently revolutionary. In a time (again/always) of political violence, Jessa and Nico discuss the desire to complain over the desire to change and the provocation of empathy....
info_outlineWelcome to episode one of The Culture We Deserve's Book Club, Revolution and Ruin: Reading the European 19th Century.
In this inaugural episode, Joseph and Jessa discuss Mary Shelley's The Last Man, a prophetic novel about disease, war, and the end of mankind. Unlike the apocalyptic spectacles of your standard end of the world movies and television shows, Shelley's slow burn gets into the grief and despair of humanity's end. Shelley was born at the tail end of the French Revolution and just before the revolutions of 1848, and she is invested in the questions of her era: how should a nation organize itself? how should resources be distributed? how is a person to live amid disruption and unpredictability? And what is the point of making art during tumult?
Join the discussion at:
http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com