Tag Archives: July 2025

Arts & Literature, Books, Essays, Literature, Reviews

Literary Essay: “Infinite Interiors – On the Twenty Best Novels of All Time”

The following essay was written by ChatGPT and edited by Intellicurean from an article titled “The 20 best novels of all time” written by Claire Allfree and published in The Telegraph book section on July 6, 2025.

When a culture attempts to consecrate a definitive list of its greatest novels, it risks both an admirable arrogance and a kind of elegiac futility. The recent selection of The 20 Best Novels of All Time, published by The Telegraph, seems at once a celebration of the novel’s inexhaustible possibility and an implicit acknowledgment of our own waning capacity for reading with genuine urgency. It is as though we assemble these canons less to instruct our descendants than to reassure ourselves that we have not entirely forgotten how literature once moved the soul.

One cannot help but admire the breadth and seriousness of this catalogue. It stretches from the dreamlike elegance of The Tale of Genji—a work whose thousand-year distance intensifies its immediacy—to the compulsive self-dissection of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a testament to our age’s faith that self-disclosure can substitute for narrative shape. What holds these disparate texts together is not merely their historical significance but their shared aspiration to render life in all its unmastered perplexity.

If Harold Bloom were to begin here, he might call attention to The Tale of Genji as an early demonstration of what he once termed the “internalization of romance.” It is a book that transcends its courtly gossip to become an inexhaustible study in desire’s transformations, a mirror to the reader’s own fluctuations of attachment and estrangement. We encounter Genji’s erotic restlessness as both scandalous and poignantly familiar, for the novel’s true subject is the incommensurability between longing and fulfillment—an incommensurability that modern fiction has inherited as its principal obsession.

James Wood, by contrast, might focus on Middlemarch as the novelistic apogee of moral realism. Eliot’s genius lay in her refusal to reduce her characters to mere emblems of ideology or historical process. Instead, she endowed them with what Wood has called “free indirect style’s psychic oscillation,” a prose capable of inhabiting and exposing consciousness in the same instant. It is a book that dares to be both panoramic and exquisitely local, to weigh the ambitions of a nation against the disappointments of a single marriage bed. If there is a single argument to be made for the continued relevance of the realist novel, it is that Middlemarch remains more acute about our interiority than any contemporary memoir.

And yet one cannot ignore how this list gestures toward the novel’s capacity for formal subversion. Ulysses, with its irreverent transformations of the Homeric epic into the trivial routines of Dublin, still feels scandalous in its abundance. Joyce’s genius is not only in his linguistic pyrotechnics but in his suspicion that consciousness itself can never be adequately represented. His prose, that shifting mosaic of styles and registers, offers no comfort to the reader who seeks transparency. Instead, it confronts us with the knowledge that the novel’s greatest power may reside in its refusal to cohere.

This refusal—to simplify, to console, to moralize—animates many of the twenty selections. Invisible Man is less a conventional narrative than a hallucinatory initiation into the American underworld of racial invisibility. Ellison’s rhetorical bravado, his blending of surrealism and jeremiad, still outpaces the efforts of more contemporary chroniclers of identity. To read Invisible Man today is to recognize how easily literary radicalism becomes cultural commonplace, but also to remember how singular its achievement remains.

Nor does the list shy from novels that embrace the uncanny. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita may be the most exuberant refutation of realist pieties ever composed. Its supernatural comedy is both a rebuke to Stalinist orthodoxy and a reminder that the imagination is an inherently seditious faculty. If much of the 20th-century novel sought to dismantle the illusions of bourgeois life, Bulgakov’s masterpiece demonstrates that irony and enchantment can be revolutionary forces.

Yet if Bloom were to caution us, he would do so against the temptation to read these novels exclusively as instruments of social critique. Literature endures precisely because it exceeds its momentary political applications. War and Peace is indeed an anatomy of the Napoleonic Wars, but it is more crucially a demonstration of how historical consciousness itself can become an object of artistic inquiry. Tolstoy’s genius was to discover that the novelist’s truest fidelity is not to facts but to the felt perplexity of lived experience.

It is striking how Robinson Crusoe stands at the inception of the English novel, bearing within it the seeds of many later contradictions. Defoe’s narrative is, on the surface, a hymn to industry and resourcefulness. But the same story—of a man claiming dominion over an island—also encodes the imperial impulse, the confidence that the world exists to be measured, catalogued, and possessed. What once seemed the purest adventure has become, to modern readers, an uneasy parable of conquest.

One also encounters here the severe naturalism of Thérèse Raquin, a work whose lurid determinism feels almost an affront to Victorian piety. Zola’s lovers are not tragic in any redemptive sense; they are specimens trapped in an experiment of their own appetites. And yet there is a perverse grandeur in the novel’s refusal to pretend that desire leads anywhere but into the pit.

New Grub Street too is a novel about entrapment—this time not by passion but by commerce. Gissing’s weary chronicling of literary London feels uncannily prophetic, as if he anticipated the rise of every ghostwritten bestseller and every writer forced to commodify a persona. What is most unsettling is that he offers no counterexample: no heroic idealist who transcends the marketplace, no unspoiled domain of “pure” art. In this sense, the book remains an indispensable autopsy of cultural production.

If Zola and Gissing reveal the suffocating material conditions of life, Moby-Dick reveals the existential abyss. No novel is more saturated with the terror of cosmic indifference. Melville’s prose—sometimes biblical, sometimes madcap—collapses the distance between metaphysics and anatomy, making the whale not merely an animal but an emblem of the universe’s mute resistance to comprehension. In Bloom’s phrase, it is the American epic that devours all interpretations, a text that renders the critic humble before its incommensurate ambition.

One finds a different kind of ambition in Party Going, where Henry Green distills modernist unease into something almost glacial. Its stranded revellers, imprisoned in their own frivolity while fog swallows the city below, seem to embody an entire civilization’s failure to apprehend its own decline. The novel is both slight in incident and inexhaustible in implication—a reminder that the modernist fascination with stasis can be as provocative as any narrative pyrotechnics.

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time remains the most exhaustive testimony to literature’s faith in consciousness as a world unto itself. No novel before or since has so patiently mapped the minute inflections of memory, the subtle humiliations and triumphs of social life. It is a book that tests the limits of our attention but also rewards it with an intimacy that becomes, paradoxically, universal.

The Great Gatsby, meanwhile, retains its status as a parable of aspiration’s inevitable corrosion. Fitzgerald’s sentences are so lapidary that their loveliness can almost distract from the novel’s acrid judgment. Gatsby’s dream—at once romantic and predatory—has become the template for American self-mythology. That the dream collapses under the weight of its illusions is precisely what grants it the force of prophecy.

It is striking, too, how many of these novels seek to articulate the experience of cultures in collision. Things Fall Apart is the most lucid demonstration of Achebe’s conviction that narrative authority must be reclaimed by those whom empire has consigned to silence. Okonkwo’s tragedy is not only that he fails to adapt but that his story has been written over by the conqueror’s language. Achebe’s triumph is to create a form that both inhabits and transforms that language.

Closer to our own era, The Country Girls quietly ignited a literary insurrection. O’Brien’s candid portrayal of female desire and disillusionment, so scandalous in 1960s Ireland, now seems almost decorous in its gentleness. Yet its influence remains incalculable. It taught a generation of writers that the domestic could be radical, that the most private confessions might unsettle entire cultures.

No less ambitious, though in a different register, is The Golden Notebook. Lessing’s formal fragmentation enacts the very psychic disintegration it describes. Anna Wulf’s notebooks—political, personal, artistic—refuse to reconcile into any coherent identity. In this refusal, Lessing anticipates the confessional experiments of Knausgaard and the autofiction that now dominates so much literary discourse.

The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald, is a late testament to literature’s capacity to hover between genres—memoir, travelogue, essay—and to become, in that ambiguity, something more resonant than any of them alone. Sebald’s melancholy is not performative but almost geological: the sorrow of civilizations grinding into dust, of memory dissolving into rumor.

If Sebald writes out of mourning, Knausgaard writes out of a hunger so relentless it often seems pathological. My Struggle is both monument and provocation: an assertion that the granular details of ordinary life deserve the same attention Proust once gave to aristocratic salons. Whether this is a triumph of honesty or a capitulation to narcissism is a question the reader must answer alone.

And then there is Conversations with Friends, whose subdued prose and emotional diffidence reflect an era uneasy with grandeur. Rooney’s novel is not so much plotted as observed: a record of glancing attachments, tentative betrayals, and the provisional negotiations of millennial intimacy. Some will dismiss it as slight, but its cool detachment has a disquieting relevance. It suggests that the novel no longer needs epic ambition to be significant; it need only be exact.

A Closing Reflection

Surveying these twenty novels, we see not a single tradition but a plurality of experiments—each one extending the novel’s reach. To read them is to join a conversation that has never ended, in which each new book answers its predecessors with admiration, dissent, or surpassing ambition. Perhaps that is the most heartening lesson: that literature, in all its contradictions, remains the most durable form we possess for contemplating the inexhaustible strangeness of being alive.

A LIST OF THE BOOKS FROM THE ESSAY AND REVIEW IS BELOW:

  1. The Tale of Genji (1021) – Murasaki Shikibu
    Often called the first novel ever written, this thousand-year-old Japanese masterpiece recounts the romantic adventures of Prince Genji and the inner lives of the women he pursues, offering an exquisite portrayal of courtly love and social intrigue.
  2. The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) – John Bunyan
    A religious allegory composed in prison, telling the story of Christian’s perilous journey to the Celestial City. Simultaneously quest narrative, moral parable, and spiritual confession, it became one of English literature’s most influential texts.
  3. Robinson Crusoe (1719) – Daniel Defoe
    A castaway narrative presented as a true account, blending adventure and colonial ideology. Crusoe’s survival on an island and mastery over his domain has sparked both admiration and fierce debates over its imperialist assumptions.
  4. Moby-Dick (1851) – Herman Melville
    Captain Ahab’s vengeful pursuit of the white whale becomes an existential epic exploring obsession, fate, and humanity’s place in the cosmos. Famous for its lyrical prose and encyclopedic digressions on whales and whaling.
  5. Thérèse Raquin (1867) – Émile Zola
    A grim study of adultery and guilt, depicting the murderous passion between Thérèse and her lover, Laurent. Their crime leads to psychological disintegration and ghostly hauntings in this early work of French naturalism.
  6. War and Peace (1867) – Leo Tolstoy
    Tolstoy’s sprawling saga of Russian aristocrats during the Napoleonic Wars interweaves personal transformation with sweeping history, offering a masterful portrait of love, fate, and the forces that shape nations.
  7. Middlemarch (1871) – George Eliot
    Set in a provincial English town, this realist masterpiece follows the intellectual and emotional struggles of Dorothea Brooke and other characters as they confront marriage, ambition, and disappointment.
  8. New Grub Street (1891) – George Gissing
    An unflinching look at the late-Victorian literary marketplace, chronicling the rivalry between idealistic writers and pragmatic hacks, and exploring the compromises required to survive as a professional author.
  9. Ulysses (1922) – James Joyce
    A modernist reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey, set over a single day in Dublin. Famous for its stream-of-consciousness style, linguistic experimentation, and celebration of ordinary life’s hidden richness.
  10. In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) – Marcel Proust
    A monumental seven-volume exploration of memory, time, and desire, chronicling the narrator’s life and the decline of French aristocracy with lush psychological and social detail.
  11. The Great Gatsby (1925) – F. Scott Fitzgerald
    A glittering tragedy of the Jazz Age, centering on the mysterious Jay Gatsby’s doomed pursuit of wealth and love, and exposing the hollowness of the American Dream.
  12. Party Going (1939) – Henry Green
    A surreal, modernist novel about a group of privileged young people stranded in a railway hotel, whose trivial gossip masks a pervasive sense of dread as Europe hovers on the brink of war.
  13. Invisible Man (1952) – Ralph Ellison
    An unnamed Black narrator journeys through racism and disillusionment in America, blending surreal episodes, biting satire, and profound reflections on identity and invisibility.
  14. Things Fall Apart (1958) – Chinua Achebe
    Set in a 19th-century Igbo village, this landmark postcolonial novel traces the cultural collision between indigenous African traditions and British missionaries, through the tragic story of Okonkwo.
  15. The Country Girls (1960) – Edna O’Brien
    The coming-of-age story of two Irish girls escaping their repressive Catholic upbringing, whose quest for independence transformed Irish literature and scandalized conservative audiences.
  16. The Golden Notebook (1962) – Doris Lessing
    An ambitious, formally fragmented narrative about a woman writer dividing her life into separate notebooks—political, personal, creative—and attempting to reconcile them during a breakdown.
  17. The Master and Margarita (1966) – Mikhail Bulgakov
    A satirical fantasy in which the Devil arrives in Stalinist Moscow with a retinue that includes a giant talking cat, exposing the absurdity and cruelty of totalitarian society.
  18. The Rings of Saturn (1995) – W.G. Sebald
    A genre-defying meditation combining travelogue, memoir, history, and philosophy, as a narrator’s walk along the English coast sparks digressions on decay, memory, and loss.
  19. My Struggle (2009–2011) – Karl Ove Knausgaard
    A six-volume autofiction epic chronicling the author’s life in exhaustive detail, from childhood to fatherhood, redefining confessional writing and stirring controversy over privacy and truth.
  20. Conversations with Friends (2017) – Sally Rooney
    A millennial love story about a young Dublin student entangled in an affair with an older married man, written in Rooney’s lucid, understated style that captures the textures of contemporary intimacy.
Analysis, Law, Opinion, Reviews

REVIEW: “Judgment Calls – From Diddy’s Acquittal To The Supreme Court’s Shift”

THE FOLLOWING IS AN “AI REVIEW” OF THE JULY 3 EPISODE OF “BLOOMBERG LAW WITH JUNE GRASSO” PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

In the dimly lit chambers of American justice, two parallel stories unfolded this term—one involving the cultural phenomenon of Sean “Diddy” Combs, the other the ideological recalibration of the United States Supreme Court. Each, in its own way, exposed the tensions inherent in a legal system grappling with the competing imperatives of moral condemnation, procedural fairness, and the inexorable gravitational pull of politics.

In federal court, Combs emerged, if not unscathed, then improbably triumphant. After six weeks of graphic testimony and the steady drip of lurid detail, jurors acquitted him of the most sensational accusations: racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, crimes that, had they stuck, would almost certainly have resulted in a life sentence. Instead, he was convicted only on two counts of transporting sex workers across state lines to participate in what prosecutors termed “freak-off parties.” In the pantheon of celebrity trials, this outcome was remarkable not merely for the verdict itself but for the rhetorical overreach that defined the government’s case.

Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor turned defense attorney, spoke to the case’s cautionary lesson about prosecutorial ambition. RICO—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—was never an intuitive fit for Combs, a music mogul whose business dealings, however flamboyant, bore little resemblance to the mafia syndicates the statute was designed to dismantle. In the final analysis, jurors appeared unconvinced that the machinery of Combs’s empire—record labels, promotional companies, an entourage that blurred the line between personal and professional—was itself the instrument of a criminal conspiracy. They were similarly unconvinced that the two women at the heart of the government’s sex trafficking charges had been coerced rather than entangled in a toxic, if mutually complicit, set of relationships.

Perhaps more striking still was the defense’s strategy: they called no witnesses. Rather than counter the government’s narrative with competing testimony, Combs’s lawyers focused their energy on cross-examination, unspooling the contradictions and ambivalences embedded in the prosecution’s evidence. Here, too, lay a broader truth about modern criminal justice. The power to define the contours of the case—the charges themselves—can be as determinative as the evidence marshaled to prove them. When the government chooses to depict a defendant as the capo di tutti capi of an illicit empire, it must persuade a jury not only of wrongdoing but of a sweeping criminality that often strains credulity. When that narrative collapses, as it did here, the defense is left with the simpler task of pointing out the seams.

But Combs’s legal jeopardy is not yet at an end. Though acquitted of the most serious charges, he faces up to twenty years in prison on the counts that remain, even if the federal sentencing guidelines suggest a considerably lower range. The presiding judge, troubled by videotaped evidence of Combs assaulting one of the alleged victims, declined to release him pending sentencing—a reminder that in federal court, the most powerful voice is not the jury’s but the judge’s. It is not inconceivable that the final chapter of this saga will be harsher than the defense’s celebration suggested.

If Combs’s courtroom drama offered a microcosm of prosecutorial overreach, the Supreme Court’s term showcased a more profound shift: a conservative supermajority willing to reconfigure the balance of power between the judiciary and the executive—and, by extension, between individuals and the state. In conversation with constitutional law scholar Michael Dorf, host June Grasso illuminated the breadth of these changes. Over the past year, the Court issued a series of rulings that, taken together, represent a quiet revolution in the way the federal courts interact with presidential authority.

At the heart of this transformation was the Court’s decision to curtail nationwide injunctions—sweeping orders issued by district judges to block federal policies across the entire country. For decades, these injunctions served as a vital mechanism by which civil rights plaintiffs, immigrant communities, and other marginalized groups could halt executive overreach before it inflicted irreparable harm. Their disappearance is no mere procedural adjustment; it recasts the balance between the judiciary’s protective function and the executive’s prerogative to govern unencumbered.

This doctrinal shift accrued almost exclusively to the benefit of President Trump, whose administration had faced a phalanx of legal challenges. Whether the issue was the forced deportation of migrants, the exclusion of transgender Americans from military service, or the elimination of birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court’s majority showed an evident willingness to side with the executive branch on an emergency basis—often with scant explanation. Dorf described this posture as striking not merely for its partisanship but for its inconsistency: lower courts that blocked Trump policies were overruled with alacrity, even as those same justices castigated nationwide injunctions as judicial overreach.

At the same time, the term’s most divisive rulings revealed a Court emboldened to advance a culturally conservative agenda. In a 6-3 decision, the justices upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, dismissing the equal protection claims of transgender plaintiffs and casting doubt on whether such discrimination should trigger heightened constitutional scrutiny. In another ruling, religious parents were granted the right to withdraw their children from public school curricula that included LGBTQ-themed storybooks—a decision that critics warn will invite broader challenges to any teaching that conflicts with sectarian belief. In the aggregate, these rulings did more than roll back hard-won protections for LGBTQ Americans. They signaled a willingness to prioritize religious objections over the rights of vulnerable communities, an alignment that recurred throughout the term.

For Dorf, the most unsettling dimension was not the conservative tilt per se but the Court’s apparent comfort with what he called a “soft authoritarian” style of governance. The Roberts Court had already repealed the constitutional right to abortion and limited the federal government’s capacity to regulate firearms. What distinguished this term was its readiness to facilitate the Trump administration’s disregard for judicial orders—an erosion not of precedent but of the rule of law itself.

Whether these developments portend a lasting reorientation of American jurisprudence remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the ideological polarization of the Supreme Court is reshaping the lives of countless citizens in ways that transcend conventional partisanship. In this respect, the travails of Sean Combs and the ambitions of the Roberts Court are, improbably, two facets of the same American story: one in which the legal system’s power to punish and to protect is increasingly mediated by political will—and by the narratives that prevail when the evidence, the law, and the culture clash in the crucible of the courtroom.

Segment 1: The Verdict in Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Case

Guests:

  • Robert Mintz, former federal prosecutor, partner at McCarter & English

Topics:

  • Combs’ acquittal on the most serious charges (racketeering, conspiracy, sex trafficking)
  • Conviction on two lesser felonies (transportation to engage in prostitution)
  • Defense’s strategy to challenge overcharging
  • Impact of the 2016 video showing domestic violence
  • Potential sentencing: between ~2–5 years under guidelines, but judge has broad discretion
  • Judge’s refusal to release Combs pending sentencing due to danger concerns
  • Broader implications of prosecutorial overreach and the difficulties of proving coercion in complex, long-term relationships

Segment 2: The Supreme Court Term Review

Guest:

  • Michael Dorf, constitutional law professor, Cornell Law School

Topics:

  • The Supreme Court siding repeatedly with the Trump administration
    • Disbanding nationwide injunctions (limiting checks on executive power)
    • Facilitating major policy shifts (transgender military ban, deportations, birthright citizenship challenges)
  • LGBTQ rights decisions:
    • Upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors
    • Requiring schools to exempt religious families from LGBTQ-inclusive curricula
    • Concerns about the erosion of protections under equal protection doctrine
    • Forthcoming cases on transgender sports participation and conversion therapy bans
  • Second Amendment developments:
    • Court upholding ghost gun regulations
    • Declining to broadly immunize gun manufacturers
    • Signaling possible caution but not reversal of the pro-gun rights direction
  • Emergency docket criticism:
    • Pattern of granting Trump administration emergency relief with limited justification
    • Disregard for procedural norms
  • Overarching movement:
    • From traditional conservatism into enabling a more authoritarian style of governance

Summary

This episode of Bloomberg Law, hosted by June Grasso, offered an in-depth analysis of two major legal stories:

1. The Sean “Diddy” Combs Case
After a six-week federal trial with emotionally charged testimony, Combs was acquitted of racketeering and sex trafficking but convicted of transporting sex workers across state lines—a felony under the Mann Act. Prosecutors’ strategy to use RICO laws typically reserved for mob cases ultimately backfired, allowing the defense to argue overreach. While the jury found Combs’ conduct disturbing, they did not believe it rose to organized criminal enterprise. Despite securing partial convictions, the prosecution faces criticism for overcharging, which opened avenues for defense cross-examination and ultimately undermined their case. Combs remains in custody as he awaits sentencing, which could be significantly harsher than defense estimates due to the judge’s concerns about continued danger.

2. The Supreme Court’s Term
Professor Michael Dorf described a term marked by sweeping decisions that advanced a conservative agenda, often benefiting the Trump administration. The Court stripped lower courts of their ability to issue nationwide injunctions, effectively removing a key check on executive overreach. In LGBTQ cases, the Court upheld bans on gender-affirming care for minors, sided with religious parents seeking exemptions from inclusive curricula, and signaled openness to further limits on trans rights in upcoming cases. While the Court maintained some gun regulations, its overall jurisprudence continues a rightward trajectory, blending traditional conservative principles with deference to Trump’s more aggressive policies. Emergency docket decisions frequently favored the administration without full briefing, raising concerns about procedural fairness and erosion of judicial norms. Ultimately, the Court’s direction was characterized as not just conservative, but increasingly aligned with authoritarian tendencies.

THIS POSTING WAS WRITTEN BY AI AND EDITED BY INTELLICUREAN

Analysis, Economics, Financial, Opinion, Profiles, Reviews

REVIEW: “A BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL AND AN EVEN BIGGER DEBT: THREE PERSPECTIVES”

The following is an in-depth analysis of President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” written by ChatGPT from important, bi-partisan fiscal, economic and political sources, all listed below:

If there is one unassailable truth in American political life, it is that no grand legislative gesture arrives without the promise of prosperity—and the prospect of unintended consequences. Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law on July 4th, stands as a monument to this dynamic: a sprawling package of permanent tax cuts, entitlement retrenchments, and fresh spending, all wrapped in a populist bow and accompanied by the familiar refrain that the deficits will somehow pay for themselves.

To understand the bill’s import—and its likely fallout—it helps to consider three vantage points. The first is that of Milton Friedman, who would see in these provisions a laboratory for the free market, tempered by fiscal illusions. The second is Paul Krugman’s, for whom this is a brazen experiment in upward redistribution. The third is David Stockman’s, whose uniquely jaundiced eye discerns an unholy alliance of crony capitalism and debt-fueled political theatre.

Friedman, the Nobel laureate and evangelist of free enterprise, might first commend the bill’s unapologetic tax relief. A permanent extension of the 2017 tax cuts is precisely the sort of measure he once called “a way to restore incentives, reduce distortions, and reward enterprise.” For Friedman, a tax system ought to be predictable, broad-based, and minimally intrusive. In this sense, the bill’s elimination of taxes on tips and overtime income, coupled with higher thresholds for the estate tax, will likely increase the incentive to work, save, and invest.

Yet Friedman would be quick to warn that no tax cut exists in a vacuum. The real test of fiscal virtue, he always argued, is not in slashing tax rates but in restraining spending. This bill, by combining aggressive tax cuts with continued defense expansions and only partial reductions to social spending, falls short of the discipline he prescribed. The result, Friedman would say, is a structural deficit that will eventually require either inflation or future tax hikes. “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” he liked to remind audiences. This is a lunch billed to generations unborn.

Krugman, viewing the same legislation, would perceive not a triumph of market freedom but an egregious abdication of public responsibility. He has long argued that the most misleading idea in modern politics is the notion that tax cuts inevitably pay for themselves. As the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring shows, the bill is likely to add over $3 trillion to the national debt in the next decade, even after accounting for higher GDP. Krugman would note that the permanent nature of the cuts deprives lawmakers of future leverage and crowds out investments in education, infrastructure, and health.

More pointedly, Krugman would argue that the bill’s distributional impact is regressive by design. Expanded deductions for capital gains and estates, the restoration of a higher SALT cap, and corporate incentives all tilt the benefits toward the affluent, while Medicaid cuts and SNAP work requirements fall hardest on those with the least. In Krugman’s view, this is not simply poor economics but a moral failing: a return to what he calls “the era of Dickensian inequality, dressed up in the rhetoric of growth.”

Yet the critique most likely to sting is the one that David Stockman would deliver. Unlike Krugman, Stockman began as a champion of supply-side tax reform. But he has since become its most unflinching critic. To him, the “Big Beautiful Bill” represents the final stage of a fiscal derangement decades in the making: a bipartisan addiction to borrowing and a refusal to reckon with arithmetic. “This is not capitalism,” Stockman might write, “it’s a simulacrum of capitalism—an endless auction of political favors financed by the Fed’s printing press.”

Stockman would remind readers that when he served as Reagan’s budget director, the expectation was that tax cuts would be offset by deep spending restraint. Instead, deficits ballooned and discipline eroded. The new bill, with its eye-watering cost and lack of credible offsets, is an even more flamboyant departure from any pretense of balance. Stockman would likely deride the Republican celebration as a form of magical thinking, no more credible than the illusions peddled by Democrats. In his telling, the bill is both symptom and accelerant of a broader collapse of fiscal sanity.

All three perspectives converge on a single point: the bill’s enormous impact on the debt trajectory. According to estimates from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the legislation could push the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio past 145% by 2050—an unprecedented level for a peacetime economy. While proponents insist that higher growth will mitigate the burden, the Tax Foundation’s dynamic scoring suggests the additional output will cover only a fraction of the revenue loss.

Friedman would insist that economic growth requires both lower taxes and leaner government. Krugman would counter that social stability and productivity demand sustained public investment. Stockman would argue that the entire paradigm—borrowing trillions to finance giveaways—has become a bipartisan racket. Despite their ideological divergences, all three would agree that the arithmetic is merciless. Eventually, debts must be serviced, entitlements must be funded, and the dollar’s credibility must be defended.

What remains is the question of public memory. In the years ahead, as interest payments rise and fiscal constraints tighten, politicians will doubtless blame one another for the bill’s consequences. The narrative will fracture along familiar lines: Republicans will claim the tax cuts were sabotaged by spending; Democrats will argue the spending was hobbled by tax cuts. Independents will declare that neither side ever intended to balance the books. But the numbers, as Friedman and Krugman and Stockman all understood in their own ways, are immune to spin.

There is an old line, attributed variously to Keynes and to an anonymous Treasury mandarin, that the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Perhaps, in this case, Washington can remain irrational longer than the public can remain attentive. But eventually, the bill will come due—not only the legislation signed on Independence Day, but the larger bill for decades of self-deception.

A big, beautiful bill indeed. And perhaps, in the fullness of time, an even bigger, less beautiful reckoning.

Key Elements of the Bill

  • Permanent tax cuts (≈ $4.5 trillion): Extends nearly all parts of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including individual rate brackets, expanded standard deduction, plus new deductions—no taxes on tips/overtime (through 2028), boosted SALT deduction ($40k cap for five years), larger child/senior credits, plus expansions like auto loan interest write-offs and “Trump Accounts” for parents apnews.com+15ft.com+15crfb.org+15.
  • Major spending cuts: $1–1.2 trillion in savings via Medicaid cuts (work requirements, provider taxes), SNAP/state cost-shifts, rollback of clean energy incentives .
  • Increased enforcement and defense: $150 B added to defense, another $150 B+ for border/ICE enhancements; ICE funding grows tenfold – now largest federal law enforcement budget .
  • Debt-ceiling hike: Allows a $4–$5 trillion statutory increase in borrowing authority as.com+3en.wikipedia.org+3reuters.com+3.

📊 Economic & Fiscal Outlook

🏛️ Congressional Budget Office (CBO)

🏦 CRFB & Budget Advocates

  • Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) puts the Senate’s reconciliation version at $4.1 trillion added debt through 2034—and warns a permanent version could add $5.3–5.5 trillion en.wikipedia.org.
  • CRFB also flags that Social Security and Medicare’s projected insolvency deadlines are now accelerated by roughly one year .

🧮 Tax Foundation

  • Estimates that permanent tax measures could yield a +1.2% GDP boost over the long run, but also slash federal revenue by $4 trillion (dynamically)—meaning growth would only cover ~19% of the revenue loss en.wikipedia.org+15en.wikipedia.org+15reuters.com+15.
  • Shorter-term growth boost around +0.6% by 2027, but turns mildly negative (–0.1%) by 2034 once fiscal constraints bite taxfoundation.org.

🌍 International Outlook (Moody’s, Reuters)

💬 Media & Policy Experts

  • Reuters warns of a “debt spiral,” with rising interest costs jeopardizing Fed independence .
  • FT, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist describe it as the largest GOP tax/deficit expansion since Reagan, dubbing it a “reverse Robin Hood”—favoring corporations and wealthy over vulnerable groups .
  • Economists at Yale, Penn warn severe health-care cuts could increase preventable mortality and financial distress en.wikipedia.org+1ft.com+1.

🔍 Bottom Line Summary

MetricEstimate
Deficit Increase (2025–34)$3.3–4.1 T (CBO: ≈ $3.4T; CRFB Senate: ≈ $4.1T)
Debt-to-GDP TrajectoryRising, potentially 145–200% by 2050
GDP Growth Impact+0.6% by 2027, fading to –0.1% by 2034
Revenue Loss~$4–5 T over a decade (dynamic)
Insured Loss & Social Costs~11 M fewer insured; Medicaid/SNAP and health impacts significant
  • Neutral consensus: Deficit historians, nonpartisan agencies agree debt will balloon sharply in absence of offsetting revenues or spending reversals.
  • Growth trade-off: While tax relief offers modest short-term growth, it does not offset long-run fiscal burdens.
  • Debt consequences: Higher mandatory interest costs, credit rating erosion, pressure on policy flexibility, and future tax hikes or spending cuts loom.

🧠 Final Take

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” delivers sweeping tax cuts, spending reductions in social safety nets, and major border/defense expansions—all rolled into one 940-page, $4–5 trillion fiscal package. Bipartisan institutions like the CBO, CRFB, Tax Foundation, and independent watchdogs align on its massive impact:

  1. Adds trillions to the deficit, sharply escalating national debt.
  2. Offers modest, short-term output gains, but risks longer-term economic drag.
  3. Amplifies fiscal risk, stokes interest burden, and could strain future budgets.
  4. Contains explicit regressive elements—favoring higher-income households and corporations over lower-income families and health-care access.

Here are the three writers whose vantage points are considered:

1️⃣ Conservative / Republican

Milton Friedman

Why he stands out:

  • Nobel Prize–winning economist and prolific writer whose work shaped modern conservative and libertarian economic thought.
  • Champion of free markets, limited government, and monetarism (the idea that controlling the money supply is key to managing the economy).
  • His books and columns influenced Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and remain foundational in debates about taxes, deficits, and regulation.
    Major Works:
  • Capitalism and Freedom (1962) – argued that economic freedom underpins political freedom.
  • Free to Choose (1980, with Rose Friedman) – a best-selling defense of deregulation, school vouchers, and lower taxes.
  • Columns for Newsweek and extensive public outreach (including the PBS series Free to Choose).

2️⃣ Liberal / Progressive

Paul Krugman

Why he stands out:

  • Nobel Prize–winning economist and prominent columnist who shaped liberal economic commentary from the 1990s onward.
  • A sharp critic of supply-side tax cuts, deregulation, and austerity.
  • Influential in Democratic policy debates on stimulus spending, inequality, and health care.
    Major Works:
  • The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) – traced the rise of inequality and made a moral case for progressive taxation and social insurance.
  • End This Depression Now! (2012) – argued forcefully for Keynesian stimulus after the Great Recession.
  • Columns in The New York Times, where he has been one of the most-read voices on economic policy.

3️⃣ Independent / Centrist

David Stockman

Why he stands out:

  • Former Reagan budget director who later became an iconoclastic critic of both parties’ fiscal excesses.
  • He helped design the Reagan tax cuts, but later turned against supply-side orthodoxy and big deficits.
  • His writings blend libertarian skepticism of big government with scathing critiques of Wall Street bailouts and crony capitalism.
    Major Works:
  • The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (1986) – a landmark insider account of budget battles and exploding deficits.
  • The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (2013) – an encyclopedic denunciation of central banking, stimulus, and fiscal irresponsibility.
  • Regular commentary and op-eds across financial and political publications (The New York Times, Zero Hedge, The Atlantic).
Essays, Politics, Reviews, Social Media

REVIEW: “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics”

An AI Review: “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics”

In The New Yorker essay “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics,” Kyle Chayka explores how social media has become not merely a communication tool for political figures but the primary arena in which politics itself now unfolds. The piece contrasts the digital personas of Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani to illustrate how posting has evolved into a core exercise of power and a new form of political identity.

Chayka begins by chronicling former President Trump’s frenetic use of Truth Social, the platform he created after leaving Twitter. Trump does not merely announce decisions online; he appears to make them there. For instance, in June 2025, Trump unilaterally declared and publicized a ceasefire between Israel and Iran on Truth Social after having ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities only days earlier. He issued warnings and taunts in the same all-caps style he once used to brag about the size of his nuclear arsenal compared to Kim Jong Un’s. The essay argues that this real-time posting has compressed world-shaking events into casual, ephemeral updates, trivializing violence and policy into the equivalent of viral content.

Yet Trump is not alone in harnessing the power of constant broadcasting. Chayka turns to Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old New York State assembly member and Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, who embodies a different approach to digital politics. Where Trump’s style is bombastic and combative, Mamdani’s presence on TikTok and Instagram is more polished and warm. His short-form videos—some produced by the creative agency Melted Solids—blend documentary realism with the aesthetics of viral influencer content. Clips of Mamdani walking through Manhattan or spontaneously greeting his filmmaker mother, Mira Nair, have garnered millions of views. His collaborations with high-profile digital creators like the Kid Mero and Emily Ratajkowski reflect an understanding that modern campaigns are not only about policy but about generating a steady stream of engaging material.

Chayka underscores that both politicians are symptoms of the same phenomenon: social media has swallowed the traditional infrastructure of political communication. No longer is there a clear boundary between a politician’s private musings and official pronouncements. The medium has become the message—and often the entire substance. Even memes have turned into flash points of political conflict. The article recounts how U.S. border officials detained a Norwegian tourist, Mads Mikkelsen, who carried a satirical meme of Vice President J.D. Vance on his phone, suggesting that political images have acquired the power to implicate their holders in ideological battles.

This transformation, Chayka argues, has significant consequences. Trump’s unfiltered posts, once viewed as a sideshow, have become a primary instrument of governance, with the potential to inflame conflicts or disrupt alliances. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s refined authenticity—crafted through video diaries and collaborations—illustrates how even progressive candidates must adopt the same always-online posture to cultivate a political following. While Mamdani’s style is less aggressive than Trump’s, it similarly depends on projecting a version of authenticity that is inseparable from performance.

The essay closes by reflecting on the future of American politics in this environment. The Democratic Party has struggled to counter Trump’s cultural dominance, as shown by tone-deaf spectacles like a Pride concert at the Kennedy Center with anti-Trump parodies of Les Misérables. In contrast, Mamdani’s campaign has generated genuine enthusiasm. Yet Chayka raises an open question: can the idealistic energy of this new digital-first politics survive the compromises of actual governance? If online performance has become the main credential for leadership, it is unclear whether any politician—no matter their ideology—can avoid the pressures of perpetual self-promotion.

In the end, Chayka’s essay offers a clear warning: social media has transformed politics into a theater of the immediate, where every post carries the weight of policy and every meme can become an instrument of power. Whether this dynamic can be reconciled with the demands of responsible government remains the central challenge of the digital age.

Strengths of the Essay

  1. Compelling Illustrations of Digital-First Governance
    • The article effectively juxtaposes Trump’s all-caps proclamations with Mamdani’s handheld videos.
    • Vivid examples: Trump’s posts about Iranian bombings feel almost satirical in their triviality—like “food grams”—yet they are deadly serious.
    • The Vance meme incident (Norwegian tourist Mikkelsen denied entry partly over a meme) underscores how digital artifacts can become politically consequential.
  2. Clear Argument
    • Chayka convincingly demonstrates that posting is no longer merely a marketing tactic—it is a form of exercising power.
    • The phrase “influencer-in-chief” encapsulates this new paradigm succinctly.
  3. Timeliness and Relevance
    • The piece captures the unsettling normalcy of this phenomenon—how we now expect statecraft to be conducted via apps.
    • It connects to broader anxieties about the erosion of institutional boundaries between governance and entertainment.
  4. Balanced Comparison
    • The contrast between Trump’s aggression and Mamdani’s optimism avoids simple equivalence.
    • The essay suggests that while style differs, both are beholden to the same dynamics: immediacy, spectacle, and performative authenticity.

Areas For Further Exploration

  1. A Critique of Consequences
    • While Chayka notes the trivialization of serious decisions (e.g., bombings posted like selfies), he stops short of examining the systemic dangers—the erosion of deliberative processes, the collapse of public trust, and the incentivizing of extremism.
    • A deeper dive into why social media rewards such maximalist performances—and how this affects democracy—would have been valuable.
  2. An Exploration of Audience Complicity
    • The essay portrays politicians as the main actors, but it could interrogate how audiences co-produce this environment: what are the incentives to consume, share, and reward this content?
    • Do voters really want “authenticity,” or simply entertainment masquerading as politics?
  3. Further developed Historical Context
    • While the piece references Trump’s first term, it could have drawn richer parallels with earlier media transformations:
      • Roosevelt’s radio “Fireside Chats”
      • Kennedy’s TV charisma
      • Obama’s early social media campaigns
    • This would help readers situate today’s moment within a longer trajectory.

Broader Implications

The essay ultimately raises unsettling questions:

  • If the performance of authenticity is now the primary qualification for political power, how do policy substance and institutional competence survive?
  • Is there any way for governance to reassert seriousness, or will the logic of virality always prevail?
  • What happens when online theater collides with offline consequences—wars, economies, civic life?

These questions feel especially urgent given that the piece suggests this dynamic is not limited to Trump’s right-wing populism but has also infiltrated progressive candidates.

*THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN BY CHAT GPT AND EDITED BY INTELLICUREAN.

Artificial Intelligence, Podcasts, Reviews

Review: How Microsoft’s AI Chief Defines ‘Humanist Super Intelligence’

An AI Review of How Microsoft’s AI Chief Defines ‘Humanist Super Intelligence’

WJS “BOLD NAMES PODCAST”, July 2, 2025: Podcast Review: “How Microsoft’s AI Chief Defines ‘Humanist Super Intelligence’”

The Bold Names podcast episode with Mustafa Suleyman, hosted by Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins of The Wall Street Journal, is an unusually rich and candid conversation about the future of artificial intelligence. Suleyman, known for his work at DeepMind, Google, and Inflection AI, offers a window into his philosophy of “Humanist Super Intelligence,” Microsoft’s strategic priorities, and the ethical crossroads that AI now faces.

1. The Core Vision: Humanist Super Intelligence

Throughout the interview, Suleyman articulates a clear, consistent conviction: AI should not merely surpass humans, but augment and align with our values.

This philosophy has three components:

  • Purpose over novelty: He stresses that “the purpose of technology is to drive progress in our civilization, to reduce suffering,” rejecting the idea that building ever-more powerful AI is an end in itself.
  • Personalized assistants as the apex interface: Suleyman frames the rise of AI companions as a natural extension of centuries of technological evolution. The idea is that each user will have an AI “copilot”—an adaptive interface mediating all digital experiences: scheduling, shopping, learning, decision-making.
  • Alignment and trust: For assistants to be effective, they must know us intimately. He is refreshingly honest about the trade-offs: personalization requires ingesting vast amounts of personal data, creating risks of misuse. He argues for an ephemeral, abstracted approach to data storage to alleviate this tension.

This vision of “Humanist Super Intelligence” feels genuinely thoughtful—more nuanced than utopian hype or doom-laden pessimism.

2. Microsoft’s Strategy: AI Assistants, Personality Engineering, and Differentiation

One of the podcast’s strongest contributions is in clarifying Microsoft’s consumer AI strategy:

  • Copilot as the central bet: Suleyman positions Copilot not just as a productivity tool but as a prototype for how everyone will eventually interact with their digital environment. It’s Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s ecosystem and Google’s Assistant—a persistent, personalized layer across devices and contexts.
  • Personality engineering as differentiation: Suleyman describes how subtle design decisions—pauses, hesitations, even an “um” or “aha”—create trust and familiarity. Unlike prior generations of AI, which sounded like Wikipedia in a box, this new approach aspires to build rapport. He emphasizes that users will eventually customize their assistants’ tone: curt and efficient, warm and empathetic, or even dryly British (“If you’re not mean to me, I’m not sure we can be friends.”)
  • Dynamic user interfaces: Perhaps the most radical glimpse of the future was his description of AI that dynamically generates entire user interfaces—tables, graphics, dashboards—on the fly in response to natural language queries.

These sections of the podcast were the most practically illuminating, showing that Microsoft’s ambitions go far beyond adding chat to Word.

3. Ethics and Governance: Risks Suleyman Takes Seriously

Unlike many big tech executives, Suleyman does not dodge the uncomfortable topics. The hosts pressed him on:

  • Echo chambers and value alignment: Will users train AIs to only echo their worldview, just as social media did? Suleyman concedes the risk but believes that richer feedback signals (not just clicks and likes) can produce more nuanced, less polarizing AI behavior.
  • Manipulation and emotional influence: Suleyman acknowledges that emotionally intelligent AI could exploit user vulnerabilities—flattery, negging, or worse. He credits his work on Pi (at Inflection) as a model of compassionate design and reiterates the urgency of oversight and regulation.
  • Warfare and autonomous weapons: The most sobering moment comes when Suleyman states bluntly: “If it doesn’t scare you and give you pause for thought, you’re missing the point.” He worries that autonomy reduces the cost and friction of conflict, making war more likely. This is where Suleyman’s pragmatism shines: he neither glorifies military applications nor pretends they don’t exist.

The transparency here is refreshing, though his remarks also underscore how unresolved these dilemmas remain.

4. Artificial General Intelligence: Caution Over Hype

In contrast to Sam Altman or Elon Musk, Suleyman is less enthralled by AGI as an imminent reality:

  • He frames AGI as “sometime in the next 10 years,” not “tomorrow.”
  • More importantly, he questions why we would build super-intelligence for its own sake if it cannot be robustly aligned with human welfare.

Instead, he argues for domain-specific super-intelligence—medical, educational, agricultural—that can meaningfully transform critical industries without requiring omniscient AI. For instance, he predicts medical super-intelligence within 2–5 years, diagnosing and orchestrating care at human-expert levels.

This is a pragmatic, product-focused perspective: more useful than speculative AGI timelines.

5. The Microsoft–OpenAI Relationship: Symbiotic but Tense

One of the podcast’s most fascinating threads is the exploration of Microsoft’s unique partnership with OpenAI:

  • Suleyman calls it “one of the most successful partnerships in technology history,” noting that the companies have blossomed together.
  • He is frank about creative friction—the tension between collaboration and competition. Both companies build and sell AI APIs and products, sometimes overlapping.
  • He acknowledges that OpenAI’s rumored plans to build productivity apps (like Microsoft Word competitors) are perfectly fair: “They are entirely independent… and free to build whatever they want.”
  • The discussion of the AGI clause—which ends the exclusive arrangement if OpenAI achieves AGI—remains opaque. Suleyman diplomatically calls it “a complicated structure,” which is surely an understatement.

This section captures the delicate dance between a $3 trillion incumbent and a fast-moving partner whose mission could disrupt even its closest allie

6. Conclusion

The Bold Names interview with Mustafa Suleyman is among the most substantial and engaging conversations about AI leadership today. Suleyman emerges as a thoughtful pragmatist, balancing big ambitions with a clear-eyed awareness of AI’s perils.

Where others focus on AGI for its own sake, Suleyman champions Humanist Super Intelligence: technology that empowers humans, transforms essential sectors, and preserves dignity and agency. The episode is an essential listen for anyone serious about understanding the evolving role of AI in both industry and society.

THIS REVIEW OF THE TRANSCRIPT WAS WRITTEN BY CHAT GPT