Latest news with #JonathanSwift
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Opinion - The most psychotic musical since ‘Sweeney Todd' — and why America needs it
Luigi Mangione is accused of gunning down the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in broad daylight. A clean shot. No hesitation. Very soon, he'll sing about the brutal act in a San Francisco musical. I say: Good. 'Luigi: The Musical' is absurd, possibly sociopathic — and yet somehow entirely defensible. In fact, in this grotesque, camp-addled culture of ours, it might be the most honest piece of art produced all year. Not because murder is funny. Not because the justice system is a joke. But because we now live in an age where satire is the last viable truth-delivery system. Much of journalism is corporate. Novels are afraid. Late-night comedy is neutered. You want truth? Put it in a musical. Wrap it in sequins. And give it jazz hands. Satire has always been the most ruthlessly efficient scalpel. Aristophanes mocked imperial war. Jonathan Swift proposed devouring Irish children. George Orwell, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Vonnegut — they didn't protest. They staged freak shows. Molière shredded hypocrisy in powdered wigs. Charles Dickens dragged Victorian England through the gutter it tried to ignore. Joseph Heller turned bureaucratic madness into 'Catch-22.' Before his comedy went off a cliff, George Carlin stood on stage and tore down empire with a smirk. With 'Four Lions,' a pitch-black comedy about incompetent jihadists, Chris Morris made terrorism absurd. Before that, he had already terrified the British establishment with 'Brass Eye,' a fake news satire so savage it tricked members of Parliament into denouncing fictional drugs on air. Trey Parker made everything absurd, or at least appear absurd. From Mormonism ('The Book of Mormon') to war propaganda ('Team America') to the bloated theater of American politics and celebrity culture ('South Park'), nothing was sacred — and that was the point. Satire doesn't whisper; it slaps. It offends. It remembers what the real world would rather forget. 'Luigi' stands firmly in that lineage — not in spite of the outrage it invites, but because of it. What are we really so scandalized by? The idea of a murderer with a musical number? Please. We've been there before: 'Sweeney Todd,' 'Chicago,' 'Heathers,' 'Assassins.' We have clapped for John Wilkes Booth. We have cheered for razor blades and ricin. What bothers people about 'Luigi' isn't the violence. It's the contemporaneity — the fact that it's still too soon and the wound hasn't scabbed yet. This character, the corporate assassin-turned-accidental folk hero, feels dangerously plausible. Deep down, we know the real absurdity isn't the musical. It is the world that created such a man. We live in a culture that glamorizes sociopathy but gets offended when it's reflected back. Netflix ran 'Dahmer.' You can now buy 'American Psycho' mugs, t-shirts and beanies. 'The Sopranos' has a wine label. Real-life cartel hitmen share their 'wisdom' on TikTok. And yet, when a fringe theater group stages a smart, cynical satire about a real-life killing, we're told it's 'too far'? Get real. 'Luigi' doesn't play by prestige rules. It's too camp. Too gaudy. Too loud. It isn't Oscar-bait. It's black box theater with blood under its nails. And that's why it matters. It's not Netflix. It's not Hulu. It's not a limited series you can binge and forget. It's theater. And theater — real theater — makes you sit with it. The show is Gulag humor for the Uber Eats generation. It weaponizes the ludicrous, stitches viral violence to choreography, turns cellmates like Diddy and Sam Bankman-Fried into Greek chorus figures, and mocks our collective appetite for the borderline insane. 'Luigi'isn't glorifying Mangione. It's not trying to humanize him. It's trying to indict us. The audience. The algorithm. The economy of attention that turns killers into content. The culture that made a young man with a gun a trending topic before the body hit the pavement. This is a country where mass shooters get Wikipedia pages before their victims get autopsied. Where headlines blur into hashtags. Where the line between infamy and influence disappeared sometime around 2014. In that context, 'Luigi' isn't satire. It's realism. But there's a deeper tragedy here — not in the subject matter, but in the medium. Theater is dying — with its empty seats, aging donors and young people who'd rather scroll through cat videos, theater is losing the war for attention, and fast. This makes 'Luigi' both timely and, in some ways, necessary. Perhaps it's too campy. Perhaps it's too crass. Maybe it turns a murderer into a meme with a melody. But you know what? It gets people off their screens. It gets them out of their apartments. It gets them into a room with other humans, watching a live act of provocation unfold in real time. That used to be called art. Now it's called a liability. 'Luigi' won't win prestigious prizes. It might not even last its full run without protests. But it belongs. Theater isn't supposed to be sacred. It's supposed to be a mirror. Sometimes cracked, but always honest. So let them sing. Mangione won't be the last killer to dance under a spotlight. He's just the first one to do it with a chorus line and a cellmate named Diddy. John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hill
The most psychotic musical since ‘Sweeney Todd' — and why America needs it
Luigi Mangione is accused of gunning down the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in broad daylight. A clean shot. No hesitation. Very soon, he'll sing about the brutal act in a San Francisco musical. I say: Good. 'Luigi: The Musical' is absurd, possibly sociopathic — and yet somehow entirely defensible. In fact, in this grotesque, camp-addled culture of ours, it might be the most honest piece of art produced all year. Not because murder is funny. Not because the justice system is a joke. But because we now live in an age where satire is the last viable truth-delivery system. Much of journalism is corporate. Novels are afraid. Late-night comedy is neutered. You want truth? Put it in a musical. Wrap it in sequins. And give it jazz hands. Satire has always been the most ruthlessly efficient scalpel. Aristophanes mocked imperial war. Jonathan Swift proposed devouring Irish children. George Orwell, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Vonnegut — they didn't protest. They staged freak shows. Molière shredded hypocrisy in powdered wigs. Charles Dickens dragged Victorian England through the gutter it tried to ignore. Joseph Heller turned bureaucratic madness into 'Catch-22.' Before his comedy went off a cliff, George Carlin stood on stage and tore down empire with a smirk. With 'Four Lions,' a pitch-black comedy about incompetent jihadists, Chris Morris made terrorism absurd. Before that, he had already terrified the British establishment with 'Brass Eye,' a fake news satire so savage it tricked members of Parliament into denouncing fictional drugs on air. Trey Parker made everything absurd, or at least appear absurd. From Mormonism ('The Book of Mormon') to war propaganda ('Team America') to the bloated theater of American politics and celebrity culture ('South Park'), nothing was sacred — and that was the point. Satire doesn't whisper; it slaps. It offends. It remembers what the real world would rather forget. 'Luigi' stands firmly in that lineage — not in spite of the outrage it invites, but because of it. What are we really so scandalized by? The idea of a murderer with a musical number? Please. We've been there before: 'Sweeney Todd,' 'Chicago,' 'Heathers,' 'Assassins.' We have clapped for John Wilkes Booth. We have cheered for razor blades and ricin. What bothers people about 'Luigi' isn't the violence. It's the contemporaneity — the fact that it's still too soon and the wound hasn't scabbed yet. This character, the corporate assassin-turned-accidental folk hero, feels dangerously plausible. Deep down, we know the real absurdity isn't the musical. It is the world that created such a man. We live in a culture that glamorizes sociopathy but gets offended when it's reflected back. Netflix ran 'Dahmer.' You can now buy 'American Psycho' mugs, t-shirts and beanies. 'The Sopranos' has a wine label. Real-life cartel hitmen share their 'wisdom' on TikTok. And yet, when a fringe theater group stages a smart, cynical satire about a real-life killing, we're told it's 'too far'? Get real. 'Luigi' doesn't play by prestige rules. It's too camp. Too gaudy. Too loud. It isn't Oscar-bait. It's black box theater with blood under its nails. And that's why it matters. It's not Netflix. It's not Hulu. It's not a limited series you can binge and forget. It's theater. And theater — real theater — makes you sit with it. The show is Gulag humor for the Uber Eats generation. It weaponizes the ludicrous, stitches viral violence to choreography, turns cellmates like Diddy and Sam Bankman-Fried into Greek chorus figures, and mocks our collective appetite for the borderline insane. 'Luigi'isn't glorifying Mangione. It's not trying to humanize him. It's trying to indict us. The audience. The algorithm. The economy of attention that turns killers into content. The culture that made a young man with a gun a trending topic before the body hit the pavement. This is a country where mass shooters get Wikipedia pages before their victims get autopsied. Where headlines blur into hashtags. Where the line between infamy and influence disappeared sometime around 2014. In that context, 'Luigi' isn't satire. It's realism. But there's a deeper tragedy here — not in the subject matter, but in the medium. Theater is dying — with its empty seats, aging donors and young people who'd rather scroll through cat videos, theater is losing the war for attention, and fast. This makes 'Luigi' both timely and, in some ways, necessary. Perhaps it's too campy. Perhaps it's too crass. Maybe it turns a murderer into a meme with a melody. But you know what? It gets people off their screens. It gets them out of their apartments. It gets them into a room with other humans, watching a live act of provocation unfold in real time. That used to be called art. Now it's called a liability. 'Luigi' won't win prestigious prizes. It might not even last its full run without protests. But it belongs. Theater isn't supposed to be sacred. It's supposed to be a mirror. Sometimes cracked, but always honest. So let them sing. Mangione won't be the last killer to dance under a spotlight. He's just the first one to do it with a chorus line and a cellmate named Diddy. John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
What was it like fighting measles before vaccine? 1918 article warns of disease
Walk through an old cemetery and the tragic sight of small grave stones marking the final resting places of children is a common sight. Childhood mortality was commonplace from the early 1900s and earlier. When parents of the 1950s and 60s were given the chance to vaccinate their children against potentially fatal childhood illnesses they took advantage of the highly publicized inoculations. The sense of relief was real with the generation before — I grew up knowing older family members who had endured life-long injury from diseases like polio. Today severe consequences of childhood illnesses are being seen again where science skepticism has taken hold. Humans relate to story and anecdote told by the fireside but have a harder time with applying critical statistical analysis to real life choices. Given the choice of a convincing story told around the campfire and an empirical table of data, most people relate to the story more than the numbers. And sadly in some cases gathering accurate health data is being threatened by cutbacks in the only workforce charged with collecting and making sense of it. How do we address firefighter cancer rates, pregnancy risks and a host of other questions if no one is gathering the baseline information? It is ironic that today's anti-science digital storytelling was enabled by the scientists who invented the internet and devices that navigate it. The digital fireside has a lot of stories of questionable origin. Also ironic that people who distrust numbers and secretive organizations are fed information via a mathematical algorithm. Social media companies have an incentive to keep clients engaged and enraged but not accurately informed. The mission of most subscription-based sources is weighted toward accuracy but having a paywall limits the number of viewers. As satirist Jonathan Swift said; 'Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.' And the visual storytelling that often accompanies vaccinations is cringe inducing. It is almost impossible to take pictures of the actual story, prevention, the absence of disease. The most common images, someone getting stuck with a sharp needle, accompanying stories since the 1950s, isn't an inviting calling card. Sadly in 1918, there was little medicine could offer at the time for many illnesses except ride it out. In the late 1910s, the Daily Telegram carried a women's page with the tag lines 'You and your friends' and 'Women who are doing things.' It carried a mix of news on fashion, health and organization activities. It also had advertising that recognized that women had control of key buying decisions. The page had advice for the person who would most likely be the household caregiver should a health crisis hit. This story ran March 15, 1918, as World War I was raging in Europe. The movement of troops would facilitate the transmission of contagious illness. The four decks of headlines of the day have been edited here since they just repeat the story. Never before in the history of the state, according to Dr. W.H. Kellogg, secretary of the California State Board of Health, have measles and German measles been so prevalent. During 1917 there were 23,500 cases of these diseases reported to the State Board of Health, and during January and February of this year not less than 9,000 cases of these diseases have been reported. While nearly all cases have been of a very mild type, occasionally the disease has appeared in a very severe form. Since most fatal cases of measles occur in children under five years age, parents should take special care in protecting very young children from becoming infected. The best way to control measles is to isolate all cases as soon as suspicious symptoms occur. The chief difficulty in the control of the disease lies in the fact that it is more 'catching' in the early stages before any rash appears. Prompt isolation, however, helps to reduce the prevalence of the disease. The State Board of Health does not advise closing the schools during an epidemic of measles, provided a system of inspection of school children is maintained. The best results are obtained through keeping the schools open and excluding all pupils who show any early symptoms of illness, such as fever, sore throat, or the symptoms of a common cold. The regulations of the board require the isolation of all cases of measles and German measles. Health officers and citizens should comply with these regulations in order that the wide prevalence of these diseases may be reduced. The presence of measles among our soldiers will not help to win the war.
New York Times
12-04-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Stop Fetishizing the Stock Market
In a pamphlet published in 1711, Jonathan Swift lamented the 'folly' of those who 'mistake the echo of a London coffeehouse for the voice of the kingdom.' Those informal salons were, he wrote, frequented by people whose wealth depended on their shares in the Bank of England or the East India Company or 'some other stock.' If the responses to the Trump administration's tariff policies have shown us anything, it is that, like most of the ills against which Swift railed, this unfortunate tendency to conflate stockholders with the nation remains very much with us. The greatest division in American life is not between so-called red and blue states, or between urban and rural citizens, but instead between those who own stock and those who do not. For those who do, economic security can be measured in portfolio statements; the rest — roughly 40 percent of Americans — must make do with such antiquated metrics as the cost of housing or even the price of eggs. This division is not merely economic; it is also ideological. Though many Americans own at least some stock, 10 percent of Americans own 93 percent of it. Yet the elite stock-owning class has convinced itself that what is good for the S&P 500 is good for America. Worse, many Americans who own stock through retirement plans or pension plans have been convinced to believe this, too, even though their interests tend not to align neatly with those of multimillionaires. The result is a kind of ideological capture in which any policy that does not serve the immediate interests of shareholders is dismissed as reckless, radical or economically illiterate. The common good, insofar as it is considered at all, must first be translated into the language of market returns. Can anything be good if it does not make the line go up? The question (we are told) answers itself. Like awed visitors to the oracle at Delphi, we consult the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 with solemn credulity, and their half-random fluctuations are taken as portents of divine favor, or else as intimations of the coming wrath of heaven's gracious ones. All presidents — including Donald Trump — genuflect before this altar, and most of us implicitly regard any policy that displeases the great god Wall Street as a kind of sacrilege. We treat the stock market as the final arbiter of our collective well-being. But the stock market is not synonymous with the health of the United States. It is not always even a particularly valuable reflection of the state of the economy. Treating it as such not only blinds us to the reality of material conditions; it has also made us incapable of distinguishing between broad-based prosperity and a top-heavy consolidation of wealth. In April 1990, the Dow Jones industrial average stood at 2,710. Despite the no doubt harrowing events of the last week and a half, it is currently at 40,200. Does anyone really believe that Americans are roughly 15 times as wealthy as they were 35 years ago? Even gross domestic product — another debatable metric — is only five times what it was 35 years ago. Consider a series of alternative measures. In 1970, the median household income was less than $9,000. A new car cost about $3,400 and the average house $26,000. Today, median household incomes have risen to $80,000, but a new vehicle is somewhere in the neighborhood of $49,000, and the average home more than $400,000. Even these figures do not tell the whole story. The median income half a century ago generally represented the work of a single wage earner, and the prices of automobiles reflected the costs of paying good wages to unionized employees. Today, dual-income households are the norm, and a significant number of cars and trucks are made by nonunion employees, most of them abroad. These sorts of examples should be considered alongside social pathologies that are not always as easily quantifiable: the proliferation of gig work; the transformation of housing into a speculative asset class; the rise of a quasi-legal cannabis industry, payday lending and online gambling; the decline of reading; the atrophying of attention spans as virtually all facets of modern life are subsumed into digital communications technology. All of these things have, in a sense, been 'good for the market.' In the post-Cold War era, Americans have convinced themselves that economic decision making does not involve value judgments. When policies benefit the stock market, we imagine that they do so in accordance with an unassailable law of nature. But increasing shareholder value is just one possible goal. Another is increasing domestic steel production. Another is shifting the lower middle class away from aspirational 'laptop' jobs to skilled trades. These are all political choices, no less than the decision to regulate or to privatize. A bull market is not evidence of prosperity when real wages stagnate, housing becomes unaffordable, infrastructure crumbles. This is why we should be skeptical when the usual suspects — financial analysts, think-tank denizens, the perpetually aggrieved opponents of Mr. Trump — wring their hands over the supposed damage to 'the economy.' What, exactly, is being lamented? There are any number of possible criticisms — many of them warranted — of Mr. Trump's erratic tariff policy. But our having spasmodic muscular contractions in the general direction of Wall Street is not one of them. If nothing else good comes from the chaos, the articulation of an overarching national goal that is not simply 'making the number go up' would be a small step in the direction of something better. When John F. Kennedy told the American people that 'a rising tide lifts all boats,' one assumes that he did not envision a handful of yachts drifting off into the sunset while an entire fleet of rowboats capsized. That tide has certainly risen.
