Sincere suffering: Writing in the aftermath of grief, Nora Holmes probes its paradoxical nature in her new essay for The Harper Review. Grieving, “an infinite response to an ultimate finitude,” keeps us tethered to that which we have lost—but, as C. S. Lewis noted while mourning his wife, its perversion threatens to sever the connection. How does one come to the right relation with grief, without avoidance or fetish? Holmes finds an answer in the Tao Te Ching’s philosophy of non-doing, realizing that, “only by recognizing the impossibility of the task before me do I stand a chance of accomplishing it.”
Emily Sun, senior editor
Apocalyptic harbingers: There might be nothing more l’air du temps than a “vibe coded” Authoritarian Consolidation Index. Created and published by John Ganz on his popular Unpopular Front Substack this January, the political commentator named the tool “Polybius” after the ancient Greek historian. Plug in your country of choice and the index will spit out a score representing how close said country is to a consolidated autocracy, as opposed to a liberal democracy, at any moment.
Polybius generates a score by aggregating public information and evaluating it according to “democratic vital signs,” such as “judicial independence” or “corporate compliance.” A Polybius section called “social signals” tracks support for the “regime” from elite political figures, media sources, and markets. Polybius also takes information from Claude API’s real-time web search tool and runs it through theoretical models ranging from “Marxian Class Analysis” to “Tocquevillean Civil Society.” A Polybius score of 100 represents a country in the full grips of consolidated autocracy. When Polybius was hatched twelve days ago, the United States’ overall score hovered at 29. By Friday, the score had ticked up to 33.4. The most notable difference seems to be the “federalism/regional” democratic vital sign, which went from a “stable” 25 to a “worsening” 35 over the course of the week. Continue reading online.
Elena Eisenstadt, contributing editor
Strings of desire: What is the most transgressive thing that one can say about sex today? And which position can, as Michel Foucault or Donald Trump might have it, “make sex great again”? These two questions are intimately related. As Kavya Krishnamurthy wrote in The Harper Review last spring, “We like to talk about sex as if it is a secret because secrets are erotic, and we would like sex to be erotic. We would like it to be transgressive.” The resurgence of the patriarchy, the allure of submission, the popularity of tradwives can all be understood as elements within necessary and perpetual rebellions of the erotic.
Individual rebellions are derivative of societal ones—sex, and the rest of our desires, are not really ours. They are driven by what Lillian Fishman, in a review of pornography for The Point, postulates “must haunt every puritanical and sex-negative society: to disavow what we want and still get it.” Even in the most essential parts of our selves, even those parts in open revolt, one finds society pulling the strings. We don’t care to offer a way out, but we found an answer to the first questions while laughing at The Sex Lives of Puppets. Continue reading online.
Liam Eifert, production editor & Nora Holmes, contributing editor
Image: Ernst Josephson, David and Saul, oil on canvas, 1878 (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm)