A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is unlike anything else in HBO’s Game of Thrones universe. It’s grittier, it’s more grounded—and it’s actually about occupational licensing.

The biggest mystery of the show’s first season is whether Duncan the Tall is officially a knight. The show leaves it ambiguous: a shrug here, an unanswered question there.

But by all accounts, “Dunk” is a good knight. For decades, he squired for Ser Arlan of Pennytree, a hedge knight with no permanent ties to any of the noble houses. Dunk is brave and just, and he defends the weak and the innocent, as all knights take an oath to do. He may not know how many kingdoms are in the realm, but he can beat a highly skilled prince in combat. “He’s done all the things a knight is supposed to do,” as showrunner Ira Parker said on the official show podcast. Yet Dunk could be executed for claiming a credential he doesn’t technically possess.

Thankfully, today’s hair braiders, cosmetologists, interior designers, and even fortune tellers who run afoul of modern occupational licensing laws won’t face “the king’s justice” for working without a license. But the fines and potential jail time they could face are just as silly as killing someone for knighting without the proper credentials.

Was Ser Duncan the Tall ever knighted? Maybe it shouldn’t matter.

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These Strange New Minds is a comprehensive book for lay readers wondering how large language models (LLMs) work and how they might help or harm human culture.

Its author, the cognitive neuroscientist Christopher Summerfield, faces an inherent challenge: The pace of change in AI makes it difficult for any traditionally published book to feel fully up to date. Books from major publishers can take more than a year to move from manuscript to finished copy. Summerfield addresses this by adding a later-written afterword noting that LLMs are already reasoning and conversing more effectively than they did just two years ago. They are becoming more “agentic,” helping users accomplish tasks rather than merely answering prompts, while also becoming more capable tools for crime and fraud.

Summerfield does not believe LLMs will destroy humanity. But he makes clear that dismissing what they can already do, or what they are likely to do, is shortsighted. Anyone who organizes their work or daily life through computers should not ignore AI’s looming impact. That remains true even if how “deep learning” achieves its results is still, in some respects, “mysterious.”

Summerfield engages seriously with skeptics who claim that, because LLMs merely predict or echo patterns derived from the vast corpus of human writing on which they are trained, they are not truly thinking or meaningfully imitating the human mind. LLMs, he acknowledges, “work by multiplying together large matrices of numbers,” while our brains operate through “electrical signals in an organic medium.” But that does not mean the outcomes—effective understanding and communication—are always meaningfully distinguishable. To “say that LLMs do not think at all,” Summerfield writes, “requires a new and rather convoluted definition of what it means to ‘think.'”

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The incendiary Olivier Award–winning play Giant, which premiered in London last year, comes to Broadway this spring with a regrettably timely message. The titular giant is Roald Dahl, the cantankerous, 6′ 6”, much-loved children’s author.

The drama takes place during a 1983 summer luncheon and afternoon hosted by Dahl (John Lithgow) and his soon-to-be second wife, Felicity Crosland (Rachael Stirling). The guests are his British publisher (Elliott Levey) and his American publisher’s sales representative (Aya Cash), both of whom are Jewish.

Worried about sales of Dahl’s new book, The Witches, the publishers want the irascible author to craft an apology for an article in which his criticisms of Israel scandalously veered into antisemitism. Though playwright Mark Rosenblatt completed Giant before Hamas’ attack on Israel, the play’s concerns resonate at a time when criticism of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war similarly commingles often with a hatred of Jews.

While the play deals effectively with these big issues, it is not in the least didactic. It dramatically presents characters subtly negotiating the entanglements of identity and the perils of cancel culture. The cast is superb, and Lithgow’s portrayal of Dahl’s simultaneous tenderness and monstrousness is perfection.

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Would you trade your identity for utopia Apple TV’s science fiction series PLUR1BUS examines whether a perfect world is worth the loss of everyone’s individuality.

When an alien virus turns the world’s population into a hive mind, every person’s consciousness is absorbed into one central entity, imbued with their collective memories and experiences. Human beings now think and act as one, collectively devoted to building the perfect world. They are so dedicated to pacifism that they won’t even pick fruit from trees.

The only exceptions are 13 people who are inexplicably immune to the virus. Since their friends and family are still around, though they’re now part of the hive, many of the 13 wish to join the collective. The collective, in turn, tries to help them do so.

But Carol (Rhea Seehorn of Better Call Saul) is not just immune to the virus but hostile to the concept of losing her identity. The collective respects her wishes and amiably caters to her every desire, but it becomes clear that whether she wants it or not, they hope to incorporate her eventually anyway—as they see it, for her own good.

Manousos (Carlos Manuel Vesga), perhaps the series’ most fascinating character, opposes the new world order even more militantly than Carol does. On screen, Manousos embodies the principle that there’s no such thing as a free lunch: He not only rejects every offer of the collective’s assistance, but he insists on paying for anything he uses. Or, when he doesn’t have enough cash, writing IOUs by hand.

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Books had little to do with the populist uprising that swept Donald Trump into power in 2016 and 2024. But a cadre of right-wing writers and influencers have been constructing intellectual scaffolding around the MAGA phenomenon ever since. In Furious Minds, Laura K. Field explains and taxonomizes the effort to replace old-school Reagan-style conservatism with something more ruthless and muscular—but still grounded in ideas.

Field divides the New Right into three rough factions: Claremonters (such as Michael Anton, the man behind the infamous “Flight 93 Election”essay published in the Claremont Review of Books), postliberals (such as Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed, which made it onto former President Barack Obama’s reading list), and national conservatives (such as Yoram Hazony, an Israeli-American philosopher trying to make nationalism great again).

Field has especially rich insights into the first camp, having studied political theory in the Straussian tradition. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Thomas Pangle, a student of both Closing of the American Mind author Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss himself. This lineage makes her treatment of figures associated with the Claremont Institute, headquarters of “West Coast Straussianism,” particularly valuable.

The New Right factions are united, Field writes, by “a staunch social traditionalism and rejection of liberal pluralism.” They want to fight and definitively win the culture war. Field’s center-left critiques are not always the ones a libertarian would make. But her work mapping this intellectual space provides an indispensable starting point for anyone who hopes to go beyond a superficial understanding of the anti-liberal American right.

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In the years since the pandemic, weightlifting has frequently been associated with right-wing and even neofascist politics. In the media, guys—and it’s always guys—who lift are regularly portrayed as authoritarian thugs, toxic dudes, and MAGA maniacs, or worse. “Getting fit is great,” reads a 2024 Guardian headline, “but it could turn you into a right-wing jerk.”

So it’s not surprising to see Jordan Castro’s new novel, Muscle Man, hailed as a literary response to the gym bro–ification of the right. But Castro’s story is trickier, subtler, and funnier than any thinkpiece about the manosphere’s favorite workout regimen.

The book’s main character, an English professor named Harold who teaches at a small liberal arts college, feels stifled by wokeness, fatness, femininity, social media, and bureaucratic machinations at his college. The conformist pressure is almost Orwellian, and the book’s ending nods to 1984.

Yet Harold himself is no exemplar of masculine excellence. He’s a neurotic head case, obsessively in his own thoughts, which he often renders as an imaginary podcast in which he expounds expansively on the world around him. He’s a permanent guest on a show that runs entirely in his own head.

Castro excels at rendering the interior monologues of today’s elites, the trains of paranoid, self-aggrandizing thought that chug relentlessly through the minds of wannabe tastemakers. Harold spends most of his time judging everyone around him, critiquing their personas, their politics, their mere presence. He’s attracted to lifting because it offers another vector by which to judge others—their bodies—but mostly it’s a reflection of his own psychological frailty.

The bodily purity of pumping iron, Castro seems to suggest, is at best a salve for mental instability, an escape from the brutal pressure of thought. Lifting, contra The Guardian, might be the one thing that helps make Harold a little less of a jerk.

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Michael Huemer’s new book Progressive Myths aims to inoculate readers against what the author calls the “progressive mind virus”: an infection, he writes, that “deactivates one’s truth-seeking capacities” and teaches “us to identify with some group other than the whole society.” While Huemer locates this “virus” on the left, his core message is nonpartisan: “We need to know what is true if we are to make progress on any of the actual, real problems we face.”

Huemer combs through the specious statistics, data, and testimony progressives peddle to persuade Americans to cede more power to the state—to rectify historical injustices, to correct systemic biases, or to avert armageddon. Huemer himself is an anarchist who argued that states are morally indefensible in his 2013 book The Problem of Political Authority, but he nonetheless believes, and tries to convince his readers, that America is still “among the freest, most egalitarian, and most open-to-progress societies in history,” warts and all.

Huemer concludes a long list of dire warnings issued by histrionic progressives by wryly noting: “Just in case you missed the theme here: None of those things happened.” For just two examples, he points to scientists in the 1970s who predicted a new ice age in the early 21st century, and the United Nations warning in 1989 that entire nations would be submerged by 2000 due to global warming.

Huemer is overly dour, however, about the risks posed by progressive orthodoxy. The man on the street scoffs at land acknowledgments, hasn’t heard of “stereotype threat,” and trusts his primary care doctor.

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Former Los Angeles Times man Jim Newton, in his book Here Beside the Rising Tide, picked a representative subject through which to judge the achievements and excesses of the 1960s counterculture: Grateful Dead guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia.

Garcia served briefly in the U.S. Army before getting sucked into the nascent bohemia around the Menlo Park and San Francisco areas in the mid-’60s—one shaped partly by CIA experiments in giving LSD to citizens, including novelist Ken Kesey and Garcia’s lyric-writing partner Robert Hunter. Garcia abjured electoral politics and world changing as a deliberate vocation (though Newton hits some insights by running Garcia’s history alongside that of fellow California entertainer Ronald Reagan). But President Richard Nixon used Garcia in a campaign ad to represent the untamed American rebel youth many voters hoped he’d quash. Garcia’s band made important appearances at many way stations in American culture, from Woodstock to Altamont to MTV to the early internet.

Garcia once said it was a “lie” that freedom means “absolutely and utterly free,” explaining that “along with freedom there’s implicit responsibility…there is no free ride.” Garcia worked hard to make his California hippie troupe what was in many years the highest grossing band in America.

He also abused his liberty to feed his appetites for food and drugs. That cost him his life. But while he lived, he provided insight, aesthetic bliss, and clues about different ways to approach creativity, community, and business. Few Americans have been as influential. As Newton notes, Garcia’s form of freedom “doesn’t work for everyone, and doesn’t always work even for those who come to accept it,” but “it’s magnificent when it does.”

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Cabaret begins with the Kit Kat Klub’s flamboyant master of ceremonies enticing the audience to leave their worries outside: “Life is disappointing? Forget it!” It ends with the same character—an unforgettably haunting performance by Eddie Redmayne when I saw the show this past summer, though Adam Lambert took over the role in October—donning a boxy suit and attempting to blend into a world where drawing attention to yourself in certain ways is no longer safe.

That’s the real tragedy at the center of Cabaret, which debuted theatrically in 1966, became a hit film in 1972, and was revived in 2024 at Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre. Yes, the Nazis take power and the war comes and the audience knows that millions will die after the curtain falls—but all that takes place outside the frame of the story. Cabaret is about vulnerable people, powerless against the rise of a sweeping authoritarian regime, each seeking a way to cope with the unprecedented times in which they live.

As politics punctures their lives in various ways, they move, they mourn, they try to blend in, or they try to go on as if nothing has changed. If they survive what’s coming, it seems certain it will be as something less than their full selves. That’s the cost of enduring when freedom fades.

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In September 1975, two California women each tried unsuccessfully to assassinate President Gerald Ford. The podcast Rip Current examines both women’s stories, plus the radical politics of a counterculture whose desperate last gasps informed their worldviews.

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a 26-year-old Charles Manson disciple, tried to shoot Ford in Sacramento, but her gun misfired. Sara Jane Moore, a 45-year-old housewife who had gotten in too deep with radicals, fired at Ford in San Francisco 17 days later, but a bystander deflected the shot. The podcast recounts each woman’s history and the confluence of events that led them each to attempt to murder a sitting president.

Rip Current premiered on the anniversary of Fromme’s attempt, September 5. Coincidentally, this happened to fall just weeks after an attempted assassination of then-former President Donald Trump and just 10 days before officials foiled another attempt. While this moment in history feels tense—like the radical 1960s and ’70s—it’s worth remembering that, in fact, American political violence has been with us, and often more intensely, for a long time.

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