IT’S HIS ENTIRE INTENT:

Actually, Master and Commander is a Domestic Fantasy About a Codependent Life Partnership!: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith on the Queer Subtext of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin Series (Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, February 4, 2025, LitHub)

Concerns aside, as someone who enjoys both historical fiction and not being straight, I was ready to give the books a chance to charm me on both fronts.

Here’s where I ended up, three months and seven thousand pages later: the Aubrey/Maturin series is not only a military-historical epic but also—I would even say primarily—a work of domestic fantasy about a life partnership so codependent it breaks the space-time continuum.

First: this story is, indeed, a romance. (This is almost certainly against O’Brian’s intentions, but—here we proclaim the mystery of queer resonance in fiction—the characters speak for themselves.)

All great literary romances are about the love between/among men: it’s the text, not the subtext. It just isn’t sexual.

LOST, NOT LAST:

Last Boys at the Beginning of History (Mana Afsari, Jan. 22nd, 2025, The pPoint)

There is no dress code at NatCon, but somehow everyone, young and old, is dressed to the nines. Many attendees look like extras in American Psycho; it’s a hot summer, but I see tailored wool and linen suits, tastefully patterned burgundy, ultramarine and violet silk ties, and pocket squares on twenty-year-old men. There are hundreds of young men here, and plenty more are turned away at the registration table; they try to sneak in anyway. Several ask me to help get them in: among these are foreign interns visiting over the summer for internships, young private-sector professionals, college students.

The first morning, I’m approached by a young man dressed in a nice gray suit, who has been hanging at my periphery as I talk to an editor for First Things. The newcomer offers a handshake, mentions he’s a student at an Ivy League school, and clumsily adds that it’ll be his first semester this fall. I realize that he must have graduated high school only weeks before. I had been surprised already to notice many men are easily younger than 25—I hadn’t anticipated meeting a teenager. He’s chosen to spend part of his last summer before college here, at this political conference at the Hilton.

He asks for my LinkedIn and I reach out to him in the fall, after the election. “I was ten when he first announced he was running for president, and he just captured my attention,” he says. “I’d always been fascinated by politics and history, obsessed with world leaders… I think that there’s a certain element of greatness in Trump’s personality.” And then: “I’ve always seen myself in him. That’s the first thing that drew me to him when I was ten. I’d always been admonished in school by my teachers…”

He pauses. “Well,” he laughs, “this is a little silly. But when I was little, I always wanted to do something great, and I would talk about that when I was a kid. And I’d have teachers and other people telling me: you can’t say that, you shouldn’t be so full of yourself. And then this guy comes on to the stage, eschewing all of these norms that people expected him to follow, just going out there and saying, ‘I’m a winner, the people who are running this country are doing a bad job, I’m the only one who can fix it, put me in there and I can make America great again.’ I looked up to Trump when I was little in the same way that maybe a kid in France might’ve looked up to Napoleon two hundred years ago.”

Lucas,*11. Like all other asterisked names, Lucas’s name was changed for this article. born in 2005, was raised in a “typical” and “apolitical” family outside of Philadelphia. “I’ve never in my life remembered a time when the Democratic Party supported ambitious people,” he says. “I think their whole ideology is based off of oppressing those with ambition, who actually have the gumption to go out and do something and build something on their own. … The people who make humanity great, the innovators, the builders, the winners in society, they look at the winners and tell them, ‘You’re evil, and the only reason you’re at the position that you’re at is because you exploited other people.’ It’s antithetical to the way that a lot of young men work.”

But, I ask him, what do young men who aren’t aspiring to be “innovators, builders and winners” think of Trump?

“I went to public high school in a middle-class area,” he says. “A lot of the guys who I went to high school with weren’t particularly ambitious career-wise, but they do admire people who are. They all admire Trump for what he’s done.” He pauses. “Going to the gym, for example: it’s a way to improve yourself.” I immediately think of all the right-wing intellectual influencers on Twitter that post bodybuilding photos alongside their recommended reading lists. “All young men, even if they’re not actively trying to be great, still admire greatness,” he continues. “It’s really rare that you meet one that doesn’t have some respect for somebody who’s gone out and done something great.”

Trump, he explains, is a role model: “He wins against all odds. He gets impeached, he gets criminal trials thrown at him, shakes all that off. He gets shot. The fact alone that he got up and pumped his fist—that takes a lot of physical courage in itself. … He understands deep down that the U.S. has been rudderless since the Cold War. We haven’t had the best people.”

I ask Lucas if anyone else at NatCon, including Vivek Ramaswamy or J.D. Vance, the former of whom he got to meet, inspires him. “I really like them. They’re sharp guys; I like their policy. But I don’t really think there’s anybody else like Trump.” Trump proved to him that his dreams were possible, no matter the opposition. “Hopefully I can strike it big in the private sector,” he says, “and then if everything were to go right, I would like to be president someday.”

YOU CAN’T ENGINEER HUMAN NATURE:

Edward C. Banfield and What Conservatism Used to Mean: Hard thinking on difficult and uncomfortable questions about how to keep everything from falling apart. (Joshua Tait, Feb 01, 2025, The Bulwark)

IN GOVERNMENT PROJECT, BANFIELD TELLS the story of Casa Grande from its genesis to dissolution. It was fundamentally a relief project, to give succor to the Depression poor. Administrators made the decision to establish Casa Grande as one of four FSA cooperative farms—or “collective” farms, to use a term more evocative of the Soviet Union—despite the ways this ran against the expectations of the settlers, their neighbors, the press, and Congress. (There were another eleven FSA farms that were partly, but not fully, operated cooperatively.)

The rationale for running Casa Grande on a cooperative basis arose from the understanding that a major transition was underway in American agriculture. Technology had changed the economics of farming, but culture had not kept up. Diesel tractors gave such an advantage to large-scale farmers that the small family homestead became all but obsolete. The climate and landscape of this part of Arizona further seemed to suggest the need for treating this farm differently. To make Casa Grande at all viable, it would have to be at scale, which, to maximize relief, meant it would be a cooperative. No one would own their “property as lord of the manor,” as Banfield recounted; they would “use it only in common with 59 others.”

Eventually, FSA signed off on the project, funding was appropriated, and the beginnings of a cooperative legally established. The settlers were a varied bunch. Some were Arizonans; a later batch were Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl. Casa Grande did not promise them wealth; it was relief. But for the vast majority, Casa Grande offered them housing, amenities, pay, and security superior to any they had ever experienced. It also, at least in theory, offered the sense of purpose and satisfaction that can come with work, and the sense of camaraderie that can come with being part of a team. The FSA hoped these benefits and shared experiences would hold the settlers together despite their lack of a common background and ethos.

Yet, as Banfield notes, an academic who spent a month at Casa Grande in early 1941 said that “the most striking fact about the Casa Grande project is that it seethes with dissatisfaction.” More than three quarters of the settlers were dissatisfied with the project. Why? In some respects, they were comparing their situation against an ideal. They did not like industrial-scale farming: The hours were less flexible and the roles less autonomous than on small farms. The settlers got little real training in the techniques of farming. There was little for teens or young adults to do. Their neighbors made fun of them for taking government aid. And they were still poor. But above all, the settlers simply did not like one another. Casa Grande—like most of FSA’s other collective projects—was riven with factionalism.

IT’LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

This innovative flying taxi could completely transform city travel — here’s the surprising energy source that makes it possible (Simon Sage, February 1, 2025, The Cool Down)

Battery power is used during vertical take-off, after which the HAM III-2 switches to hydrogen power. Seating is available for two people, flight time is estimated at 40 minutes, range is set to 100 kilometers (about 62 miles), and cruising speed is about 112 miles per hour.