Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

May 2026

Music

THE LAST GIANT:

Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95: Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, he stood out, as both a musician and a personality. (Peter Keepnews, May 25, 2026, NY Times)

In the late 1940s, when most young jazz saxophonists favored a light tone with minimal vibrato, he developed a fat, full-bodied sound that was a throwback to the older style of Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz. In the late 1950s, when his career as a bandleader was just getting off the ground, Mr. Rollins abruptly began a hiatus that lasted more than two years — mostly, he explained later, because he was not satisfied with the quality of his playing.

Mr. Rollins came of age when a new kind of jazz known as bebop was in ascendance, and from the start his playing was suffused with bebop’s harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring. To classify him as a bebopper, however, would be an oversimplification.

Over the years he flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles. But with his ferocious energy, his penchant for playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment, and his unusual sound — sometimes harsh and mocking, sometimes lush and romantic — he was ultimately unclassifiable.


“The music I play is too big to be put into any one style,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “Every time I pick up the horn, I want to hear something fresh.”

That commitment to freshness was the key to Mr. Rollins’s approach, and to his appeal. The jazz critic Francis Davis wrote in 2000 that Mr. Rollins “is the greatest living jazz improviser, and if we redefine virtuosity to include improvisational cunning as well as instrumental finesse (as we probably should when discussing this music), he may be the greatest virtuoso ever produced by jazz.”

Mr. Rollins was rarely satisfied with his own playing; he often came away from a performance or a recording session proclaiming that he was sure he could have done better. He unquestionably did have his off nights, perhaps more than any other jazz musician of his stature, but some fans saw this as a positive sign: The occasional bad night, they argued, was a small price to pay for his willingness to take chances and his refusal to constantly play the same things the same way.

Sonny Rollins: 12 Essential Albums: The towering saxophonist, who died at 95, was a master of living in the moment. Listen to some of his most compelling work, onstage and in the studio. (Hank Shteamer, May 25, 2026, NY Times)

‘The Bridge’ (1962)
By 1959, Rollins was one of the most celebrated saxophonists in jazz, but he wasn’t meeting his own high standards. So he decided to take more than two years off from performing and recording, famously spending much of that time practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge, near the Lower East Side apartment he shared with his wife, Lucille. The album that commemorated his return made no radical break with the past, instead showcasing a warm, intimate sound built on the plush chording of the guitarist Jim Hall. Offsetting the relaxed mood was the title track, a Rollins original where he sailed over the brisk up-tempo swing of the bassist Bob Cranshaw and the drummer Ben Riley with marvelous agility.

Sonny Rollins – Stockholm – 1963 – (Sonny Rollins – 1930-2026) – Past Daily Tribute Edition

Sonny Rollins: One of jazz’s last living greats dies at 95 : Revered for albums including “The Bridge” and “Saxophone Colossus,” Rollins overcame addiction, prison and self-doubt to become one of jazz’s greatest saxophonists. (Shakeel Sobhan, 5/26/26, AFP)

Ever critical of his work, he once said in an interview, “I don’t consider myself a musician that has learned as much as I want to learn.”

At the height of his fame, he withdrew from performing in 1959 and spent more than two years practicing alone on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge, a period that inspired “The Bridge” and cemented his legacy.

Magic, mastery and magisterial power: 10 of Sonny Rollins’ greatest recordings: After his death aged 95, we look back at a remarkable catalogue of work that stretches from vivacious mid-50s sets to his evocative performance after 9/11 (John Fordham, 26 May 2026, The Guardian)

Sonny Rollins, colossus of jazz saxophone, dies aged 95: One of the last stars of the bebop generation, Rollins was a genius of melodic invention and improvisation, working with Davis, Monk, Coltrane and others (Ben Beaumont-Thomas, 25 May 2026, The Guardian)

‘I was so close to the sky. It was spiritual’: Sonny Rollins on jazz landmark The Bridge at 60 : It’s one of the most romantic stories in music: the jazz star rejecting fame to practise on a New York bridge for two years. Now 91, Rollins recalls those long cold days – and how he has coped after losing the power to play (John Fordham, 21 Jan 2022, The Guardian)

Rollins had withdrawn from jazz before, in the early 50s, when heroin addiction had taken him into a stretch of hard-labour rehab at the Lexington Narcotics Farm in Kentucky. In 1956, the year after he got clean, the exultant Saxophone Colossus session emerged. So Rollins understood the liberating potential of focused, relentless hard work, away from gigging and hanging out. But he also knew how fresh and different the new music of Coltrane, Coleman and Davis was sounding by 1959 (the year in which those three made the groundbreaking albums Giant Steps, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Kind of Blue) and felt he needed to provide answers of his own.

Did he worry about the disappointment his withdrawal might bring to his fans? “Am I playing music for other people, you mean?” Rollins inquires. “Yes I am, in a way. But I’m playing for myself. I have to sound good. I don’t want to make my public feel I’m great if I don’t feel like that. Also, I’ve always loved practising – as much as I did performing. Wherever I was, on tour or whatever, I always wanted to find some place to practise, because that’s in my DNA, to keep improving myself.”


Every scrap of music Rollins heard from his youth in jazz-steeped Harlem onwards seemed to get stored in the random access memory of his mind, to be inverted and reshuffled on the fly in performance. His neighbourhood friend Thelonious Monk would smuggle him underage into clubs, he would pass the world-famous Cotton Club on his walk to school, and he would internalise it all, plus snatches of his siblings’ classical practice, jukebox hits and more. Reappraising and digging into all that material in his head, away from the pressures of gigging and travel, seems to have been a trigger for Rollins ascending to the bridge.

“I just happened to be out walking and I saw some steps and I thought: let’s see what’s up there,” Rollins says. “And when I got up to the top, I just saw all this fantastic open space. No one was up there. It was busy, sure – the subway trains and cars were going over and the boats going underneath – but there weren’t many people walking on it in those days; it’s much busier now. There were a lot of pillars and abutments back then, where I could find spaces where people couldn’t see me, though they could hear me. The only people who could see me were the few who were walking across the bridge. And not many of them would stop to talk. I guess they mostly thought: who’s that crazy guy?”


Presumably calls of nature and inhospitable weather must have intervened now and then? “Well, I would play for a long time every day, often 14 or 15 hours. Of course, sometimes I’d come down to go to the bathroom, or I’d go to a bar I liked where I might have a cognac, but then I’d go right back up. If it was cold, I’d play with gloves on; that was not a problem.

“It was so wonderful to be so close to the sky up there, any time of year. Maybe this might sound a little bit corny to people, but it was a spiritual feeling to me. Years later, I remember playing an open-air concert, somewhere in Buffalo or Maine, and I looked up at the sky and felt that communion with some kind of spiritual element. It felt great to me – that distance thing, reaching out to something beyond the people.”

INDEX: Sonny Rollins (The Guardian)

AUDIO: The Bridge (remastered) (You Tube)

Sonny Rollins Is at Peace. But He Regrets Trying to One-Up Coltrane. (David Marchese2/27/20, NY Times Magazine)

I’m working toward why I’m here — what it’s all about. At this point in my life I’m — well, I don’t want to say satisfied, but I feel that I’m closer to an understanding. It’s always been my idea that the golden rule is a good thing, but I wasn’t quite able to understand if the golden rule was possible. If somebody is playing music and I’m playing music and we’re in a saxophone battle, I still have to play my best, regardless of the other guy. It has nothing to do with my trying to make him feel bad because playing music is for a higher cause. So I believe living by the golden rule is possible. Not only possible but the reason we’re here.

An Uncanny Moment for Jazz Lovers: Sonny Rollins dies the day before the Miles Davis centenary (Ted Gioia, May 26, 2026, The Honest Broker)

Identitarianism

BREAKING OUT OF THE BANTUSTANS:

The Voting Rights Act Is Dead. Here’s a New Model for Black Politics. (Jake Grumbach, Perry Bacon, May 25, 2026, New Republic)

It’s worth explaining when and how Black politics lost its effectiveness. There has never been a singular Black political movement or African American ideology. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois famously quarreled. Du Bois’s own views shifted over the course of his life. The reality of the civil rights activism of the 1950s and ’60s was more complicated and messy than beautiful Martin Luther King speeches and smartly organized boycotts.

But after the civil rights victories of the 1960s, a clear Black politics emerged and predominated for five decades. Aspiring Black leaders, who had earlier led from the pulpit or protests, sought and won political office, most commonly becoming either mayor or member of Congress in heavily Black areas. A network of Black organizations, such as the National Urban League and the NAACP, focused less on the mass protests of the civil rights era and more on behind-the-scenes lobbying and collaborating with those Black officials in office.

Though they varied considerably, these organizations often became synonymous with a single famous leader, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. And these leaders were often treated by the media and politicians as spokespeople for the entire Black population. These politicians, groups, and leaders aligned tightly with the Democratic Party, viewing it as the only vehicle to advance Black political goals.

The results of this approach have been uneven. On the one hand, African American politicians became increasingly powerful within the Democratic Party, gaining committee chairmanships, the mayor’s office in some of America’s largest cities, Cabinet and judicial appointments, and finally, in Barack Obama, the party’s presidential nomination. These elected officials delivered major policy victories to Black Americans and the country as a whole, from local economic empowerment of Black communities to the Affordable Care Act. On the other hand, African Americans became a “captured minority,” the term invoked by Princeton political scientist Paul Frymer. Democratic Party officials knew that Black voters would back them no matter what, so they had little incentive to push hard for policies and programs that would help African Americans in particular. Electoral pressures led the Democratic Party to set an agenda that would appeal to swing voters in swing states—a very non-Black constituency.

As the Democratic Party became increasingly concerned that advancing Black concerns turned off white voters, Black Democratic politicians and prominent activists faced a choice: advance in the party by downplaying and sidelining Black concerns, or advocate Black interests at the expense of their careers. Many chose the former. Contrary to conservative pundits who claim that he stoked racial conflict, Obama actually spoke far less about racial issues than his Democratic predecessors. Prominent activists shifted from pressuring Democratic politicians to being very defensive of them. Sharpton and others negotiated with mayors, presidents, and corporations, but grew unaccountable to Black America at large—operating more like celebrities than community activists. Over time it became difficult to distinguish the policies of Black and white mayors, as both were beholden to the police and corporations in their cities and thereby unwilling (and often lacking any real power) to advance policies to help rank-and-file Black Americans.

The Congressional Black Caucus for a time earned its self-given moniker, the “Conscience of the Congress,” pushing the U.S. in radical directions, whether on enforcing civil rights or in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. But gradually, members of the CBC became advocates for Democratic donors and big business as much as for Black activists and voters. Above all, they advocated for their own careers. Many CBC members are among the cohort of congressional Democrats in their upper seventies and eighties who insist on running for reelection despite growing concerns of a gerontocracy.

Cheeto Jesus One Economy to Rule Them All

AS IF HE WAS SECRETLY TRYING TO DISCREDIT THE ECONOMICS OF THE lEFT:

The triple toll of Trump’s terrible tariffs: Ultimately, American workers and consumers suffer three different ways. (Tom Schaller, May 25, 2026, Public Notice)

Yes, tariff receipts temporarily ended up in Washington. But those taxes were paid indirectly, via increased retail prices, by every American who bought imported goods or products made from imported components. Yale Budget Lab estimated the price tag per American at $2,400 per year, which is almost how long tariffs were in effect until the Supreme Court’s February 20 decision. Because it’s nearly impossible for individual citizens to compute how much they paid in tariffs, no less apply for reimbursements, most will get nothing.

Anglospherics

IF GEORGE HAD GIVEN US OUR OWN PARLIAMENT WE COULD HAVE AVOIDED THE WHOLE LESS:

John Adams’s Providential Moses Moment (Jane Cook, May 21, 2026, Providence)

From disbanding their colonial legislatures to taxing the colonists while denying them representation in Parliament, King George III’s oppression and tyrannical actions were Pharaoh-like. The Battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill in 1775 had raised the stakes and increased the danger to their lives. Pondering his role, Adams wrote to Abigail: “Is it not a saying of Moses, who am I that I should go in and out before this great people?”

Pressing on Adams’s mind was his own burning bush triggered by musket fire.

“When I consider the great events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may have been instrumental of touching some springs, and turning some small wheels … I feel an awe upon my mind, which is not easily described,” he wrote as he grasped the gravity of the situation in one hand and hope for liberty in the other.

“Great Britain has at last driven America, to the last step, a complete separation from her, a total absolute independence, not only of her Parliament but of her crown.” Adams added that there was something very “unnatural and odious” in a government that was “1,000 leagues” away.

One Economy to Rule Them All

ASSEMBLING STUFF WE INVENT IS WHAT COLONIES ARE FOR:

How I Became a Manufacturing Skeptic (Dani Rodrik, 5/12/26, Project Syndicate)

In recent years, I have become skeptical about the viability of the traditional industrialization-led growth model. I have argued for a different model of economic growth, emphasizing the development of productive capabilities in labor-absorbing, mostly non-tradable services. I have warned policymakers in Africa and other developing regions that trying to emulate the East Asian model would produce, at best, manufacturing enclaves, with a tiny sliver of productive firms integrated into global value chains while the bulk of the labor force remains stuck in low-productivity activities.

Mexico exemplifies this outcome. As Santiago Levy, a former Mexican deputy minister of finance, pointed out at the same conference, Mexico’s exports of manufactured goods have increased more than tenfold since the country joined the United States and Canada to form the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. At the doorstep of a giant market and with policymakers determined to promote foreign trade and inward investment, few countries were blessed with better circumstances for export-oriented industrialization. Yet Mexico’s overall economic performance has been dismal, even by undemanding Latin American standards, with a declining productivity trajectory.

Anglospherics

DONALD WHO?:

Has Taiwan Made Itself Immune to American Betrayal? (Channing Lee, 5/20/26, Project Syndicate)

US support for Taiwan is not a preference that could change with a US administration, nor is it a bargaining chip. Rather, it is thoroughly embedded in the machinery of American power—in congressional mandates, defense planning, semiconductor supply chains, state-level partnerships, and private-sector investment.

These ties make the relationship difficult for any US administration to unwind, and even more difficult for China’s government to weaken. The era when analysts parsed every presidential statement for clues about Taiwan policy is fading. High-level rhetoric still matters, but the durability of US-Taiwan ties now rests less on individual leaders than on institutional momentum.

Despite new presidents coming to power in both Taipei and Washington over the past two years—and despite unprecedented Chinese military pressure on Taiwan—the relationship has only deepened. Congressional delegations (most recently from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) regularly visit Taiwan, and arms sales have continued (so far)—with the Trump administration greenlighting the largest weapons packages in the relationship’s history. Trump has signed new legislation reinforcing bilateral ties, his National Security Strategy has emphasized deterrence in the Taiwan Strait, and a recently announced reciprocal trade framework has formalized a strategic economic partnership.


Private-sector developments have been especially transformative, mainly because Taiwan’s dominance in high-end semiconductors and AI infrastructure has transformed the island from a traditional geopolitical flashpoint into a pillar of the global economy. “Non-red” supply chains (trusted networks that are insulated from Chinese leverage) have moved from concept to practice, with Taiwan sitting at the center of this shift.

TSMC’s expanding campus in Arizona is only the most visible example of this broader trend. Taiwanese firms of all sizes are investing in US data centers, advanced materials, and electronics; and US technology companies are deepening their presence in Taiwan, particularly in AI and cloud computing. Meanwhile, both are reducing exposure to China.

For years, US policymakers talked abstractly about “decoupling” from China. Now markets and industry are making it real, with Taiwanese capital revitalizing US manufacturing, and US firms increasingly relying on Taiwan for next-generation innovation. Crucially, defense technology partnerships are linking private-sector advances to Taiwan’s asymmetric defense and the US military’s modernization.

Health

ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER:

When Covid hit, I started walking 20,000 steps a day. It’s changed my life: Setting a daily goal made me fitter, boosted my mood and allowed me to explore parts of New York I’d never seen before (Isaac Fitzgerald, 6 Nov 2020, The Guardian)


It felt good to move my body. And accomplishing something gave me a jolt of mood-lifting dopamine. In the middle of an achingly difficult year, here was a simple task I could complete – something good for me.

Every morning after I woke, and every evening before bed, rain or shine I headed to the park and put one foot in front of the other.

This was a huge triumph. I’d made many attempts to regularly exercise in my adult life, and until now, nothing had stuck. I committed to a goal: 20,000 steps a day, or about 10 miles. As days turned into weeks turned into months, I didn’t always hit that goal, but it didn’t really matter. I walked every day, and if I logged only 15,000, or even 12,000 steps, still considered it a win.

Not surprisingly, walking day in and day out has had positive, if subtle, effects on my body. I’ve grown sturdier. My leg muscles are a little bigger and harder, and I feel generally stronger and more resilient.

It’s also had a positive effect on my mind. I feel sharper, more alert. My morning walks get me charged up for the day, and my sunset walk gives me a boost going into the evening, where before, I would just lie about, wondering why I was so tired.

While I keep my phone on me – how else can the app track my steps? – I try not to look at it while I’m walking. Taking a break from the tiny, upsetting digital universe I keep in my pocket frees me up to be attentive to the world my body moves through, to notice and connect with other walkers I encounter. One man always wears goggles. Another carries a large ball, sometimes bouncing or kicking or throwing it forward before running to catch up with it. There’s a group of women who must keep to the exact same schedule I do, given how often we run into each other. We all give each other the nod when we cross paths, and it feels good.

End of History

HUMAN EXISTENCE IS THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN SECURITY AND FREEDOM:

The Future of Dynamism with Virginia Postrel (hosted by G. Patrick Lynch, Law & Liberty Podcast)

Virginia Postrel :
[T]he basic distinction is between dynamism, which is open-ended discovery and progress that is driven by bottom-up problem solving, bottom-up problem defining, innovation, and feedback, also. So not every new idea is a good idea, not every idea of how to solve a problem actually solves the problem. And there is this constant process of discontent also, because whatever you have, you see what could be better about it. And that’s one reason that this progress is open-ended, but it’s very much an idea of discovery, sort of a liberalism that centers discovery and curiosity and learning. “Learning” is what I say in the book. On the other side, you have what I call stasis and I talk about two different forms. One, which is the easier to understand, is people who really center stability. Their ideal society is one that doesn’t change and often they have an ideal located somewhere in the past.

It could be the Middle Ages, it could be the 1950s, it could be before the agricultural revolution. There are many different forms of that type of stasis, which I call reactionary in the book. The other form of stasis is more subtle, and much more pervasive, which is the idea of, no, we like change, we like progress, we like discovery, but we want it to look exactly the way we want it to look. And this is what I call technocracy. So this is a form of stasis that is about control. So it’s not about “nothing changes,” it’s about very directed change. And since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, technocracy has dominated liberal democracies. There was a rise of thinking that, “Wow, look at all these great things that railroads and steel mills, all these corporations that have to plan these giant enterprises, we should plan the economy the same way.”

And obviously looking back on it and especially through the lens of some of Hayek’s work, this seems obviously wrong, especially in the forms that you find it in the early twentieth century or late nineteenth century where it really is like every single bit of the economy would be planned, but it wasn’t stupid. It wasn’t stupid people saying this. It was people drawing the wrong lessons from the world that they were living in. And so I see this continuing struggle between ideals of an open-ended discovery-oriented society that is very bottom up also. So no one is in charge, no one is in control. It doesn’t mean you have no rules. You need rules, but they need to be very general and you need to be able to have nested levels of rules so that McDonald’s can say every menu has to be the same, and somebody’s one-off restaurant can have different food every night depending on what’s fresh in the market.

The genius of liberalism is republican liberty, which allows us to balance the two by granting exactly as much freedom to others as leaves us secure ourselves.

End of History

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

The ‘warrior ethos’ promises victory — history says it leads to defeat (John Broich, May 21, 2026, The Conversation)

Democracies don’t necessarily fight clean wars. During World War II, the Allies firebombed cities, created internment camps and dropped atomic bombs.

What distinguishes fascist powers from democracies is their contempt for rules based on their sense of superiority. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced that the Nazis would claim the absolute right to override democratic constraints. “This contemptible parliamentarianism … is gone,” he said.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said it more bluntly in 1936: “We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”

But rules of engagement function as a control system that ties tactical decisions to strategy, law and the risk of escalation. Discarding them tends to produce the atrocities and strategic blowback that lose wars.

Democratic procedure does similar work: Political scientists who studied 197 conflicts from 1816 to 1987 found that democracies won about 76% of their conflicts and non-democracies 46%, in large part because accountable leaders and public access to information force a government to notice when a plan isn’t working.

A fascist regime that treats democratic constraints as obstacles is likely to decide inconvenient information is an obstacle too. Because of this, in fascist governments, loyalists rank higher than experts. Fascist systems don’t remove people for being wrong; they remove them for insufficient loyalty. The man who tells the leader what he wants to hear rises. The man whose report contradicts the leader’s views endangers himself.

Maybe the silliest trope of the 60s/70s was that democracies had inherent disadvantages in fighting totalitarian regimes when the exact opposite was true. It has always led folks to wildly overestimate the strength of our opponents, as witness in Iraq, Ukraine, etc. Disastrously, it led to a prolonged Cold War rather than simply settling the USSR’s hash immediately.

India

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

India has a new political superstar – a cockroach (Zoya Mateen, 5/21/26, BBC)

A satirical collective that takes inspiration from the insect – stubborn, reviled and considered indestructible – has attracted millions of online followers and mainstream media attention in less than a week, making even veteran politicians sit up and take notice.

The cockroach was thrust into the spotlight last week after controversial comments made by India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant. During a hearing, he allegedly compared unemployed young people drifting towards journalism and activism with cockroaches and parasites.

He later clarified that he was referring specifically to people with “fake and bogus degrees”, not India’s youth more broadly.

But by then the comments had already spread widely online, triggering outrage, jokes – and a humorous political idea called the Cockroach Janta Party (Cockroach People’s Party), or CJP. The name is a parody of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been in power since 2014. Critics and rights groups have alleged that press freedom and civil liberties have declined since then, which the BJP denies.

The CJP is not a formal political party but an online movement built around political satire. Its tongue-in-cheek membership criteria include being unemployed, lazy, chronically online and having “the ability to rant professionally”.

It was created by Abhijeet Dipke, a political communications strategist and student at Boston University. He says the idea came as a joke.

Nationalism being humorless, mockery is a terrible threat.

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