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)

Culture

Sex

CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR HOW IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL TO TRANSITION…:

The Kids Who Identify as Animals: A rising subculture of kids says they don’t feel entirely human. Here’s what their parents are learning to do with that. (Kara Baskin, 10/14/26, Boston Magazine)

What is new is where—and how young—the search happens. The furry world these kids move through lives largely online: The International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP), a group of scholars who study it, finds a heavy overlap with digital media use, and nearly 60 percent of furries say they found the fandom before turning 18. It’s a place where identity is constantly performed, debated, and policed, often by other kids. Yet even for the most online generation in history, some things arrive before the algorithm. The Internet gave Sol the word for it, and others who understood. But the feeling was already there.

The fandom also overlaps heavily with other marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ and nonbinary young people—which has made it a target of moral panic. In 2022, the baseless claim that schools were installing litter boxes for students who identified as cats ricocheted across the Internet and into political speeches, sparking a new battle in the culture wars.

Furries are also routinely conflated with sexual fetish—adult furry content exists online—though that bears little resemblance to the kids sewing tails, painting masks, and trading art at PortCon. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that there’s sort of an adult undertone when really, this is about expression, identity, and creativity,” Werkhoven says. “There’s the conception that furry is strictly like a kink, and that’s not true. It’s: ‘I have a character, and that character is a dog.’”

That fear-and-fascination cycle is where most parents come in. Catherine, a Newton mother of two furry kids (now 27 and 21), found out her older child was a furry only because her younger one let it slip years ago; the older one feared the stigma too much to say so. “These furries are all anonymous. They’re in big fur suits, right? It could be anybody. I don’t know, factually, if this has ever happened, but there is fear that pedophiles will take advantage of younger kids,” she says. Then she chaperoned her younger child to a convention and found it closer to an art fair than a den of iniquity: kids and caregivers, mental health workshops, and costumes of startling craft. “They come up with a whole character. They have very elaborate stories of their character and terminology. It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or girl, gay or straight; they become this other person, and they can open up,” she says. “I was impressed.”

Catherine’s reassurance, though, rests on something therian parents don’t have. Her children invented their “fursonas.” Sol didn’t invent the cat. The question in Susanne’s house isn’t whether this is safe—it’s what it means that her daughter isn’t pretending.

Music

DIRT MAID:

The Complex Legacy of the Great Wynonna Judd: Her devastated and victorious new album follows the suicide of her mother Naomi. (Crispin Sartwell, 10/12/26, Splice Today)

“The dirt made me. The dirt made me, like a mother with no shame made me,” she sings, shockingly on “Kentucky Queen.” Who sings like that about their mom, much less about their mom the beloved country star? But Wynonna has been freed to tell the truth as she experienced it, hard as it may be.

A different day
The same ol’ call
Lost your mind in Mobile
Fallin’ off again
It’s too far, I can’t find you
A counterfeit fix, that’s what you run to
I know, Lord, I know

It’s a strange transaction
That nobody wins, but I buy in
Oh, here we go again

And I’m desperate for change
From the rain and stormy weather
I would drag you out of Hell if I could
But I don’t have the power
I can’t save you, but I try
I don’t want to, but I still believe
In a hopeful lie

I hear this song as being about the struggle when someone you love is in and out of rehab, for drug abuse or mental illness issues. She’s saying (I think) that she believed it, or tried to, or said she did, each time Naomi headed toward a recovery, or got more therapy. But perhaps the song is about her daughter Grace, who’s had similar struggles and is currently in jail. In any case, the song registers how the pain has been exacerbated by hope, which is a terrible truth. But she manages to sing about these matters directly, with no obscurity or evasion, and I hope that expressing it with this sort of intensity will help her.

Books

CLOCKWORK BALDERDASH (profanity alert):

As Odd as a Clockwork Orange: The Unreliable Narrator and Primary Sources (The Memory Hole, Jun 28, 2026)

In the years after they reunited, there were signs that Burgess’ wife could not fully overcome the attack she suffered: “Lynne could not bear to be left alone at night,” Burgess wrote, “even with a dog that flew into an ecstasy of noise at the scuffle of a mouse. She feared the dark, and the fear had its origin in blacked-out wartime London when she had been viciously attacked by four GI deserters.” The attack inspired an early passage in one of the most disturbing scenes of A Clockwork Orange, in which a gang terrorizes a young couple in a cottage by physical assaulting the husband and raping the wife. The final chapter of the book, where the main character outgrows his sociopathy, was cut by the U.S. publisher to maintain a darker ending for the novel: “Eric Swenson, Norton’s vice-president, insisted that the book lose its final chapter,” Burgess explained. “I had to accede to this lopping because I needed the advance, but I was not happy about it.”

Following Lynne’s death in 1968, Burgess was asked to return to the hospital to collect her rings. To obtain the wedding ring, her finger had to be broken, the same one the American GIs had attempted to break many years before.

This is the account you will read—or a slight variation thereof—if you open almost any non-fiction biography, newspaper article, book, or encyclopedia on the topic of Burgess and his famous novel. The only issue with the story is that none of it is true.

Music

WRECKING:

Why Everybody Loves Glen Campbell (Ted Gioia, Oct 05, 2026, The Honest Broker)


This all happened because he had earned the respect of some lesser-known peers, the first-call musicians who worked in the trenches during these sessions. Nowadays they are known collectively as the Wrecking Crew, and are acknowledged as the leading studio players of the era. Glen Campbell would be remembered today, even if he had never released a single record under his own name, just for his membership in this elite cohort.

He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I’d heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.

Campbell was that good.


There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.

He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.

But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked.

Sex

STOLEN “VALOR”:

The Decline of Bisexuality: Most people who identify as bisexual live like they’re straight. (Ellie Gardey Holmes, October 2, 2026, American Spectator)

Take Kate Brown, who served as Oregon’s governor from 2015 to 2023. Brown’s bisexual identity made her special to progressives. When she was sworn in as governor, Time’s headline announcing her inauguration read: “Oregon’s Kate Brown Becomes First Openly Bisexual U.S. Governor.” She used her identity to prop herself up as a heroic inspiration to people. “If I can be a role model for one young person that decides that their life is worth living because there’s someone like them in the world, it’s worth it,” she said in 2016.

And yet Brown’s identity requires virtually nothing of her. She has been married to her husband for 30 years. All she needs to do is continually insist that she is attracted to women even while she is married to her husband. (One notes that heterosexual people do not typically announce an attraction to people other than their spouse.)

Former Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema likewise claims a bisexual identity, and likewise does nothing as a result of it. She was previously married to a man and then carried on an affair with another man, and she has not publicly dated a woman.

Brown and Sinema are not alone. The Pew Research Center found in 2015 that a full 84 percent of people who identify as bisexual are in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, while 7 percent aren’t in any relationship at all.

In a world where LGBTQ identity confers fewer social benefits, we can assume that bisexuals will often be the first to drop their identities, as they were the easiest to adopt in the first place and they don’t have much impact on one’s life.

Social contagions pass.

Music

TRADITION!:

A Place Among the Fiddlers: In a southwest Virginia fairground, thousands of musicians gather every August to keep a centuries-old tradition from flickering out. (David Alm, October 1, 2026, Longreads)(

The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.

There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.


One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited.

In the 1980s and ’90s, cars lined up days before the gates to Felts Park opened. The fairgrounds got so full back then that people slept in the horse stables that used to line one end of them. Once, Elizabeth Taylor made a surprise appearance with her then-husband, Virginia Senator John Warner. Rumor has it that members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Leftover Salmon have shown up at Galax, under the radar, just to jam.

And yet, despite appearing well attended to my virgin eyes, the Old Fiddler’s Convention’s numbers are down from the pre-pandemic years, and way down from peak Galax. Folks say it’s not like it was. Maybe, as one long-time attendee speculated, it’s that more kids are choosing devices and passive consumption over face-to-face activity with other humans, or that more and more young adults are fleeing southwest Virginia due to the gutted coal, tobacco, and manufacturing industries. Or maybe it’s just that people around there are dying faster than they’re being born. Glen Alexander, a 55-year-old fiddler who’s been going to Galax since he was a child, put it bluntly: “We’re all scared to death this is gonna go away.”

Identitarianism Music

MEN ARE FROM MARR, MAGA IS FROM MORRISSEY:

The meaning of Johnny Marr: And of not talking about Morrissey (William Davies, Sep 27, 2026)

Now aged 67, Morrissey is in the demographic sweet-spot of Reform sympathisers (the over-70s have not abandoned the Tories in such high numbers). Violence against children was not merely a topic he turned to as he was running out of ideas from the 1990s onwards, it was one of the first things he wanted to vent when he was granted a public platform in 1983. Those who grew up in the 1960s and 70s experienced the final flush of institutionalised sadism against children, and the complete absence of systematic child protection against sexual abuse, which teachers, scout leaders, vicars, sports coaches and Radio One DJs exploited to the full. They have since watched as society progressively and systematically drove violence out of schools and parental norms, which is of course not to say that abuse does not persist in the shadows and the margins. ‘Progress’ came just too late for them, no doubt leaving many in a state of profound ambivalence regarding its desirability. The insult posed by ‘woke’ (for which read the reactionary depiction of it) is that someone might feel violated and harmed by nothing more than words.

As many have observed, on learning that Far Right riots frequently feature men in their 50s and 60s, some of the violence returning to Britain’s streets is due to men who developed a taste and skill for it over forty years ago, on football terraces, nights out and perhaps at the hands of family members. These same men are also more likely to dish it out in the home (where Barbarism Begins). Psychoanalysts must have things to say about the heightened significance of sexual violence against white girls in the imaginary of the contemporary Far Right, that speaks of more than just hypocrisy (though there is undoubtedly plenty of that).

The Morrissey that depicted a world of normalised sadism and abuse was not ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ but he was honest and disturbing, perhaps more than we’re entirely comfortable with. This is not to suggest that we must all ‘hug-a-racist’, as Cameron once suggested of ‘hoodies’. But if we’re looking for a national story, with working class Manchester and indie music at its heart, the current Johnny Marr/Andy Burnham cultural love-in only tells one side of it. The blend of sixties and nineties nostalgia that Burnham and Marr have come to express is a feel-good one, especially for my generation (Gen X) and some younger. It’s canny politics to lean into this as a vision of community and conviviality, allowing ideas of ‘working class identity’, ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ to become owned by decent, generous, quietly liberal people.

There is, however, a national id that has been repeatedly pushed down, but which was blasted out of the radio by Morrissey’s unique voice circa 1983-84. It now forces its way out through the corrupt grinning neo-fascism of Farageism, which promises a restoration of violence at the borders, at sea, in the welfare system and – who knows – even within the education system. Marr is now on the opposite side of the culture war from Morrissey

Food

NOT JUST CRITTER FOOD:

The case for America’s original superfood — the acorn: The nut is popping up on menus and in cookbooks, and experts are working to breed a sweeter variety, which could lead to a new era of acorn eating. (Kate Morgan, 9/27/26, Washington Post)


As autumn descends, it’s nearly impossible to ignore the acorns as they thunk onto roofs and burst like popcorn under car tires. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that there are about 40 billion oak trees in the United States, and as the weather cools, they begin to drop a bounty of nuts — an all-important food source for squirrels and chipmunks, deer, bears, birds and other animals.

But acorns aren’t just critter food. For a long time, they were an important food staple for people, too. Before colonization, Indigenous North Americans were especially dependent on acorns, says Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota chef known as the Sioux Chef. “It was such a massive, important part of their diet,” he says.

Acorns were dried or roasted, ground into flour and used to make porridges, soups and breads. “They were getting most of their carbs and essential fats from acorns,” Sherman says. “They’re highly nutritious.”

Acorns contain essential vitamins and minerals, including a big dose of manganese, folate, and vitamins E and B6, and they are rich in antioxidants. And it’s looking like acorns could be the next popular superfood: They have been popping up on the menus at popular restaurants, in cookbooks and in food influencer content. Some tree breeders, food scientists and chefs are working to put the humble acorn back on our plates.

Family

LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORIES:

The Missing Kayaker: What happened to Ryan Borgwardt? (Jamie Thompson, November 6, 2025, The Atlantic)

Emily told the detective that Ryan had left their home in Watertown, about an hour from Big Green Lake, at around 4:45 p.m. the previous afternoon. He’d driven the family minivan to a friend’s house to pick up wood pellets for his stove. Before setting off, he’d mentioned that he might drop the kayak in the water somewhere on his way home, and attached an enclosed trailer with the kayak. He’d told Emily over the weekend that he wanted to fish on Big Green Lake, which would be roughly on his way.

Emily told the detective she’d texted with Ryan the previous evening. She forwarded screenshots of their exchange.

At 10:12 p.m., Emily had written, “Night. Love you.” About 15 minutes later, she’d texted again, telling him that their older son, 17, was spending the night at a friend’s house.

Five minutes later, Ryan texted back: “I may have snuck out on a lake.”

Emily: “That would have been nice to know…I was beginning to wonder why you weren’t home.”

Ryan apologized, but then added: “Temperature is perfect.”

Emily: “Nothing new. I should be used to it by now. So many nights I have no idea where you are when it’s late.”

Ryan: “The meteor shower is awesome in the dark.”

Emily asked Ryan to turn on his location-sharing in the Life360 app, which he did.

Emily: “Again, no communication. Would have been nice to know.”

Ryan: “I’ll work on this communication thing.”

Emily: “It sucks going to bed not having any idea where you are. Just saying.”

Ryan told Emily he’d forgotten his paddle and was instead using a fishing net.

Emily: “No paddle is dumb.”

Ryan: “I love you…goodnight.”

Emily: “Night. Love you too. Be safe.”

Ryan: “I’ll start heading back to shore soon.”

Emily: “K.”

After her last text, at 10:49 p.m., Emily said she fell asleep. When she woke around 5 a.m., Ryan still wasn’t home.

Emily texted him at 5:12 a.m.: “Where are you?????”

Then, at 5:16 a.m.: “Babe?????”

Missing: Inside New York’s Missing Persons Bureau, Captain John H. Ayers untangles runaway dreams, fake suicides, and vanishings that never resolve. (Morris Markey, July 21, 1934, The New Yorker)

As I said before, however, youth is not the chief problem of the Bureau. The greatest number of people who disappear are men, and they fall into quite explicit categories: They are running to escape a shrewish wife or an impossible family existence, or they are running to avoid the debacle that follows financial collapse, or they are old and feel themselves in the way of their relatives, or they are attempting to leave an impression of death, with consequent insurance benefits to wife and children.

The police have much sympathy with most of these fellows, even when they find them and have to bring them miserably back. They know that it takes a lot of driving to make a man give up everything that he knows, all of his small habits and his possessions and his friends, and begin life from scratch. But they are faced with the law when a wife or children have been abandoned, for it is in the law that a man must provide food and shelter for his family, even when that family exerts all the ingenuities to make him utterly miserable.

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