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

Film/TV

AN AWESOME CINEMA:

The Business of Hollywood Is Horror (and Faith-Based) (Joseph Holmes, October 7, 2025, Religion & Liberty)

You see, movies have always relied to some degree on “awe,” and the further filmmakers leaned into awing their audience, the more successful they became. This is why, throughout film history, short films gave way to features, which gave way to epics, which gave way to blockbusters, which gave way to the mega-blockbusters. But this “awe effect” comes with a big price tag. We have to see Spider-Man swing, Superman fly, and Batman punch people throughout the film or we feel unsatisfied. And this costs a lot of money to do over and over again.

But this isn’t true of horror and faith-based films, where the biggest awe factor is the thing we don’t see. In faith-based films, that’s God. You can have a faith-based film that deals simply with ordinary people doing normal things, but as they get closer to God or God acts dramatically in their lives, fans of the genre feel the same elation as they do when seeing the Millennium Falcon shoot into hyperspace. Likewise, in horror films, we are often there to see the monster. But we also expect—and want—to not see the monster most of the time, because a lot of the entertainment is in the fear of anticipation that the monster’s hiddenness brings. So again, it’s much cheaper to make a monster in a horror film because we don’t expect to see it throughout most of the movie.

The other thing that gives faith-based films and horror films an advantage is that they resist the erosion of monoculture, as both genres lean heavily on religious narratives and religious communities that involve people meeting every week and listening to the same stories together. Haidt notes this in The Anxious Generation as well. Religious services bind people together under a shared system of values and experiences. This creates a common culture of tastes and values that movies can then appeal to. As secular culture continues to subdivide into smaller and smaller subcultures, religious communities will stand out as the biggest and least divided of the subcultures, making it easier for studios to identify and reach out to.

Books Conservative Thought Identitarianism Russia

COMPLETE WITH THEIR OWN CHEETO NAPOLEON:

‘Animal Farm’ Never Gets Old: Orwell’s classic turns 80. (Cathy Young, Sep 26, 2025, The Bulwark)

The Soviet parallels in the novel, in which animals on a farm run by the drunk and abusive Mr. Jones band together to drive out their two-legged oppressors and set out to build a haven of freedom and equality for all beasts, are very explicit—right down to specific characters, events, and symbols. Napoleon, the crafty boar who eventually becomes Animal Farm’s totalitarian dictator with a personality cult, clearly represents Stalin; his rival Snowball, who co-leads the revolution but gets outmaneuvered, forced into exile, and branded a traitor—and blamed for everything that goes wrong on the farm—is Trotsky with trotters. (Early on, there’s also a Marx-Lenin mashup: Old Major, the wise boar who inspires the revolt before dying and has his skull reverentially displayed on a post, much like Lenin’s mummified body in the mausoleum in Red Square.) The farm’s flag—a white hoof and horn on a green field—echoes the red flag with the hammer and sickle. Like the early Soviet revolutionaries, the animals throw themselves into enthusiastic labor to make their experiment work, and normal practices turn into political projects: “the Egg Production Committee for the hens,” “the Clean Tails League for the cows,” and “the Whiter Wool Movement for the sheep.”

Soon, the resemblances turn much darker. In an episode that clearly echoes the Holodomor, the mostly man-made famine Stalin used to break the back of peasant resistance to collectivization (and crush Ukrainian nationalism), hens who resist orders to surrender their eggs for trading are starved into submission. Later, the purges and show trials begin. As the assembled animals watch in horror, four pigs who had criticized Napoleon earlier are dragged before him by his pack of trained hounds, confess to treasonous collaboration with Snowball, and are at once dispatched by the same dogs. […]

But in 2025, Americans may be reading this novel with somewhat different eyes than in times gone by, when strongman rule, cult-like worship of leaders, and reality-denying propaganda were things that happened somewhere else. Today, it’s hard to read Orwell’s mordant description of the extravagant panegyrics to Napoleon (“two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, ‘Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!’”) and not think of the examples we are witnessing daily—from the downright idolatrous sensibility common among Trump’s base to administration officials falling all over each other to heap praise on Trump at a cabinet meeting, or a member of Congress telling reporters Trump is “never wrong,” or press secretary Karoline Leavitt gushing, “Cracker Barrel is a great American company, and they made a great decision to Trust in Trump!” Likewise, when Orwell wryly notes that the animals “had nothing to go upon except Squealer’s lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better,” one can’t help thinking of Trump firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner who wouldn’t deliver that message.

The rewriting of slogans, the insidious conspiracies invoked to explain anything that goes wrong, the propaganda chief convincing the other animals that things they saw with their own eyes didn’t happen or happened very differently: The parallels are all over the place.

While the normals keep the aspidistra flying…

Culture

PUPPETMASTER “PAS DE DEUX”:

Planet Puppet: A weekend at the ventriloquist convention (Mina Tavakoli, n+1)

Men and women behind me were grunting, lowing like cattle. We were all grunting, lowing like cattle. This was Vent 101, a workshop designed to coach red dotters through the basic tactics of the art. Together, we were unveiling the core of the ventriloquial mystery by practicing the letter B with our teeth clamped together.

The general act of learning ventriloquism is tedious, because the puppet is an instrument, and only one half of the theater routine. It is an ancient art, a maze of gestures and shadow gestures, biblical if not Delphic in provenance. I can only describe it as cousinish to learning the violin and getting very good at whistling at the same time. Nimble fingers tweak at little pinches and squeeze-boxes stuck inside the cavities of the ventriloquial dolls, regardless of whether they’re the standard, wooden manikin type (called “hard puppets”) or the squishier, usually more zoological ones (our “soft sculptures”), while the tongue operates flawlessly under confinement. These little hummingbird motions, behind their cage of clenched, unmoving teeth, continue the joke inherent in the word ventriloquist, from the Latin venter (“belly”); loqui (“to speak”); “belly-breathing,” or the illusion of voice from elsewhere.

There is no real “throwing” of the voice, alas; the ear’s deficits are made up for by the eye, which focuses on the puppet’s moving jaw, forming the suggestion that whatever’s being said by you is said by your companion. The most problematic letters of the alphabet — there are five of them — inspire too much frottage between lips, which explains why puppets often have jeery, whiny, heavily accented, broken, or otherwise goofy voices: these are coping mechanisms, rerouted into hallmarks of the form.

Take the letter p, an annoying plosive. Under the standard ventriloquial straitjacketry of (1) a relaxed jaw, (2) slightly open but stiffened lips, and (3) a closed set of teeth, a phrase like “I like to hike” is shockingly easy to pronounce, whereas “I prefer puppetry” is humbling. To dodge the automatic, upper-to-lower-lip kiss involved in expressing the letter p, ventriloquists hump the back of the tongue against the soft palate and vault air right through the back. In practice, this sounds much like the letter t. The ventriloquist thinks p, says their muffled t, and does this ad nauseam until the letter is strong and clear. (“I trefer tuttetry.”)

Tonight’s tutelage was hosted by a man named Dan. His road-to-ventriloquial-Damascus moment was in 1965, care of a life-changing encounter at a Phoenix amusement park with Curly Q, a dummy belonging to the visiting Miss America pageant winner of that year. “I just about collapsed when I saw him. I was 5 years old,” he told us proudly. “But what about you all? Why vent? What’s your reason? And can you all hear me OK?”

Some wanted to do it because they’d joined a church ministry; many wanted to be able to tell stories to their grandchildren. One man raised his hand and announced that he’d always dreamt of a career in stand-up comedy, but felt too nervous to stand solitary onstage. Dan nodded understandingly. “When I’m up there without my puppet, I feel kind of exposed. And when I have one of my characters with me, I can relax a little bit more, and I can feel like I’m sharing the failure with somebody else if that’s what happens. I don’t take the full burden.”

We moved through the hard letters noisily. A few of the more gifted and seasoned in the back of the room were capable of showing me an elegant, dummy-free trick called “bifurcating,” where a ventriloquist speaks with lip movements that completely mismatch the sentence spoken. This has the terrific effect of looking like a flesh-and-blood human speaking with a laggy network connection, or someone being dubbed in a foreign-language film in real time.

Film/TV

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

The Vocational Theology of Toy Story (Andy Shurson, September 17, 2025, Christ & Culture)


The first movie revolves around the rivalry of Woody and Buzz as they fight for the top position in Andy’s room and in his heart (Andy is the boy in Toy Story, not the author of this article). The tension grows as the pair ends up in the torturous hands of their kid neighbor, Sid. As the movie grows to the climax, Woody escapes Sid’s clutches, but Buzz gets stuck in the fence. In that split second, Woody must decide: does he abandon Buzz, capitalizing on the moment over his rival, or does he save Buzz, jeopardizing his reunion with Andy? As Woody turns back to help Buzz, we see how Woody’s understanding of life in Andy’s kingdom has changed. Woody no longer views Buzz as a threat who will take away the gaze of his master. Woody sees Buzz as a friend and neighbor who also belongs to the master.

Immigration

AS FOR GOODS, SO FOR PEOPLE:

Migration Is the Key to Global Prosperity (Carlos Alvarado-Quesada and Katrina Burgess, 9/15/25, Project Syndicate)

Looking ahead, advocates of a more sensible approach should focus on three essential objectives. First, migration policy must be insulated from short-term politics. Decisions should be based on data, not fear. Migratory policy is a long-term public policy investment that will suffer if migrants are scapegoated and vilified for political purposes. As with monetary policy, the more that migration policymaking can be moved from partisan political arenas to independent, evidence-bound institutions, the better.

Second, migration policy must be more firmly embedded in a broader multilateral framework. Origin and destination countries alike can benefit from collaboration to prevent brain drain, facilitate orderly passage, and ensure that remittances contribute to long-term development. No country can manage these complexities alone. We need to frame migration not as an emergency but as a permanent feature of our interconnected world. Coordinated international agreements can help align the interests of sending and receiving countries, balance economic imperatives with social cohesion, and avoid the zero-sum mindset that too often clouds migration policy. Ultimately, there is no other way to prevent both the depletion of human capital from emerging economies and the political backlash that destabilizes mature democracies.

Third, we must invest in integration and public messaging. Migrants are too often perceived as a burden, when in fact they are drivers of economic growth and cultural vitality. Inclusive policies – providing access to jobs, education, and local civic life – are essential not only for migrants’ success, but also for democratic resilience. Where migrants are seen and treated as valuable members of society, support for humane policies grows. Where they are excluded or criminalized, polarization follows. The real payoff comes when migrants are given the tools to contribute – through employment, entrepreneurship, and civic participation – and when host societies make room for new forms of belonging.

In many democracies nowadays, migration is discussed in visceral, emotional terms that bear little resemblance to reality. Border enforcement alone cannot prevent irregular migration; it can only displace or delay it. If people believe they can build safer, more prosperous lives elsewhere, they will try – legally or not.

Music

MAYBE YOU CAN MEET YOUR HEROES:

Living in the Present with John Prine (Tom Piazza, 10/08/18, Oxford American)

The last time I wrote a profile of a musician—that Jimmy Martin piece, twenty-two years ago—I ended up backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. Crowded hallways with people hollering and pushing their way through, musicians in jeweled suits warming up with fiddles and guitars, people telling jokes and other people squeezing past on their way to the stage. Jimmy had gotten drunk at his house, and I had to drive us to Opryland in his midnight-blue Lincoln stretch limo, which kept stalling out; when we got there he tried to pick a fight with Ricky Skaggs and almost managed to punch out Bill Anderson. So far the worst thing that’s happened on this trip is that Prine hogged all the tiramisu last night. And now we are going to a shoe store. A shoe store, I think—this is what twenty-two years can do for you.

We walk into the store, and John heads for a display where leather Top-Siders are lined up. I look around the shop. I’ve been having trouble with my own feet, actually. The salesperson greets me respectfully and calls me “sir.” As long as John’s trying out shoes I figure there’s nothing to lose by looking at some myself. There’s a slightly weird-looking pair, a dove-gray hybrid of sneaker, boat shoe, and walking shoe. I ask the clerk for a pair in 10 1/2; he brings them and they feel pretty good, incredibly lightweight, although there is a lot of room up by my toes, and the tops of the shoes have a kind of weird pucker; they look like space shoes. I ask the clerk if I can see a pair of tens.

While I’ve been doing this, John has settled on a pair of boat shoes featuring extremely shiny brass eyelets. They are some seriously bright eyelets.

“Jeez,” I say. “You’ll have to wear sunglasses to cut down on the glare.”

“They feel great,” he says, walking back and forth.

“It’s nice they throw in the shoes when you buy the eyelets.”

“I can black them out with a magic marker.”

We both buy the shoes we’ve been looking at. We walk outside into the heat and stand in front of the store, holding our shopping bags. I’m trying not to imagine what we must look like. We put on our sunglasses. “There’s your article, right there,” he says. “Buying shoes with John Prine!”

Culture

LABELS FOR LABILES:

The trouble with trigger warnings True drama is an emotional ambush (Kathleen Stock, August 22, 2025, UnHerd)

But let’s be honest: it can’t really be about harm-reduction, can it? For nobody seriously believes that the theatre can be quite that exciting. In my youth, plays were relatively boring things that parents or teachers made you sit through once a year, when what you really wanted to do was go to the cinema. The idea that you might be scarred for life by some unnaturally loud proclaiming, the odd bit of dramatic writhing around, and some judiciously applied lighting and props would have been ludicrous — as it is surely all the more so to generations raised on Netflix gorefests. And here the exception proves the rule: surely not every young dramatist can be the new Sarah Kane. If you were being cynical, you might conclude that the whole thing is a sneaky way of drumming up trade for a dying art form, by encouraging the idea that spectators might feel something visceral. (“Depending on your lived experiences, this performance may trigger memories of loss, grief, or bullying,” speculates another festival event, rather hopefully.)

The official explanation given for such notices is that they allow people to emotionally prepare for what is to come, the way you might steel yourself just before abseiling down a cliff or jumping out of a plane. But since you are not in fact going to be doing anything death-defying, but rather sitting in a cramped seat for a couple of hours casting surreptitious glances at your watch, it is possible that dire forecasts of impending emotional assault set some people up for anxiety where there would not otherwise have been any. And that, fairly predictably, is what several studies have found: trigger warnings have a tendency to increase anxiety rather than reduce it. Staying true to the ethos of the project, this awkward fact would seem to require that such warnings be given separate, prior trigger warnings of their own — and so on ad infinitum — rendering the whole process unmanageable for harried producers.


Further evidence that content warnings are basically fake news is that the theatre-makers who use them go ahead with their shows enthusiastically anyway.

They’re just unearned boasts.

Family Sex

THERE’S NOTHING IN ATOMIZATION WORTH CELEBRATING:

After Civility: Smashing the patriarchy sounded fun, but it turns out even rebels often depend on the norms they are undermining. (Elizabeth Grace Matthew, 8/15/25, Law & Liberty)

In the season six Sex and the City episode “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” (2003), perpetually single protagonist Carrie Bradshaw is dismayed that someone absconded from a party with her $485 stilettos. She is even more frustrated when the party host, a married mother of three, not only fails to reimburse her for the loss but also “shames” her, calling it “crazy” to spend $485 on designer shoes—ones that, in fact, she used to wear herself before she had what she calls “a real life,” intimating that Carrie’s unmarried, childless existence is less worthy of respect and deference than her own.

Carrie, fuming, recounts indignantly to her friend Charlotte that she has bought this very friend an engagement gift, a wedding gift, and three baby gifts, not to mention traveling for her wedding. She has spent, in total, “over $2300 celebrating her choices.” Charlotte tries to offer context: “But those were gifts … if you got married, or had a child, she would spend the same on you.” Carrie responds: “And if I don’t ever get married or have a child, then, what, I get Bubkis? … If you are single, after graduation, there isn’t one occasion where people celebrate you. … I’m thrilled to give you gifts, to celebrate your life; I just think it stinks that single people are left out of it.”

What Carrie fails to recognize is that we give such gifts not to celebrate these individuals’ morally neutral “life choices,” but rather to honor marriage and childbirth as laudable and societally desirable. If they are no longer seen that way, it is only a matter of time before not just the norms of dating (which emerged as a prequel to marriage and family) but also the broader norms of treating other people with reciprocal dignity erode as well. After all, the very notion of giving gifts to celebrate milestones like marriage and childbirth is, at bottom, a statement about our shared investment in the institutions to which we all, whether married or not, owe our societal stability. To personalize this reality in a resentful, individual way, as Carrie does, is to grossly underestimate the fragility of society itself.

Sex

THE TIES THAT BIND:

Masculinity at the End of History (Matthew Gasda, Fall 2025, American Affairs)

By the close of the twentieth century, the links in the chain of value transmission were under severe pressure, but the whole chain hadn’t completely disintegrated. The internet was new. Teen behavior had not yet turned antisocial. And there were old men around who belonged to things or at least had vivid memories of belonging to mass membership organizations: unions, churches, veterans’ associations, Rotary Clubs, Masons, Elks, Knights of Columbus, neighborhood bars. That kind of communal memory is now largely gone, as any trip to the now virtually empty or decaying physical meeting places of these organizations can attest.

Today, male adolescence largely lacks that primitive, self-organizing spontaneity. Sports has been co-opted into ultra-organized traveling sports. Boys learn from watching role models online and become hyper-optimized one-sport athletes. If they gamble or bet, it’s not over cards on a porch; it’s on a phone, on DraftKings. The steep decline in drinking as a habit for young adults may be heralded as a moral victory of sorts, but its dire consequences for male socialization and dating (outsourced to the antiseptic world of Tinder) are already in evidence, a too predict­able development. Even games have become less ritualistic because these are played online with headphones on: enervated, isolated, overstimulated. No real bonding.

I will argue that today’s young men are not just experiencing the technological foreclosure of their own possible development into functional manhood—but are enthusiastically participating in it. They are subject to many of the same social expectations and psychological pressures as men before, yet they are simultaneously living through a warped form of traditional American masculinity that carries all the burdens and drawbacks of that tradition with few (or none) of its former benefits.

It’s no wonder that young men are atomized after our war on fraternal organizations.

Art

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

What if every artwork you’ve ever seen is a fake?: I was shocked to learn just how many pieces of art sold around the world are forgeries. But should finding out something is a cheap dupe really make us enjoy it less? (Nell Stevens, 10 Jul 2025, The Guardian)

Many years ago, I met a man in a pub in Bloomsbury who said he worked at the British Museum. He told me that every single item on display in the museum was a replica, and that all the original artefacts were locked away in storage for preservation.

I was shocked and challenged him. It surely could not be the case that millions of annual visitors to the British Museum were encountering and experiencing not tangible, concrete treasures of human history, but the shallow simulacra of replicas. I may have even used the term “fraud”.

Yet on my way home that night, I began to question my own experiences at the British Museum. I wondered what it meant if the Greek water jar I had been so moved by, depicting a woman who may have been Sappho bent over a scroll, had in fact been a worthless copy. Did that make the experience any less real?

No.

« Previous Page — Next Page »

You Missed

Robotics/AI

THE MIND BOGGLES:

Sex

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

Music

DIRT MAID:

Just So Stories

APPLYING DARWINISM:

Copyright © All rights reserved | Blogus by Themeansar.