Before the day ends, I want to write a short something about Paul Horner, who died eight years ago on Sept. 18, 2017. He was 38.
Who was Paul Horner? A prankster, best known for comic viral hoaxes and fake news stories. And I mean actual fake news, the kind that’s entirely made up — not the news dismissed as “fake” by people who don’t like what it says or because it challenges their views.
To Horner, the joke was always on the person who clicked “share.” His work often fooled media outlets, trolled conservative figures and baited culture warriors. During the 2016 presidential election he aimed much of his absurd fabrications at Donald Trump and his sycophants, convinced that their eager sharing of such clearly made-up nonsense would ultimately drive voters away. Horner believed in the corrective power of fact-checking. (H.L. Mencken could have told him a thing or two about underestimating the public’s intelligence.)
I have mixed feelings about Horner’s work. He considered himself a satirist; I suspect he was more motivated by a desire to make mischief than provoke thought. At the very least, he naively failed to understand that satire — humor in general — is often lost on many people, especially those primed to be butthurt at the slightest perceived wrong.
Few remember Paul Horner or his hoaxes now. Unfortunately, the outrage addiction he exposed is more alive than ever.
The New York Times this week released its list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century and invited readers to vote for their top 10. The movie buff and former film critic in me couldn’t resist.
I’ve seen 81 of the films on the Times’ list. Many of the remaining 19 have been sitting on my watchlist for years. Now I’m motivated to finally check them off.
Meanwhile, here’s the top 10 ballot I submitted to the Times. Well, my top 10 list as of this moment. Ask me tomorrow and a few titles probably swap places with others that didn’t make the top cut.
But why stop at 10?
Here is a longer list of favorites, films that, for one reason or another, stand out to me among the hundreds of movies I’ve seen over the past 25 years. They’re listed chronologically, without commentary. Maybe I’ll write more about some of them one day. Maybe not. We’ll see.
2001 Ghost World Shrek Monsters, Inc. Mulholland Drive Y Tu Mamá También
2003 Dogville Finding Nemo School of Rock
2004 Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Napoleon Dynamite
2005 Grizzly Man Match Point The New World
2006 Borat Children of Men The Departed The Lives of Others
2007 Hannah Takes the Stairs Juno Lars and the Real Girl No Country for Old Men Ratatouille There Will Be Blood
2008 The Dark Knight In Bruges
2009 District 9 Dogtooth Fantastic Mr. Fox Fish Tank Inglourious Basterds A Serious Man Up in the Air
2010 The Social Network Winter’s Bone
2011 The Cabin in the Woods Melancholia Midnight in Paris Oslo, August 31st The Tree of Life
2012 Moonrise Kingdom Starlet
2013 American Hustle Blue Is the Warmest Color Gravity Her Ida
2014 Boyhood Force Majeure A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night The Grand Budapest Hotel A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence Under the Skin
2015 The Big Short Brooklyn Crimson Peak Ex Machina The Lure Mad Max: Fury Road The Witch
2016 Arrival Hell or High Water Lady Macbeth
2017 The Florida Project Get Out A Ghost Story I, Tonya The Killing of a Sacred Deer Phantom Thread Twin Peaks: The Return
2018 Cold War Damsel Hereditary Leave No Trace
2019 About Endlessness Beanpole JoJo Rabbit The Lighthouse Midsommar Portrait of a Lady on Fire Uncut Gems Us
2021 Pig The Worst Person in the World
2022 Aftersun The Menu Tár You Won’t Be Alone X
2023 May December Oppenheimer The Zone of Interest
One final note: The New York Times’ list should really be titled “The 100 Best Movies of the 2000s,” since it includes a handful of films that were released in 2000. I hate to be that guy, but the 21st century began on Jan. 1, 2001, not 2000. (Look it up if you don’t know why.) It bugs me when people — and worse, publications of record — don’t or refuse to get that right.
If we are counting 2000 as the start of the century, then I’m adding Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros to my big list. Dancer in the Dark might even crack my top 10. Definitely top 20.
And do you consider Twin Peaks: The Return a film? I’m on board with those critics and publications that do. A few even named it the best film of 2017 and the best film of the 2010s.
As we mark Juneteenth today — the day in 1865 when Union troops under Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to enforce emancipation in Texas1 — it’s worth asking: What could America have become if Reconstruction hadn’t been sabotaged from the start?
I’ve become deeply interested in the Reconstruction era over the past few years. When I was in school in Texas, Reconstruction was barely taught in our American history courses. And what little we were taught largely echoed the “Lost Cause” narrative, framing Reconstruction as a period of Northern misrule symbolized by corrupt carpetbaggers and inept governance. I suspect the story is still largely skimmed over.
Woodcut of Maj. Gen. Gorden Granger from The Galveston Daily News, June 21, 1865.
Reconstruction was meant to be a national rebirth after centuries of slavery and four years of bloody civil war. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, briefly opened a window when it seemed possible the country might remake itself into a multiracial democracy. But that possibility was derailed early, helped along by a disastrous political choice: Abraham Lincoln’s decision to replace Vice President Hannibal Hamlin with Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat from Tennessee who had remained loyal to the Union but was an unapologetic white supremacist. The switch was made in the name of national “unity” for the 1864 ticket.
It was one of the biggest mistakes in American history. We can never know how Hamlin might have governed after Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865, but we do know what Johnson did. His “restoration” policies immediately began to unravel the fragile gains of emancipation. He gave power back to former Confederate leaders, many of whom should have been put on trial for treason, and favored the protection of wealthy plantation owners over redistributing land to freed people. He overturned Gen. William Sherman’s famous “40 acres and a mule” orders. The effort to rebuild America under “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln imagined at Gettysburg, never fully recovered.
Donald Trump is doing his best to seize the title of worst president ever, and figures like James Buchanan, Warren Harding, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush all have their claims. But Andrew Johnson remains secure, for now, at the bottom of most presidential rankings.
Freedmen’s Bureau office in Memphis, circa 1866. The Freedmen’s Bureau was a federal initiative aimed at aiding formerly enslaved people.
Eventually, congressional Republicans managed to wrest control from Johnson, impeaching him but failing to convict him by a single vote. They pursued a different vision, creating a promising glimpse of what a just America might have looked like. But violent white backlash and the rise of so-called Redeemer governments in the South and Northern fatigue over a long, messy struggle for racial justice crushed that vision.
The Compromise of 1877 resolved the contested 1876 election in favor of Republican Rutherford Hayes in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. The federal government and much of the North simply walked away. A century of Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement and racial terror followed. Reconstruction gave way to an American apartheid.
Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom. It’s also a reminder of a lost promise. It’s a reminder that emancipation alone didn’t secure justice or equality.
Reconstruction stands as a tragic story of failure: the failure to hold traitors accountable, the failure to enforce lasting conditions for readmission to the Union, and the failure to reckon with the racism that has always run deep in the American character.
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1Granger’s General Order No. 3 informed Texans that “all slaves are free,” but it also instructed that freed people should “remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.” It warned “that they will not be supported in idleness.” While the order marked the end of slavery in Texas, it reinforced racial hierarchies and foreshadowed the limited and conditional nature of freedom that would undermine Reconstruction from the start.
Amid reports that Elon Musk may soon leave his role as a “special government employee” — although, like most things involving the Trump White House, clarity is elusive — historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore recently wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk.” In the piece, Lepore argues that Musk, despite his reputation as a futurist, is actually recycling dusty ideas from the past — specifically technocracy, a 1930s-era movement that imagined a society run by scientists and engineers instead of elected leaders.
Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, circa 1945.
Lepore traces Musk’s ideological roots to his maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a Canadian technocracy leader and conspiracy theorist who later moved to apartheid South Africa and espoused racist and anti-democratic views. Musk’s push to cut government programs, replace workers with AI and impose efficiency-driven reforms echoes the technocratic dream of a depoliticized, elite-run society.
Lepore also connects Musk’s rhetoric and goals with other early 20th century ideas, including futurist and fascist manifestos by Italy’s Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. These works glorified aggression, hierarchy and technological dominance.
“Few figures in public life are more shackled to the past,” Lepore writes of Musk.
Thus, Musk doesn’t represent a leap forward but a regression. He’s attempting to reboot a future that already failed.
“Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future,” Lepore writes. “It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom.”
I have often found it ironic that many of today’s Silicon Valley billionaires and tech bros fashion themselves as libertarian “technological supermen” when their entire industry rests on a foundation of federal research and development — from semiconductors to GPS to the internet itself. Without the massive public funding of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist to disrupt anything.
What does Musk want?
A cheeky poster in London. The British have a tradition of political mockery that stands in sharp contrast to the often more sanitized style of American political satire. “There’s something campy and ridiculous about Musk’s brand of toxicity. And it opens up a real space to ridicule,” John Gorenfeld of London recently told The New York Times.
So, what does Musk, in the guise of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, want from the government he seems so eager to dismantle?
In a recent appearance on The Focus Group podcast, tech journalist Kara Swisher, who has covered Musk for years and probably knows him better than anyone not impregnated by him — indeed, who probably knows Musk better than anyone, even those impregnated by him — said he’s motivated by two things: “One he wants to go to Mars, and he needs the government to pay for it. … And then two, he wants the data so his AI will be bigger than other AIs.”
As she also put it: “Why do you rob banks? Because that’s where the money is. Why do you rob government agencies? Because that’s where the data is.”
Mars remains a distant ambition limited by the ginormous costs, need for extended human life support systems, propulsion and radiation shielding, and the physical and psychological challenges of long-term space travel.
As for the data, I fear Musk will soon succeed in stealing it, if he hasn’t succeeded already.
DOGE and the theater of efficiency
DOGE claims that it has saved the federal government $150 billion. That may sound like a hefty number, until you compare it with the $2 trillion in cuts Musk once promised, or even his more recent $1 trillion revision. As The New York Times reported Thursday, it’s not clear how much more beyond the claimed $150 billion Musk expects his DOGEteam to find.
DOGE’s claim, based on a fuzzy list of asset sales, lease cancellations, and contract and grant cuts, is also smaller than the $154 billion increase in federal spending since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, compared with the same three-month period in 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
As The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell put it in a recent column, “How DOGE is making government almost comically inefficient,” Musk isn’t really interested in improving government performance. To paraphrase one of Rampell’s astute readers commenting on her article, DOGE is a political tool designed to undermine regulatory agencies, destabilize the civil service and make it harder for government to function, especially in ways that inconvenience Musk and his fellow plutocrats. And it doesn’t hurt that DOGE is good political theater for the cruelty-loving MAGA crowd.
The danger in Musk’s vision, which fits comfortably within the decadeslong right-wing push to undo the New Deal, lies not only in his embrace of a modern version of his grandfather’s technocratic fantasy, but also in what he’s willing to destroy to achieve it.
Thanks to “A Complete Unknown,” the Oscar-nominated biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, Dylan’s music is reaching new, younger audiences. David Browne, in a recent article in Rolling Stone, called it “the Chalamet Effect on Dylan’s catalog.”
Before the film’s Christmas release, Dylan’s songs were streamed about 1 million times a day on Spotify, according to Rolling Stone. That number is since surged to around 4 million, with some of the biggest spikes coming from songs featured in the film, like “Song to Woody.” One of only two original compositions on Dylan’s self-titled 1962 debut album, daily streams of “Song to Woody” jumped from 4,000 to 55,000. Digital and physical sales of Dylan’s music also increased, Rolling Stone reported.
How many enduring Dylan fans — much less budding Dylanologists — the film has created is unknown. My own deep journey into Dylan’s catalog began in 1985 with the release of “Biograph,” a sprawling collection of 53 hits, deep cuts, rarities and unreleased tracks that pioneered the career retrospective box set.1 Before that, the only Dylan album I owned was “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits,” a 1967 compilation of 10 essential Dylan songs recorded from 1963 to 1966.
Bob Dylan in April 1966, nine months after he ‘went electric’ at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The Newport performance is central to the new Dylan biopic, ‘A Complete Unknown.’
“A Complete Unknown” has grossed about $120 million at the box office and earned eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture. I liked “A Complete Unknown” well enough2 (“I’m Not There,” Todd Haynes’ 2007 take on Dylan’s career is far more interesting). By focusing on a specific period in Dylan’s career, it avoids some of the pitfalls of most biopics — my least-favorite film genre — though it still falls into the trap of rotely checking off major career milestones. And while I’m no actor, I’ve never understood the Academy Awards’ infatuation with performances in biopics (Chalamet is nominated for best actor), especially when a subject’s voice and mannerisms are extensively documented on tape and film. Too many of these lauded performances feel more like impersonations than fully realized character work. They’re acting karaoke.
All of this brings me to “Bob Dylan in America,” a 2010 book by Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz. Dylan’s profound knowledge of American music and the “new poetic expressions” he gives its various strands are the subjects of Wilentz’s insightful exploration of Dylan’s influences and how he redefined them.
I reviewed “Bob Dylan in America” for the Austin American-Statesman when I was the paper’s book critic. Wilentz’s book also presaged the Swedish Academy’s reasoning for awarding Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
Given the renewed interest in Dylan, I republish my (slightly revised) review here:
Sean Wilentz’s engaging new book, “Bob Dylan in America,” is as much a history of American culture as it is a history and analysis of Dylan’s music.
A history professor at Princeton University and the author of “The Rise of American Democracy” and “The Age of Reagan,” Wilentz is a refreshing and authoritative music critic — Greil Marcus with tenure. He’s also a lifelong Dylan fan and the humorously self-appointed historian-in-residence for Dylan’s official website, BobDylan.com.
Wilentz’s appreciation for Dylan’s music goes back to his childhood. His father, Eli, and uncle, Ted, co-owned the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, a Beat hangout. In December 1963, Dylan met Allen Ginsberg in Ted’s apartment above the store. It was a pivotal encounter that reconnected Dylan with Beat literary sensibilities and helped push him beyond the confines of the fold revival. Ginsberg, in turn, found “artistic enlightenment from Dylan.”
On Halloween 1964, Eli took his 13-year-old son to see Dylan at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. Forty years later, Sean Wilentz revisited this concert when he wrote the liner notes for “The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall,” a writing gig that earned Wilentz a Grammy nomination in 2005.
“Bob Dylan in America” joins Peter Doggett’s “You Never Give Me Your Money,” a history of the long, litigious breakup of the Beatles, as one of two excellent books about 1960s icons to appear in the past few months. Like the Beatles, Dylan’s primary gift is alchemy — melding folk, blues, vaudeville, country, rock ‘n’ roll and gospel into something entirely new.
From the cryptic liner notes on his eponymous 1962 debut forward, it’s been clear that Dylan draws from an extensive, affectionate knowledge of American music. But as Wilentz demonstrates, Dylan’s influences extend far beyond music, pulling from American history, literature and folklore. How many songwriters can work a line from an 1842 speech by Abraham Lincoln into a song the way Dylan does on “Summer Days” from his 2001 album “Love and Theft”?
Woody Guthrie is the early, obvious influence on Dylan — the point of origin even casual fans can name — and the poetry of Ginsberg and the Beats is the tie that binds Dylan’s churning, densely packed lyrics to Walt Whitman. But it takes a longtime and astute student of American music like Wilentz to connect — or try, anyway — Dylan to Aaron Copland, a composer initially of experimental music who mixed “folk music and orchestral form, informed by his leftist political sensibilities” into thoroughly American compositions.
Copland and Dylan are kindred artists, Wilentz says, practitioners of an “amalgamating art.” Sharing a talent for making something new out of something old, however, along with the fact that some of Copland’s old Popular Front friends would later meet Dylan, marks a pretty indirect path to Dylan. The Copland chapter, which opens “Bob Dylan in America,” is interesting not because Wilentz convincingly argues that Copland anticipates Dylan but because Copland is interesting in his own right.
The book hits its peak with a three-chapter stretch that begins with Dylan’s mid-career masterpiece, “Blind Willie McTell.” McTell was a “songster” who worked in styles — the blues, country, folk — deeply familiar to Dylan. He was not an early influence on Dylan, but a later one, pointing toward a path Dylan began following in the early 1990s to revive his career.
The next two chapters explore the origins of “Delia,” one of the earliest examples of the blues, and the shape-note hymnal “The Sacred Harp.” As he does throughout his book, Wilentz doesn’t confine himself to each chapter’s primary subject but takes us down numerous side streets and alleys before circling back to Dylan.
“Music not busy being born is busy dying,” Wilentz writes, riffing on Dylan’s famous line from “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” (Wilentz promiscuously sprinkles references to Dylan’s lyrics throughout his book. A few underscore a point; others induce groans.) Since covering “Delia” and “Lone Pilgrim,” a song found in “The Sacred Harp,” on “World Gone Wrong,” his 1993 collection of traditional music, Dylan has increasingly grounded his work even more deeply in the past. He has acted almost out of a preservationist instinct to keep alive music he fears is at risk of disappearing, Wilentz says, bringing bits from here and there into the present to “reclaim and reassemble the American musical past.”
Such recycling has left Dylan vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism, but such charges, Wilentz argues, misunderstand the tradition in which Dylan works. Throughout his career, Wilentz writes, Dylan “has been a minstrel, or has worked in the same tradition as the minstrels … copying other people’s mannerisms and melodies and lyrics and utterly transforming them and making them his own, a form of larceny that is as American as apple pie.”
As Wilentz convincingly illustrates, without such reinvention, popular music (and art in general) would be merely derivative, and repetitive. Dylan not only is in America; America is in him.
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1 Last year was a down year for film, certainly when compared to 2023. I’ve seen eight of the 10 best picture nominees (the exceptions: “I’m Still Here” and “Wicked”). Of those eight, my favorite is “Anora.”
2 One could argue that the true blueprint for retrospective box sets was established by Neil Young’s “Decade,” released in 1977. Over the past 20-30 years, both Young and Dylan have set the gold standard for archival releases.
