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It will surprise none of Pedro Almodóvar’s admirers to learn that his new film, “Bitter Christmas,” is a dizzyingly intricate meditation on the artist’s compulsion to spin truth into fiction. Or that there is a confessional aspect to the story, which borrows snippets from the director’s own life, though to what degrees of specificity and accuracy, only Almodóvar himself could fully know. He has long delighted in the medium’s twinned capacities for self-revelation and self-concealment, moving, over time, from the veiled personal allusions of “The Flower of My Secret” (1995), “Bad Education” (2004), and “Volver” (2006), among others, to the nakedly semi-autobiographical realm of “Pain and Glory” (2019). To an extent, Almodóvar invites comparison with other storytellers who have recently interrogated their compulsion to tell stories: the Steven Spielberg who plumbed his formative movie-love memories in “The Fabelmans” (2022), or the Joanna Hogg who chronicled her film-school experience in “The Souvenir” (2019) and “The Souvenir: Part II” (2021). Tellingly, though, those works were origin stories. For Almodóvar, now seventy-seven, the whole rich expanse of his life and career seems to be fair game.

And game is, indeed, the word; no living filmmaker pilfers from himself more playfully or prolifically. In “Bitter Christmas,” Almodóvar, perhaps in a burst of Yuletide generosity, has seen fit to give himself not one but two fictional alter egos. The first is Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a Madrid-based director who has two little-seen independent features under her belt and who now works mostly in advertising. What she brings to mind is not so much the porous boundaries between art and life but the inextricable nature of work and pleasure. Single-minded and hyper-observant, she seems hard pressed to enjoy anything unless it provides fuel for her next job. Early in the film, during a scene set in 2004, she and her close friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo) attend a strip show, where a bride-to-be and her friends—and, in all likelihood, the moviegoing audience—go weak-kneed at the sight of Bonifacio (Patrick Criado), a glistening hunk in iridescent undies. Does Elsa join them? She does not. Instead, she slips backstage and, with no more shame or hesitation than a sports writer would feel soliciting locker-room reactions, asks Bonifacio to star in an underwear commercial. Yet Elsa isn’t all business; there’s a spark to her that Bonifacio, despite some initial wariness, can’t resist. He does the commercial and falls in love with her, and she with him—at least, up to the point that her career will allow.

Almodóvar’s second, more obvious stand-in is Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a director who’s closer to his own age. We encounter him in Madrid, in 2026, and we soon realize that he and Elsa are inhabiting not only different time frames but separate narrative planes: Elsa is a character in a script that Raúl is writing, also titled “Bitter Christmas.” The images of Elsa that we see are, as ever with Almodóvar, impeccably composed and color-coördinated, yet they hail from a work in progress—a film within a film, taking shape in its maker’s mind. Elsa is Raúl’s creation, though they are both, of course, Almodóvar’s creations, in a film that amounts to a prismatic valentine to the art of creation. The result is like a stack of cinematic funnels, or perhaps a game of autofictional telephone: select aspects of Almodóvar’s life have been distilled into Raúl, and then further refined, or—depending on one’s perspective—complicated, embellished, and muddled into Elsa. When Elsa experiences panic attacks, accompanied by debilitating migraines, we are watching both Raúl and Almodóvar transmute details of their own medical histories into fiction. (Almodóvar, famously sensitive to light, wears dark sunglasses on nearly every occasion.)

The similarities swirl and multiply; so do the differences. Bonifacio is a dreamily, ridiculously idealized figure—a full-time firefighter who strips only on weekends—and, in the early introductory scenes, you sense both a flair for comic exaggeration and a weakness for exposition in what turns out to be Raúl’s writing. (One of the sly pleasures of Almodóvar’s elaborate meta-structure is that seemingly accidental flaws can later reveal themselves to be deliberate ones.) Bonifacio is also a calming, steadfast presence in Elsa’s life, and he looks after her with a heart-melting devotion that we see mirrored in Raúl’s younger partner, Santi (Quim Gutiérrez). Elsa is reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Middlesex,” which functions as both a temporal marker—in 2004, the novel is a recent literary phenomenon—and a sly wink at the gender-fluid sensibility that enables her to exist, on page and screen, as a vessel of Raúl’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Yet Elsa doesn’t have much time for reading; when she isn’t reeling from physical pain, she’s agonizing over her work. When she jets off, mid-film, to the black-sand beaches of Lanzarote, she admires the scenery for a moment or two and then spends hours hunched over her laptop, toiling at a script. Patricia, who’s come along to Lanzarote (and brought her young son), is miffed at her friend’s distractedness, but Elsa is minimally apologetic. Inspiration is rare, and has no respect for holidays.

Almodóvar evokes the intensity and excitement of the writing process with simple yet effective graphic tools: The opening titles are typed onto the screen, complete with a blinking cursor; Elsa’s thoughts and actions are sometimes anticipated by a line of onscreen text. The composer Alberto Iglesias, one of the director’s steadiest collaborators, provides more passionate flourishes—the strings of his score seem to shudder ecstatically, but also ominously, whenever Raúl approaches his laptop, and every thrum all but declares that writing is not only a generative act but a violent one.

When, at one point, Raúl snaps at Santi for bothering him while he’s trying to write, no writer could entirely blame him—especially as Raúl hasn’t made a film in five years. It’s perhaps the one detail that sets him apart from Almodóvar, who seldom lets even two years go by without rattling off a new picture. “Bitter Christmas” is his twenty-fourth feature, and, like “Pain and Glory,” it’s the work of a filmmaker at once wholly aware of his encroaching mortality—something referenced, continually, by his characters’ struggles with pain, infirmity, and loss—and yet stubbornly unwilling to let it derail his creative energies. Time will catch up with Almodóvar at some point, but writer’s block, it seems, never will.

Inspiration, though, can be treacherous, as it is first for Elsa, and then for Raúl, in one of the film’s many symmetrically conceived twists. Both Elsa and Raúl are compelled to write about other people’s personal tragedies, and the artistic gratification they feel is answered, almost immediately, by a stinging moral rebuke. Patricia doesn’t appreciate her marital troubles becoming grist for Elsa’s creative mill, and Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), Raúl’s longtime assistant, is enraged at how blithely he appropriates her friend’s recent trauma for his fiction. “I know you need to film, but not everything is for you to use,” she snarls, with the fearlessness of a close confidante—a role that, it soon becomes clear, might also transform her into Raúl’s most dangerous enemy.

Raúl protests that his borrowings from reality will be so thoroughly intermingled with fiction as to be unrecognizable to the viewer—a case that Almodóvar, in interviews, has made in his own defense. And yet it is also Almodóvar who, in a spirit of self-interrogation, gifts Mónica with an equally shrewd rebuttal: “You can lie in life but not when you write,” she fires back at Raúl. “You’re more honest in your scripts than in your life.” The accusation echoes of one of the most memorable lines in Almodóvar’s “All About My Mother” (1999), when a character says, “You are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed you are.” It’s the skeleton key that unlocks all Almodóvar’s hidden meanings: the greatest of all truths can be found in artifice, and in art.

It’s significant that the most vividly drawn and intensely felt relationships in “Bitter Christmas” are between friends and colleagues, not lovers. Bonifacio and Santi are supportive to the point of subservience, whereas the arguments between Elsa and Patricia—and especially between Raúl and Mónica—linger and bruise. It’s bracing to see a film so comfortable with anger, one that’s in no hurry to smooth over every disagreement or forgive every betrayal. Almodóvar knows that secrets and words can be weapons, and that, in an instant, the closest of friends can become the most cruelly estranged. Is it unfair to suggest that he writes, more than ever, from personal experience? Watching the film, I couldn’t help but flash back to well-documented instances of the director falling out—not forever, happily—with some of his best and most prominent collaborators, the actors Carmen Maura and Antonio Banderas among them. Almodóvar’s decades-long body of work is a staggering history of long-term artistic relationships that have been forged, sustained, ruptured, and sometimes reconciled through cinema.

The ugly side of friendship puts the bitterness in “Bitter Christmas.” But the title itself refers to a classic song that, as performed here by the Costa Rican and Mexican artist Chavela Vargas, amounts to the sweetest of affirmations. Vargas, who died in 2012, was a friend of Almodóvar’s, and her songs recur throughout his work, though seldom so vividly. In one crucial sequence, Elsa and Patricia, hanging out at the latter’s apartment, listen to Vargas’s recordings of “La Llorona” and “Bitter Christmas” and find themselves moved to tears. The performances we hear were recorded toward the end of Vargas’s life, and their raw emotion is amplified rather than diminished by the singer’s cracked, throaty delivery; Patricia, in particular, is so overcome that the music, and the sense of bleak regret that it imparts, inspires her to make a momentous decision about her future. The glory of Almodóvar’s film is that it knows art doesn’t merely imitate life; fashioned by the right hands, and received in the proper spirit, it can change it, too. ♦

In the summer of 1942, a cash-strapped William Faulkner signed on to work at Warner Bros. as a screenwriter, earning three hundred dollars a week. His first task was to whip up a biographical treatment of General Charles de Gaulle, leading the Free French government from exile in London. Provisionally titled “The De Gaulle Story,” the project was intended as hagiography—explicitly so, as President Franklin Roosevelt had proposed the idea to Jack Warner, hoping to boost de Gaulle’s credibility with the American public. Faulkner gave the gig his best shot, producing some twelve hundred pages and entertaining fussy notes from French consultants. (A memo titled “Observations on Inexact Details” cautioned, “In a cafe in France one does not play dominos but cards or billiard.”) Ultimately, Faulkner found his protagonist so hard to pin down that he purged the bio from the bio-pic, instructing a colleague, “Let’s dispense with General de Gaulle as a living character in the story.” The script was soon relegated to oblivion.

Churchills and Roosevelts—not to mention Hitlers—abound in cinema, but, even in France, bringing de Gaulle to the big screen has historically been a fraught enterprise. As the British historian Julian Jackson has written, postwar filmmakers strove to emphasize the collective nature of resistance rather than focussing on a single great man; yet, when de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, becoming President after more than a decade’s retirement from politics, it was with such command that, as Jackson puts it, “to dare to ask an actor to portray de Gaulle himself would have been an act of lèse-majesté.” (The director Réné Clément solved the problem by using archival footage whenever the General’s presence was required.) Pierre Schoendoerffer and Bertrand Tavernier both tried to make de Gaulle films and failed, the latter surely unhelped by his producer’s insistence that the lead character be played by Gérard Depardieu. Then there was the challenge of de Gaulle’s distinctive physiognomy. Such were the sensitivities surrounding him and his myth that a single actor—the towering, schnozzy, serviceably chinless Adrien Cayla-Legrand—maintained an effective monopoly on the role for decades. It wasn’t until 2020 that the first full-scale feature film devoted to the General, Gabriel Le Bomin’s “De Gaulle,” premièred in French theatres. It closed just ten days later, with COVID-19 advancing like the Panzerjäger-Abteilung 187.

This is all to say that Antonin Baudry knew what he was getting into when he signed on to co-write and direct the most ambitious, improbable de Gaulle movie yet: “La Bataille de Gaulle”—a two-part, five-plus-hour epic, based on Julian Jackson’s nine-hundred-page biography “A Certain Idea of France.” (The book's title alludes to the opening lines of de Gaulle’s own memoirs: “All my life, I have had a certain idea of France.”) The film captivated France this summer, and the first part opened last week in the U.S. Its timing has certainly been fortuitous, with France facing a Presidential election that may put the far right in power for the first time since the Vichy regime. But when we met recently, at a café in the Luxembourg Gardens, Baudry told me he believes that the film has resonated largely because of its human element. He looked chicly rumpled in cream trousers, a button-down, and white leather high-tops decorated with red lightning bolts. He said, of the filmmakers who preceded him, “I understood the malediction—none of them had dared and managed to crack the character.”

Baudry, who is fifty-one, began his career far from the moving image, studying math before earning degrees in engineering and literature from France’s arch-prestigious grandes écoles. (He managed to slip in a film-studies minor, with a thesis on Wong Kar-wai.) After graduating, he entered the French diplomatic corps, where he worked as a speechwriter to the Foreign Minister at the time, Dominique de Villepin, and at least partially authored his famous speech at the United Nations, opposing the Iraq War. After that, he pseudonymously co-wrote a graphic novel called “Quai d’Orsay,” after the seat of the foreign ministry. The book—a juicy look at the inner workings of foreign-policymaking—was a hit, selling more than sixty thousand copies of its first edition. Having proved himself as a sort of beast of the French establishment, devouring the competition in every arena he entered, Baudry volunteered to co-write a film adaptation. Then he decided he wanted to be a director. Casual. So he wangled a meeting with Jérôme Seydoux, the chairman of Pathé film company, and persuaded him to finance a nuclear-submarine thriller called “Chant du Loup,” which premièred in 2019 to warm reviews and respectable takings.

For the de Gaulle project, Pathé gave Baudry carte blanche and an initial seventy-five million euros, an unheard-of budget for a French production. (The film was called “La Bataille de Gaulle” in France but is known as “De Gaulle” in the U.S.) It focusses on the critical years of 1940 to 1944, beginning, in Part 1, with de Gaulle refusing to join the collaborationist Vichy government and ending, in Part 2, with his triumphant return from exile during the Liberation of Paris. Baudry had a breakthrough when he and his co-writer, Bérénice Vila, who is also his wife, started thinking about de Gaulle as a figure spiritually not of the mid-century but of the Middle Ages. “I realized that de Gaulle was a modern Don Quixote,” Baudry recalled, citing the General’s “denial, his stubbornness, his readiness to die rather than admitting the unbearable reality that France had capitulated.” Once the notion of de Gaulle as a knight-errant had clicked, Baudry and Vila came up with a tactic to alleviate the pressure of his legend: as they wrote, they called their hero “Robert” instead of “Charles.” They emphasized the initial lostness of his cause: a mad band of marginals, holding on to France out of unaccountable faith, rather than a reasonable chance of wresting control from Vichy. By that point, Baudry recalled, “I had my character in my veins, and I was going to make these films.”

For the title role, Baudry cast Simon Abkarian, an actor best known for his work on the stage. The film took a hundred and fifty gruelling days to shoot, with reports of delays, quarrels, and a generally trying atmosphere leaking from sets in Paris and Cherbourg. Several months into filming, some twenty crew members quit, including the first assistant director and the director of photography. After filming finally wrapped, in 2024, post-production took more than a year, and Part 1 missed an anticipated release date in 2025. When it finally premièred, in May, at Cannes, reviews were mostly positive. Les Cahiers du Cinema criticized its formal “heavy-handedness” and its “idealized vision” of France, but critics in Le Monde and Le Figaro loved it. “De Gaulle” had won a battle, but it had not won the war.

The first installment hit French theatres in June, to dismal ticket sales. Baudry, meanwhile, was M.I.A., still editing the sound for Part 2. “I honestly didn’t give a shit about the noise outside the mixing room,” he recalled. The film’s producers, hoping for a turnaround, moved up the release of the second installment to coincide with la Fête du Cinema, a nationwide promotion offering discounted tickets. (The films’ full titles—“La Bataille de Gaulle: L’Âge de Fer” and “La Bataille de Gaulle: J’Écris Ton Nom”—were unwieldy enough to cause at least one moviegoer, yours truly, to accidentally see the second part first.) Executives overhauled the marketing campaign. Seydoux told me, “We had a crisis meeting, and I said, ‘We have a rifle with only two shots.’ ”

Then came a third, lucky blast—record-breaking heat, which sent people flocking to the cinema, one of the only reliable places to find air-conditioning. By its fourth week in theatres, “La Bataille de Gaulle” had seen admissions surge by seventy per cent. Word-of-mouth took over, and, suddenly, “La Bataille de Gaulle” was a sensation. I heard chatter about it, in the course of a few days, from both a government minister and my boxing coach. “It’s French panache!” Le Parisien crowed, heralding “a fiasco turned triumph.” The trajectory was almost embarrassingly de Gaullian: a crazy project, flailing and discounted, mounting a gritty comeback that would subsequently be treated as inevitable.

In late September, Jérôme Seydoux was sitting in an orange chair at a huge circular conference table on the top floor of Pathé Palace, his company’s Paris headquarters. He has piercing blue eyes and the plain confidence of a man born to industrial wealth—his mother was a member of the Schlumberger oil dynasty—who managed to conquer another field completely. (He is also grandfather to the actor Léa Seydoux.) At ninety-two, he is something of a cross between Louis B. Mayer and Willy Wonka, confecting France’s major films according to a proprietary formula of market savvy and personal conviction.

Seydoux and Baudry like to say that the “De Gaulle” project took shape out of serendipity: over lunch, they discovered that they were both reading the Julian Jackson biography. But in a way Seydoux has been preparing for much longer to make such a film. “I am an old man, and the story, to some extent, is the story of my life,” he admitted. Seydoux witnessed firsthand the Liberation of Paris, in August of 1944. “We tried to go to the Champs-Élysées, but we didn’t make it, because we were crossing the Tuileries and there were people shooting on the Rue de Rivoli,” he recalled. “The soldiers advised my mother to have us all go under a truck to be protected.” Another day, he and his sister were forbidden to go outside, but they snuck out and saw a German tank. “Kids were able to move because nobody would stop them,” he said.

Making a wildly expensive diptych about a long-dead, famously wooden statesman was a gamble, surely, but it conformed to a strategy that Seydoux has pursued to success in recent years,. This involves taking canonical French stories and turning them into “grandes fresques historiques,” the kind of lavish historical epics at which Hollywood once excelled in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. The movies are old-fashioned, and they are expensive, but they have proved adept at drawing big, cross-generational crowds to physical theatres. Pathé’s “The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan” was the third-highest-grossing French film of 2023; the next year, its “The Count of Monte Cristo” took second place. “It’s this sort of instinctive I.P.,” the film critic Jordan Mintzer told me. “We have Marvel. They have Dumas.” The advantage of resurrecting a wartime superhero is that the world he saves is our own, though “De Gaulle” would have been a very different proposition if it had followed its protagonist into the years of the Algerian War, decolonization, and student revolt.

Baudry has said that he approached the film from another kind of decolonial perspective—that of a French director “breaking the Atlanticist taboo” and liberating his national history from the clutch of the American cultural empire. He spent years living in the U.S. (where he created Albertine, the French cultural center in Manhattan), and when he came back to France he found “a country that was mentally colonized,” as he told Le Monde. “I saw advertisements in public spaces written in broken English that even Americans wouldn’t have understood.” His de Gaulle is difficult, not because he is a comedy Frenchman but because he is a steadfast believer in the near-hopeless cause of maintaining the sovereignty of la Fraaaaaahnce. (Abkarian’s enunciation is the stuff of epic earworms.) “I embody everything the Americans detest,” de Gaulle once said. “I am weak, and I stand my ground.” In the film, he also says borderline delusional stuff such as, “Mosquitoes don’t bite General de Gaulle!” In the next scene, he’s in bed with malaria. Baudry explained, of the General’s almost mystical self-belief, “You have to be passionate. If you’re reasonable, you leave.”

Roosevelt, played by Campbell Scott, is a far more sour, transactional figure than the morally driven humanitarian we know from American history books. Churchill (Simon Russell Beale) waffles and feints as much as he blusters. Baudry told me, “This is the first time we’re seeing this full history through own our lens.” Call it a reverse Pepé Le Pew, flattening Anglo-American icons to give some space not only to de Gaulle but to his internal antagonists and allies and to the French people themselves. Niels Schneider’s sensational performance makes you long for a spinoff two-part, five-hour bio-pic of the Free French general Philippe Leclerc. Baudry’s dramatization of the Germans' violent crackdown on dozens of mostly young, civilian protesters on November 11, 1940, is among the most moving set pieces I’ve seen, incorporating real archival footage and a narration of Paul Éluard’s 1942 poem “Liberté. And nobody who has seen this film will ever forget the Battle of Bir-Hakeim.

There are many ironies to “De Gaulle”—a great-man bio-pic distinguished by its ensemble cast; an anti-American, or at least American-agnostic, film done in high Hollywood style. But its biggest contradiction might be the fact that it is both avowedly antifascist and profoundly patriotic, a film about resistance that could be seen as almost reactionary in its insistence on the purity of de Gaulle and his cause. During our coffee, I asked Baudry whether he’d had any reservations about making a movie that is so overtly, even unfashionably proud of France. He answered in a sidelong way, saying that he hadn’t anticipated the powerful frissons of pride that many moviegoers had reported feeling. Weeks later, I received a long text: “I keep thinking about our exchange in the Luxembourg Garden,” it began. “I don’t want to sound naïve on this,” Baudry wrote. Part of the problem, he said, was that “the far-right has managed to monopolize patriotism,” confiscating “our flag and our pride.” He brought up American exceptionalism, and said that “De Gaulle” does not try to argue for a French version. “It doesn’t say that the French are better than the Spanish, the British, the Americans,” he said. “It just shows people trying to save their country which is France and which they love.”

“Why now?” is an irksome question to impose on an artist, but with Europe struggling to assert itself against an increasingly aggressive American hegemon, and people all over the world searching for models of resistance against autocratic regimes, Baudry is not oblivious to the film’s broader resonances. “I thought to myself, It’s Trump-Zelensky!” he told Le Grand Continent, of a scene in which Roosevelt and de Gaulle face off at the Anfa Hotel, in Casablanca, in 1943. Baudry told me that the current political situation put him in mind of the words of Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary in 1914: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” He continued, “That was true, and that’s a little bit what we’re fearing now.” “De Gaulle” joins a slew of other recent French movies about the Second World War, including “Notre Salut,” a drama by Emmanuel Marre about his collaborationist great-grandfather, and a starry bio-pic of the French Resistance leader Jean Moulin. But “De Gaulle,” like its hero, stands out for its willingness to be true to itself, and even a little weird. Baudry brought up Don Quixote again. “A knight devoted to his lady isn’t necessarily convinced that she is technically more beautiful than, say, the king’s wife,” he told me. “He just thinks she’s perfect, and he’ll die for her any time if needed.” It’s a certain idea about a certain idea. ♦

In 1956, an ancient gentleman named Samuel James Seymour appeared on a game show called “I’ve Got a Secret,” where he revealed, in a small voice weakened by a recent fall, that he was likely the last living witness to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The blown-out kinescope transmission of the episode, preserved on YouTube, is a wormhole—a shortcut through the space-time continuum. The viewer takes this shortcut via her laptop or phone, through a television program aired within living memory, featuring a guest who entered adulthood not yet knowing cars or planes or skyscrapers or light bulbs, and whose own father was born before germ theory and the sewing machine.

I often feel as though I am shuffling onto the stage of my children’s education in the manner of Mr. Seymour. On one side of the wormhole is the stuff of the public K-12 schools I attended in the nineteen-eighties and nineties: chalkboards and Scantrons, film strips and secondhand Signet Classics, and big, battered textbooks in grocery-bag slipcovers, passed down from student to student, year upon year. On the other side of the wormhole are my kids’ Chromebooks, pre-loaded with Google’s suite of education software and A.I. tools, along with apps from myriad other companies. I cup my hand to my ear and ask the kids to speak up as they recite the gamified learning platforms they have known: Wayground (né Quizizz), BrainPOP, ABCya!, Epic!, Kahoot!. My son, who is nine, does homework games on the free version of a cartoon show called 99math, but he’d like to join the app’s “Premium Club,” whose members can “Play UNLIMITED GAMES at home,” “Collect RARE EGGS and get EPIC PETS,” and “Get EPIC OUTFITS for your avatar,” all for just $9.99 a month.

My daughter, age eleven, spends a chunk of every social-studies class on Blooket, where she earns tokens by taking multiple-choice quizzes arranged by subject and grade level. (A recent Veterans Day–themed Blooket quiz led off with “Veterans give up a lot to serve their countries and show a lot of _____.” The correct answer is patriotism.) Using her tokens, she has assembled an army of cartoon avatars known as Blooks; her most prized platoon of late is her “Spooky Pack” of ten Blooks—a googly-eyed creature, a creepy caramel apple—who look like extras from a factory-outlet remake of “Monsters, Inc.” She acquired them ahead of Halloween by answering sub-grade-level questions about the water cycle. I bleat hoarsely at her through the wormhole, demanding to know how the avatars and the coins and all the clicking help her learn anything. “This is the not-learning part,” she explains, gently. I feel my dentures loosening as I wander away.

On my own computer, I click around in hapless search of a university-level tutorial or peer-reviewed study that might explain the cognitive benefits of Zorblitz or Pirate Pool or Fishing Frenzy (three of Blooket’s many game modes). Instead, I stumble on a promotional video for yet another platform familiar to my kids—a program called Boost Reading. In Boost, instead of clicking answers in order to earn Blooks, you click answers in order to earn accessories for avatars known as Curiosos. “The kids are really engaged,” a literacy coach murmurs despondently in the video, over a closeup of a student wearing headphones and staring at a screen. A fourth grader tells the camera, “I feel as if I’m not even reading. I feel as if I’m just playing a game.” She means it as a compliment. Some ersatz Philip Glass tinkles in the background, the sad-anxious sound of a mental-health P.S.A., or of your parents’ divorce, or of an entire nation sliding into an oddly Pavlovian illiteracy.

Boost Reading is one of the many products offered by the ed-tech company Amplify Education, which is backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. These V.C. firms include Learn Capital, which, according to its website, focusses on “AI-powered learning, digital education, workforce training, and career advancement”; and A-Street Ventures, which centers “digital-first instructional materials in curriculum and new paradigms for student assessment.” In New York City Public Schools—the largest system in the country, with nearly nine hundred thousand students and an annual budget of about forty-five billion dollars—Amplify has been a major presence for more than fifteen years. Joel Klein, who was schools chancellor under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a key national force behind the reorientation of public schools around ed-tech, later spent several years as chief executive of Amplify. In fiscal year 2026, Amplify received $12.4 million in contractual payments from the city’s Department of Education, including for curricula in math, science, and English Language Arts (E.L.A.).

The ed-tech that has swallowed our public schools is overwhelmingly driven by private capital, and Amplify is just one example. In fiscal year 2026, New York City paid contracts totalling $25.6 million to Curriculum Associates, whose majority stakeholders are private-equity firms. The company’s flagship product is i-Ready, a reading-and-math-assessment software platform that has kept its foothold in New York City and across the country despite being universally reviled by students, parents, and teachers. Curriculum Associates is facing multiple legal challenges related to i-Ready, including a class-action lawsuit, filed in the District of Massachusetts, alleging violations of consumer-protection and privacy laws; and a false-advertising case, filed in D.C. Superior Court, brought by an education nonprofit. The latter suit alleges that i-Ready “does not tell a teacher what question a child missed or why they missed it”; that the software promises “personalized instruction” but instead “runs students with opposite needs through the same pre-built lessons”; and that it measures students’ progress “on Curriculum Associates’ own test of its own lessons, scored by Curriculum Associates—a closed loop its marketing nowhere discloses.” (Curriculum Associates has denied any wrongdoing.)

Public schools would seem an odd fit for private equity, which is typically premised on a strategy of slashing costs, trimming head count, and finding the right moment to sell up. Yet Heggerty, which provides literacy curricula to some New York City schools, is backed by private equity. The majority owner of Really Great Reading (E.L.A. software) is private equity. The sole owner of Savvas (software for multiple subjects) is private equity. And one of the D.O.E.’s top curriculum venders, H.M.H.—a descendant of Houghton Mifflin, a name synonymous with old-school textbooks—is owned by the private-equity firm Veritas Capital. H.M.H. and its subsidiary N.W.E.A. have a total of nine approved learning programs in New York, including the E.L.A. curricula “Into Reading” and “Into Literature,” which are used in two-thirds of the city’s districts. In fiscal year 2026, the D.O.E. made payments exceeding twenty million dollars to H.M.H.

Veritas Capital, which has significant A.I.-related investments, refers to H.M.H. on its website as an “adaptive learning company,” though H.M.H.’s own site is more explicit on this point: “Only HMH puts AI intelligence inside the high-quality instructional materials—by design, not an add-on.” This is a surprising bona fide for the most prominent curriculum provider in New York City, where, in response to intense anti-A.I. public sentiment, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, recently announced a one-year moratorium on A.I. for students in eighth grade and under, along with recommendations on reduced screen time.

Private capital’s entanglement with increasingly A.I.-driven ed-tech places it at cross-purposes with a growing number of public-school advocates. The D.O.E. has imminent plans to launch five A.I. pilot programs for high-school students, in math, writing, and A.I. literacy; two of the pilots are from nonprofits that have received significant funding from Google, a third is from a company backed by venture capital, and a fourth is from Intel, whose top shareholders include the A.I. behemoth Nvidia. But the AIM Coalition—the umbrella organization of teachers, families, and advocates that successfully agitated for the A.I. moratorium—is militating against the pilots, arguing that they have no proven educational benefits, that they may harm teen-agers’ cognitive development, and that they effectively compel teachers and students to supply A.I. companies with free labor and personal data.

The incursion of A.I into classrooms is so recent, so freshly strange, that it may yet be possible for advocates to unwind it further—and perhaps unwind a lot of unwanted and pernicious ed-tech along with it. But it is also terribly strange that so many avatars of venture capital and private equity have been permitted to financialize public schools, which are neither designed nor intended to create profits or customers. It’s stranger still that these investors see so many dollar signs in a system such as New York City’s, where, according to the D.O.E.’s estimations, more than seventy per cent of students live in poverty.

Public schools have been providing private companies with straightforward revenue streams for generations; the outfit now known as H.M.H., for example, has existed in one form or another since the early nineteenth century. In the olden days, though, a school in the market for curricula could simply offer money to a publisher in exchange for its textbooks, then use them until they fell apart. The publisher was not granted access to the personal information or schoolwork or grades of the children using the books, as is often the case with Google and Microsoft’s learning-management platforms. These purchases did not put the school on the hook for future software or tech upgrades. And, unlike apps, books do not disappear overnight if a school does not renew its subscription to them.

The technologization of learning, in short, introduced elements of technofeudalism into the relationship between schools and ed-tech companies, creating far more opportunities for monetizing students by harvesting their data. And no company plays the part of feudal lord better than Google, which earlier this year foisted its Gemini suite of A.I. tools on public schools, much to the surprise and dismay of many educators and families. Last week, Google announced that early next year, by popular demand, it would permit schools to turn off A.I. features in its K-12 software, but that schools choosing to do so would also lose access to Google Search—a trade-off that carried a whiff of extortion. Of course, students in search of information can go directly to the URLs of trusted sources or use an alternative search engine such as DuckDuckGo, as Naveed Hasan, a computer scientist who has two children in public schools in Manhattan, told me. “This is actually a great opportunity to say, ‘Hey, we don’t need most of this Google stuff,’ ” he said. “Somehow they’re trying to blackmail us with a free product. Like, who cares?”

Technofeudalism also perpetuates itself in the form of the computer-based assessment. Though standardized tests—preparing for them, administering them—have been eroding classroom-instruction time across the country since the signing of the No Child Left Behind Act, in 2002, their corrosive effects intensified in many districts after COVID. In 2021, as schools in New York City were reopening for full-time, in-person learning, the D.O.E. began mandating triannual online assessments in reading and math. These new tests, intended to measure pandemic-driven learning loss, were sourced from MAP Growth, which is developed by N.W.E.A.; i-Ready, from Curriculum Associates; and Acadience Learning, whose parent company is backed by private equity. “The logic was, ‘We need to identify the gaps if we’re going to close them,’ ” Kyle DeAngelis, who is a third-grade teacher at a public school in Harlem, told me. “That made sense after a global-health meltdown. But, six years later, we’re still doing the same things, and schools are not getting the resources they need to close those gaps.”

Hasan is one of five elected parent representatives to the Panel for Educational Policy, the governing body that helps determine rules and budgets for the D.O.E. “All of our curriculum now is based on test scores,” he told me. “The standardized tests don’t demand long-form reading or writing, and therefore the kids aren’t taught to have the endurance to read a book.” Only about fifteen per cent of public schools in New York City currently employ a librarian. “They have mandated a curriculum with basically no books in it,” Hasan said. “We don’t have libraries and librarians because there’s no test to see if your kid is good at library.”

So far, the devil’s bargain of exchanging books for test scores appears to be a one-way transaction. According to the most recent test data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the reading scores of both fourth and eighth graders in New York State have dropped nine points in the past decade. Those results are especially bleak when you consider that the tests don’t measure for a student’s reading stamina, or quantify the joy and excitement a young person might feel in reading a book for fun, as opposed to scanning an excerpt in order to extract the correct answer and maybe a prize of some kind: a few digital coins, a new hat for her avatar, a robot’s automated words of praise.

Given the expense and inefficacy of ed-tech, the D.O.E.’s outsourcing of curricula is especially puzzling to many teachers and parent advocates. “Why are we reaching out to private industry for what should be core public responsibilities?” Hasan asked. “Curriculum design should be done in-house, by teachers who know their local communities. Otherwise, the priorities will be set by the venders.” Hasan and other advocates singled out H.M.H.’s “Into Reading” program—which is widely disliked for its reliance on excerpts, lack of diverse authors, and flat, voiceless content—as illustrative of the need for local curriculum design.

DeAngelis, who has a master’s degree in curriculum and teaching, said he was concerned that H.M.H.-style heat-and-serve learning may have a de-skilling effect on his youngest colleagues. “With the proliferation of these prepackaged curricula, I fear we are raising a generation of teachers who believe that teaching is downloading a lesson and just delivering whatever is in there,” he told me. De-skilling is likewise a concern in any school system, including New York’s, where inexperienced teachers are permitted or even encouraged to use A.I.—arguably a form of cognitive outsourcing—to generate lesson plans, classroom presentations, and feedback on student work. Martina Meijer, who teaches fourth grade in Brooklyn, told me that teachers are frequently receiving A.I.-written feedback from their supervisors. “It’s the same quality of work that a middle-school teacher would get from a student essay written by A.I.,” she said.

Meijer and DeAngelis are both part of the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE), which is the social-justice caucus of the United Federation of Teachers and a member group in the AIM Coalition. MORE-U.F.T.’s adversarial approach to ed-tech and A.I. in schools diverges sharply from the incautious optimism of the mainline U.F.T., which represents most public school teachers in New York City. Last year, the U.F.T. and its counterpart union, the American Federation of Teachers, launched the National Academy for AI Instruction, a training program that is funded by a twenty-three-million-dollar partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The academy’s classes and online resources offer guidance on how teachers can harness A.I. to lighten their workloads; in one course, teachers can “practice crafting AI prompts specifically for English learners,” and, in another, they can “learn how to build and personalize AI agents that act as instructional aides, planners, or feedback partners using educator-friendly AI tools.”

In accepting A.I. money for A.I. purposes, the teachers’ unions seem to be instantiating an idea that many of its rank-and-file members reject: that A.I. and ed-tech writ large can aid and enhance the work of teachers, as opposed to eroding or supplanting their role. “There’s no analysis of the labor issues that are raised by accepting corporate curricula and the rolling out of A.I. to address unacceptable labor conditions,” Meijer told me. “If the situation is that teachers are training computers to do their job for them, then we are at a very weak position at the bargaining table.”

The situation that Meijer describes is one that many D.O.E. leaders may have tacitly accepted. Richard Carranza, who was chancellor from 2018 until 2021, went straight from that job to an executive position at the ed-tech company I.X.L. Learning. Samuels’s immediate predecessor as chancellor, Melissa Aviles-Ramos, is now an “executive in residence” at H.M.H. And Miatheresa Pate, currently the D.O.E.’s chief academic officer, is the recipient of a fellowship jointly offered by Google and G.S.V. Ventures, an ed-tech venture-capital firm.

Yet the alternative vision for public education presented by members of AIM and MORE-U.F.T.—one that moves away from screens and centers books, pencil-and-paper learning, and a sense of being rooted in a physical place, a community—is less costly, more effective, and more human than the buffering in-app technofeudalist nightmare that our children currently occupy. Anyone who is above a certain age or able to read a D.O.E. spreadsheet can understand this, and can grasp how easy it would be to return to this model of pedagogy. Anyone can climb through the wormhole.

The sole major hurdle, it seems, is that private capital does not see this model as scalable or high-R.O.I. This shouldn’t be a hurdle at all, except that many public-education leaders in New York and elsewhere “have bought into the future outlined by tech and finance,” Craig Garrett, a parent leader in the AIM Coalition who lives in Brooklyn, told me. “The only thing that has worked so far is political pressure. If our classrooms ever return to textbooks and Scantrons, it will happen because the political price of standing up to thousands of parents, students, and teachers became too high.” ♦

Fifty years ago, Cameron Crowe interviewed David Bowie for Playboy magazine. The exchange is best remembered for Bowie’s proclamation of his bisexuality, but another section deserves more scrutiny than it often receives:

PLAYBOY: You’ve often said that you believe very strongly in fascism. Yet you also claim you’ll one day run for Prime Minister of England. More media manipulation?

BOWIE: Christ, everything is a media manipulation. I’d love to enter politics. I will one day. I’d adore to be Prime Minister. And, yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible. People have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership. A liberal wastes time saying, “Well, now, what ideas have you got?” Show them what to do, for God’s sake. If you don’t, nothing will get done. I can’t stand people just hanging about. Television is the most successful fascist, needless to say. Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.

PLAYBOY: How so?

BOWIE: Think about it. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It’s astounding. And, boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God! He was no politician. He was a media artist himself. He used politics and theatrics and created this thing that governed and controlled the show for those twelve years. The world will never see his like. He staged a country.

Playboy had no more follow-up questions until the very end of the conversation, when Crowe, who was nineteen at the time, asked Bowie whether he stood by what he had said. “Everything but the inflammatory remarks,” Bowie replied, without specifying what they were.

In later years, Bowie struggled to explain this interview and various other instances in which he dabbled in fascist rhetoric. He said that he had been “out of my mind totally, completely crazed”; that he had been thinking in mythological terms, not in political ones; that he had indulged in “glib, theatrical observations”; that the horror of the Holocaust had “completely evaded my extraordinary fucked-up nature at that particular time.” Critics and biographers took a similar line, proposing that Bowie had been suffering from “cocaine psychosis,” or that he had been speaking “at least partially tongue-in-cheek,” or that he had been dealing in “illogical irony.” The issue has periodically resurfaced in the years since Bowie’s death, in 2016, but it has hardly dented his reputation, which long ago attained the status of greatness and genius—a seamless extension of the old Romantic cult of the artist-hero.

What’s striking about Bowie’s flirtation with fascism is how commonplace it was. Such is the import of “This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich” (Akashic), a recent book by the British musician and writer Daniel Rachel. (The title is taken from Bowie’s song “Diamond Dogs,” which begins with the announcement “This ain’t rock ’n’ roll—this is genocide!”) Although Rachel devotes a chapter to Bowie, he touches on so many other semi-fascist or full-on-Nazi outbursts from rock and pop musicians of the nineteen-sixties, seventies, and eighties that the Thin White Duke, as Bowie called himself circa 1976, gets lost in the shuffle. In this light, Kanye West’s intermittent admiration for Hitler seems less an anomaly than an homage to a venerable tradition. Reading Rachel’s compilation, I stopped worrying about the moral particulars of any one case—can the art be separated from the artist?—and instead wondered about the art itself. Something in the pop ritual keeps inducing the same symptoms.

Rachel focusses on the British context, going back as far as the late fifties. When John Lennon was a Liverpool art student, he drew a picture of himself delivering a Hitler salute, with the legend “HEIL JOHN.” Lennon occasionally snapped such salutes in the following decade. When the members of the Beatles were choosing faces to feature on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Lennon suggested Jesus and Hitler, neither of whom is visible. The innocent explanation is that Lennon and others of his generation were mocking the patriotic solemnity that their parents had conferred on the Second World War. George Harrison later said, “We were the generation who didn’t suffer from the war and we didn’t want to have to keep being told about Hitler.” At the time, the war was viewed more as a stomping of the Jerries than as a contest with genocidal evil. This was also the era of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers,” with its riotous “Springtime for Hitler” sequence—although Brooks’s obvious satirical intent, not to mention his status as a Jewish war veteran, places him in an entirely different category.

A notable scene took place in Melbourne in 1964, when the Beatles greeted thousands of fans from a hotel balcony. Lennon raised his right arm and mimicked a Hitler mustache with his left index finger. Paul McCartney and George Harrison followed suit. One newspaper caption read, “Whenever the Beatles appeared on a balcony, they couldn’t resist giving Hitler-type salutes.” The Beatles clearly had in mind old newsreel footage of the Führer and the Duce greeting their hordes. You could ascribe a critical intent to the gesture—a subversive response to unchecked hype. For the most part, the band seemed wary of the unprecedented fame that had been conferred upon it.

Creepier tics cropped up among the Beatles’ successors. Brian Jones, of the Rolling Stones, was photographed wearing an S.S. uniform and crushing a plastic doll with his boot. Mick Jagger praised Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” and modelled for the director. Keith Moon thought it hilarious to march through a Jewish neighborhood in London wearing Third Reich regalia. Sid Vicious did much the same in Paris. Malcolm McLaren’s infatuation with Nazi style meant that swastikas became a staple of punk culture. Metal exhibited similar Teutonic tendencies—umlauts, Fraktur type, Iron Crosses. For Nikki Sixx, of Mötley Crüe, umlauts were “German and strong,” evocative of conquering youth. Motörhead’s Lemmy amassed a storehouse of Nazi memorabilia. Sinister associations were inscribed in band names: supposed sexual-slavery operations in German concentration camps, in the case of Joy Division; the prison where Rudolf Hess was held in postwar Berlin, in the case of Spandau Ballet. A Nazi-curious playlist would include the Sex Pistols’ “Belsen Was a Gas,” Devo’s “Triumph of the Will,” and the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop.”

Many of rock’s ersatz Nazis were, like Bowie, subsequently embarrassed by their behavior. Rachel catalogues their various excuses, titling one section of his book “Never Mind the Swastikas.” Some opted for an aesthetic defense: everyone looks good in shiny black. According to McLaren, the Nazis had “the best clothes sense.” Their uniforms were deemed “great” (Eric Clapton), “just so pretty” (Dee Dee Ramone), and “the coolest” (Ace Frehley, of Kiss). Others insisted that they had just been larking about. When Lou Reed was asked why he had an Iron Cross shaved into his hair, he replied, “I was young. I was having fun.” Siouxsie Sioux, of Siouxsie and the Banshees, called Nazi antics an “anti-mums-and-dads thing.” Peter Hook, of Joy Division, declared that his band was “nothing more than a bunch of lads obsessed with the war.” Nick Cave said that his use of the swastika on two record covers in the early eighties was “deliberately moronic.”

All the same, the trend troubled many members of the rock community—those who had managed to be young and dumb without donning an S.S. outfit or collecting Wehrmacht daggers. In the late seventies, the Rock Against Racism movement in the U.K. mobilized in response to anti-immigrant diatribes delivered by Clapton, which echoed the far-right National Front. Billy Bragg, who contributes an introduction to Rachel’s book, was a youthful member of that antifascist wave. The Dead Kennedys sang, “You still think swastikas look cool? / The real Nazis run your schools.” The rock critic Lester Bangs diagnosed white-supremacist strains in the punk world: “Anytime you conclude that life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit, you’ve got the perfect breeding ground for fascism.” In the dishevelled grunge years, Nazi regimentation lost prestige, although it didn’t disappear completely. Carlos Dengler, of the early-two-thousands band Interpol, adopted Hitler Youth drag, which he later rationalized as a critique of his German heritage.

The final chapters of Rachel’s book turn to modern pop, showing in the process that fascist chic is not exclusively a white male problem. Michael Jackson’s teaser for the album “HIStory,” in which the star marched between rigid ranks of soldiers, was echt Riefenstahl. Madonna and Lady Gaga each dipped into S.S. kink by way of the 1974 film “The Night Porter.” Nicki Minaj alluded to “Triumph of the Will” in her “Only” music video. Last year, Kanye West released a song titled “Heil Hitler”; this year, he blamed a car accident and a bipolar condition for the misstep. For the most part, however, Nazi strutting belongs to the glory days of white rock and roll, alongside the decorative use of the Confederate flag and other gestures of reactionary rebellion.

Few authors have looked closely at rock’s swastika fetish, and Rachel deserves credit for his assiduous gathering of evidence. In an epilogue to “This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll,” he says that he grew up with the music in question, singing along to “Bergen Was a Gas,” and that writing the book was painful for him. Unfortunately, he doesn’t shed much light on the origins of the phenomenon. Although he is right to emphasize unrepentant antisemitism in Western societies, it’s clear that many rockers in the book weren’t viscerally anti-Jewish. Some, in fact, were Jewish themselves. Tommy Ramone, the principal author of “Blitzkrieg Bop,” came from a family of Holocaust survivors. So did Gene Simmons, who once said, “One word from Hitler and the masses would move in unison. It was the same with Kiss.” At times, Rachel’s framing becomes hazy, as when he cites the Scottish band Primal Scream, which has used Nazi imagery to excoriate Benjamin Netanyahu and the state of Israel. Whatever the merits of that approach, this is not a case of a band drawing a positive charge from fascist iconography.

The British-born media theorist Dick Hebdige offered a gentler interpretation in his 1979 book, “Subculture: The Meaning of Style.” Focussing on punk, Hebdige argues that the likes of Siouxsie and Sid Vicious aimed to jolt the establishment by aping history’s supreme bogeymen. One scenester justified the swastika look by saying, “Punks just like to be hated.” Hebdige then turns to post-structuralist theory: “The signifier (swastika) had been willfully detached from the concept (Nazism) it conventionally signified.” In other words, in a postmodern, end-of-history age, fascist symbols lose their specific menace. Likewise, Pamela Rooke, a Sex Pistols adjutant who sported a red armband during the band’s television début in 1976, later shrugged off the episode by saying, “There was no Nazi Party now.” Johnny Ramone claimed that “there’s no threat right now of any Nazi thing,” though he did perceive a “communist threat.” Alas, signifiers have a way of reuniting with their signifieds, and the Nazi thing is alive and well.

The source of the syndrome may ultimately lie in the theatrics of the pop spectacle: isolated figures receiving the adoration of a mesmerized public. Such ceremonies of idolatry go back into the deepest past, but mass communication empowered performers to an unparalleled degree, as it had empowered Hitler. In this sense, Bowie’s discussion of media manipulation in that Playboy interview offered a valuable bit of analysis. The Beatles recognized the new reality when they walked out on a Melbourne hotel balcony. Rapt throngs were materializing out of nowhere, summoned by signals that had circled the planet. Centuries of Anglo-American cultural imperialism laid the groundwork for the Beatles’ ascendancy: English was the language of hegemony. Sound reproduction put the entire globe within reach. Electric amplification enabled the band to perform for audiences of awesome size—fifty-five thousand people in Shea Stadium, in 1965. Without microphones, the Beatles and all their successors would have been inaudible.

Such a superhuman magnification of the individual is unsettling to behold at close range. I witnessed the internal mechanics when I followed Radiohead on tour in 2000. Members of the band were variously thrilled, unnerved, and scared by what they were unleashing—a healthily complex reaction. Narcissists, not uncommon in pop circles, have no such hangups. They have always been preparing to greet crowds from a balcony; they are not surprised to hear their thoughts echoed by tens of thousands of voices in unison. But fame at the stadium level can have a corrosive effect on formerly amiable personalities, as we know from watching countless rise-and-fall documentaries on VH1. The music alone cannot generate a Nuremberg-rally atmosphere: the crucial factor is the audience’s desire for collective submission.

That longing to become one with the throng is elemental. We humans love to discard our anxious selves and join a unanimous pack. If no sinister ideology is at work—and, usually, none is—what harm is being done? In a hyper-mediated context, though, the synchronization of thousands of bodies in a rite of glorification cannot avoid being political, and the politics in question is hardly egalitarian. This was a theme of Susan Sontag’s 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism,” which was alert to darker trends in the pop realm. Sontag wrote, “The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force.” Theodor W. Adorno went even further and denounced mass culture as inherently totalitarian.

Having had a few ecstatic experiences of my own at stadium shows, I resist such drastic judgments. When Prince performed at Madison Square Garden in 2004, he imposed nothing more, and nothing less, than his own staggering virtuosity. At the same time, I mistrust pop culture’s boundless faith in its own innocence. As a rule, its products are held to be hugely influential in fostering progress, but when things go awry they are reclassified as harmless fun. Thus, Bowie’s announcement of his bisexuality is said to have significantly boosted gay rights while his Hitler fantasies amounted to boyish tomfoolery. In the same way, we tend not to talk about pop’s relationship with monopoly capitalism. The concentration of media power in the hands of a small circle of ubiquitous superstars mirrors economic inequality. Tellingly, with some honorable exceptions, élite celebrities have been circumspect about the trashing of democracy in the MAGA era. Many of them may dislike Trump, but politics is divisive and eats into profits.

Although the twilight of the pop gods is probably a long way off, a counter-swing toward a more decentered, democratic marketplace is something to dream about, particularly as offshoots of quasi-socialism take hold here and there. We need something like a redistribution of cultural wealth. At some point, fans may tire of paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to see, at the distance of a Hail Mary pass, Taylor Swift earning her second billion. Whether or not anything political hangs on the outcome, mass worship is irrational at heart, as pop’s wiser practitioners know. Bob Dylan once sang, “Never did get the message, don’t even know if one was sent to me / About the madness of becoming what one was never meant to be.” ♦