The Idiot Culture, Revisited
The post-Watergate decay in Fourth Estate investigative journalism.
A. Actor Robert Redford’s death earlier this week has led me back to a Carl Bernstein penned New Republic article from 1992 called “The Idiot Culture.” I came across this specific article in 1994 whilst contributing to and being an industry liaison (book publishers, music labels, and film distributors) for La Trobe University’s student newspaper Rabelais. Bernstein’s critique foreshadows today’s populist media culture.
B. Karen Hao’s new book Empire of AI: Inside The Reckless Race of Total Domination (London: Allen Lane, 2025) is getting a lot of both favourable and critical press about Sam Altman’s OpenAI and its competitor Anthropic. The latest I’ve read is in The Nation. On entrepreneurial scaling, Verne Harnish’s bible Scaling Up: How A Few Companies Make It . . . and Why the Rest Don’t (New York: Forbes, 2025) has a newly revised update.
C. East Carolina University’s Associate Professor Armin Krishnan (Curriculum Vitae) has posted two syllabi: SECS 6330 Covert Action and Hybrid Warfare (2025) and POLS6080 American Foreign Policy (2013). His most recent research monograph is Havana Syndrome: A Threat to National Security (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) which advances the Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) hypothesis (H1). This differs from Robert W. Baloh & Robert E. Bartholemew’s Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020) which advances the Mass Psychogenic Illness competing hypothesis (H2). For a DEW background see Louise A. Del Monte’s War at the Speed of Light: Directed-Energy Weapons and the Future of Twenty-First Century Warfare (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books Inc, 2021).
D. The Center for Strategic & International Studies has a great video series on Deterrence 101.
Module 1: Foundations of Deterrence
Module 2: Theories of Nuclear Use
Module 3: Strategic Stability, Escalation and Crisis Management
E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Problems of Philosophy.