Rad Geek People's Daily

Shared Article from freddiedeboer.substack.com

Real Feelings for Fake Beauty

the desire to live in a beautiful built environment can't be snarked away

Freddie deBoer @ freddiedeboer.substack.com

What I’m Reading: Freddie deBoer, “Real Feelings for Fake Beauty” (6 April 2026).

What’s remarkable, when you sit with all of this long enough, is that the Yale campus essentially answers the Twitter debate all by itself. The YIMBYs are wrong that beauty is prohibitively expensive, but the debate is asking the wrong question anyway. The real question isn’t whether we can build beautifully, it’s whether we’re willing to admit what we actually want, which is to be surrounded by things that feel old and storied and earned, even when they aren’t. Yale understood this and built a fantasy, and the fantasy worked so well that a century later they felt compelled to extend it, and even their imperfect extension will probably fool people in another fifty years. The desire isn’t really for Gothic architecture specifically, or for Art Deco, or for any particular style. The desire is for the feeling that a place has been cared for across generations, that it meant something to the people who built it and to the people who came after. Beauty is the signal. Permanence is the message.

Which I know is an odd thing for me to say, given that I am a committed proponent of The New. A lot of those Twitter accounts that call for aesthetic commitment and intentionality of design in new buildings hate Brutalism, while I love it. And it’s odd, when you think about it, because whatever Brutalism may be, and no matter how much many people might hate it, it’s an architectural school passionately dedicated to aesthetic commitment and intentionality of design. It’s just that the people who want beauty in buildings don’t see it in Brutalism, and maybe they also see the style as an example of the decadent decline of the West, and I’m sure some of it them see it as a consequence of the pernicious influence of communism or the Jews…. There’s a lot going on, in calls for the beauty of the past. But at the core of all of this is the simple fact that taste is subjective and beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I can almost believe that some people love the Corporate Modernism that’s expressed in so many hideous apartment buildings that stuff the DC suburbs. Almost. We are that which we are inspired by. Above this paragraph you’ll see an image of Beinecke, Yale’s rare books library, where one can find priceless works of art like a Gutenberg bible. Beinecke is not Brutalist in design (New Formalist, I reckon), but it is decidedly modernist, and it’s nestled in the very heart of Old Campus. And yet it works, somehow, in its environs, for the same reason I buy into the artifice of its neighbors, the architectural cosplay: because it looks good enough to earn that respect.

And here’s where I find myself making a kind of peace with the whole business of beautiful lies. I know that Old Campus is a stage set, that the gargoyles are props, that the medievalism is a borrowed costume from universities that were themselves borrowing from an even older tradition. I know all of that, and I go back anyway, baby on my chest, to walk among the Gothic opulence. My friend was right about the timescales, but I think he was pointing at something bigger than he intended: authenticity is itself a function of time. The new colleges at Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray feel fake not because they are fake — Old Campus is equally fake — but because they haven’t yet had the time to make us forget that we’re in on the trick. Beauty, it turns out, requires a kind of willing amnesia. We have to be allowed to forget the scaffolding. And maybe that’s the real argument for building ornately and lavishly right now, today, in our own cities and neighborhoods: not that we’ll love it immediately, but that someday, if we build it with enough sincerity and enough craft, people will walk past it and feel, without quite knowing why, that human beings once cared about beauty enough to live and work inside of it, and might still.

— Freddie deBoer, Real Feelings for Fake Beauty
Substack, 6 April 2026

What I’m Reading: Anton Howes, The Century-Long Depression in Age of Invention (Aug. 26, 2025)

Shared Article from ageofinvention.xyz

Age of Invention: The Century-Long Depression

There’s an old proverb about England, current in the sixteenth century, that it was a hell for horses, a paradise for women, and a purgatory or pris…

Anton Howes @ ageofinvention.xyz

Compared to the world of work today, with all its occasional frustrations and boredoms, having to work for a wage in the four or so centuries c.1350-1750 was a dystopian nightmare, with England pursuing policies sometimes so absurdly and ambitiously oppressive that as I discovered more about them my jaw just kept on dropping.

I believe their impact has been highly underrated, based on the belief that they weren’t regularly enforced. But the evidence, to me, suggests that they were on the whole adhered to, and so they would have hugely distorted the functioning of the English economy. I haven’t seen the full scale of the policies set out before in all their detail, and I think some important details have hitherto been missed or misinterpreted. So what follows is the long, appalling history of how England created its prison for servants, and of how this led to a century of economic depression. . . .

— Anton Howes, The Century-Long Depression
Age of Invention (Aug. 26, 2025)

This view of America’s glorious past is indispensable to understanding MAGA’s appeal — and the extremism of MAGA youth. After all, the slogan, Make America Great Again implies the loss of greatness. This sense of loss provides the intellectual and — crucially — emotional foundation of the right’s authoritarian turn.

It’s hard to overstate how much the new right idealizes America’s past. Online spaces are full of memes and images, for example, of families from the 1950s in idyllic settings, often with the caption, This is what they took from you. The memes don’t define who they are, but I quickly learned in the Clubhouse conversation that they very much included me. My support for free speech, for example, opened the door for depravity, and my defense of due process hindered the rough justice necessary to reclaim America.

The new right contrasts its vision of a glorious past with a miserable present. This month, Matt Walsh, a popular right-wing podcaster with millions of social media followers, wrote: It’s an empirical fact that basically everything in our day to day lives has gotten worse over the years. The quality of everything — food, clothing, entertainment, air travel, roads, traffic, infrastructure, housing, etc. — has declined in observable ways.

This is, incidentally, where MAGA meets MAHA (Make America Healthy Again). Parts of MAHA are rooted in the conviction that American health care is fundamentally broken to the point of being dangerous. That is the root of the belief — held by 31 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning Americans — that vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they’re designed to prevent.

Walsh’s statement, however, is the opposite of an empirical fact. In reality, it’s empirically wrong on many, many counts.

Americans live longer, enjoy higher median wages, live in larger and more luxurious homes, and enjoy more civil liberties and greater access to justice than even the recent past. The starter homes of the 1950s — tiny places that often lacked central air and other modern utilities — would be considered poverty-level accommodations now.

Violent crime is much lower than in decades past, the divorce rate has decreased from its highs in the early 1980s, and the abortion rate (despite recent increases) is far below its early 1980s peaks.

But even as I type these words, I realize their inadequacy. You cannot fact-check a person out of a feeling, and without question, the people I talked to felt — deep in their bones — that something had gone fundamentally wrong in the United States of America and in their lives. And a dry recitation of contrary facts not only did nothing to assuage this feeling of fear and loss; it was positively enraging — cringe, in a word.

To use an example wielded against me time and again, How can you possibly say that America is better than it’s been when drag queens are reading to kids in public libraries?

To that I say, as my friend Kevin Williamson put it in a recent piece addressing the new right’s nostalgia, More drag queens, sure, but fewer slaves — the moral trajectory of Western civilization is not entirely in the direction of failure, you know.^[1]

One disadvantage of your teenage and early adult years is that you tend to experience adversity without perspective. It’s hard to place your own experience in a larger context when you haven’t yet experienced that context.

And that’s exactly where we — the older generations — have failed…..

As a Cold War kid, I grew up in tense times. The threat of open war with the Soviet Union — and possible nuclear extinction — haunted our daily lives. In the midst of crises and controversies, I took my emotional cues from my parents and from the adults around me in my small Kentucky hometown.

They were never Pollyannas — how could you be? — but they also never panicked. I definitely experienced anxiety, but they provided the context so that I could understand that we’d endured similar crises and survived before. The times were dangerous, but there was also more stability than I could perceive. The result is that I learned to approach the problems of the moment with determination, not despair. Problems are real, but hope endures.

— David French, What Happens if You Refuse to Recognize That We Are in a Death Spiral
New York Times Opinion, 14 December 2025

Shared Article from New York Times

Opinion | What Happens if You Refuse to Recognize That We Are in…

Remind me never to listen to what they are saying online about me.

David French @ nytimes.com

1. ^[1][It is, in any case, not the editorial view of the Rad Geek People’s Daily that more drag queens represents a moral failure of any kind, large or small. Kevin Williamson and David French can think what they want; I think that really, it’s fine. —R.G.]↩