As always, thanks for this interesting post. I'm reading Barba-Kay's book after seeing Dreher mention it somewhere. It's fascinating but is pretty dense reading. Barba-Kay pushes hard on the virtualization of reality currently being pushed by digital technology at the expense of human interaction with the material. He's right to call this out. The Silicon Valley elite have been sending up trial balloons for a while, like the derisive idea of "reality privilege" (https://ricochet.com/1209722/the-have-nots/) and I have argued that a unifying theme of much of our cultural <ahem> upheaval (see what I did there? ;) ) and not just technology, is tied to the pursuit of a disembodied existence. (https://www.keithlowery.com/disembodied/)
Nevertheless, there is one thing that gives me pause and makes me draw back from giving in to the pessimism that characterizes Barba-Kay. (I'm not finished with his book yet so maybe I overstate his despair.) Human beings are inescapably part of material reality. It is an inseparable part of our design. Even marathon gamers have to eat. So I tend to believe that the nature of our existence will inevitably reassert itself, and digital technology will, for many at least, eventually be put in its proper place, though there may be horrifying casualties along the way. Material reality will, by necessity, reestablish itself at some point, and maybe sooner than later.
Despairing that human beings will inevitably drift into living entirely digital lives may be analogous to expecting your cat to live life as a vegan.
For me, at least, that's what gets in the way of believing too strongly in technology's long term appeal. That, and the tendency of Silicon Valley poohbahs to be insufferable.
I'm on my 2nd reading of Barba-Kay (I'm the one who put Rod onto it), and I'd say that his concern is not so much that humans will drift into living entirely digital lives as it is that the digital will "colonize" the real in such a way that the two will be blurred, and the digital will become the filter/funnel through which the real is perceived and understood.
What I found fascinating about the book is that it spells out in black and white many things that we "tech-critical" folks have long intuited about the digital revolution but haven't seen described in detail. In effect, what he's doing is taking the insights of writers like McLuhan and Postman, expanding upon them, and applying them philosophically to the digital. I admit that it's a dense book, but I think this is due to his desire to be precise.
Thanks for your article link to "The Have Nots"; it is the first time I have come across the term "reality privilege". I agree with you that, because we are made for reality, material reality will in the end reestablish itself. This was actually the exact point that my husband and I discussed a post I am preparing for next week. I also just discovered your blog "Stuff I'm Thinking About"; have you considered moving these posts onto a substack here?
Ok - so I did a thing. You pushed me over the edge and I imported my personal site to Substack. I ran my site on Ghost, and interestingly, Substack is able to import a Ghost-based site. So now I'm up and running on Substack. I'll try this and see how it works. https://keithlowery.substack.com
You're very kind. Given the subject matter of your own Substack, you might find yourself interested in this piece that I wrote a few months ago on importance of maintaining control of our own attention. Thanks for your encouragement and interest. (https://keithlowery.substack.com/p/a-right-to-our-own-minds)
Thanks Keith - that was an excellent piece which I shall save for later reference. I especially appreciate your discussion of technological complexity as a vehicle for diminishing human agency.
I am increasingly tempted to put my posts on Substack. I originally started my blog as a way to get my posts off of social media and out of the reach of the party poopers at Facebook. Running my own site, it's easy for me to archive and control all of my content. I need to dig into how that works with Substack. It will be more compelling to move things if Substack makes it easy for me to maintain local offline archives of all of my posts. It's something I need to make the time to look into.
I deeply appreciate this gift. As the slough of futility and repetition envelopes much of the resistance on Substack, many of these links address what we are finally left with : the absence of wholeness, transcendence or purpose, i.e. the unhealing wound of our generations. We have a lot of very painful work ahead of us.
Koch’s piece is interesting, but seems to me to be a little confused. He ascribes positivism and scientific materialism to Anglo-American cultural influence, when in fact they’re of French origin (though have captured a lot of Anglo-American mindshare).
Also, I think he’s a little light on the issue of German romanticism (which is sort of what he’s promoting for lack of a griffiger term) fueling Nazism. Yes, it was the “dark shadow,” but it justified itself in precisely all these “holistic,” “authentic,” “Geist-oriented,” contra base-empirical Anglo-Saxonism and bloodless French rationalism, the fullness of Kultur over the meretricious patina of Zivilisation, etc. And it worked. The Germans were much more enthusiastic about Nazism than the Italians ever were about Fascism–the somewhat cynical, somewhat indolent streaks in Mediterranean culture serving as a partial inoculant.
I love Germans and Germany and have for most of my life, but the fact is German culture makes people suckers for Big Ideas. This has its advantages—you get your geniuses cooking up some big-time ideas—but the disadvantages—that people come to believe they are true—are profound and considerable. I’ll take Angelsächsische empirical skepticism any day. (Now if we can both just agree that the French are a serious doubt of terrible ideas… 😉)
Oh, also, his speaking of English ‘mind’ as a materialist equivalent to ‘brain’ suggests that he’s not as familiar with the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Gedankenwelt as he might think, and in turn be reverting to pre-war stereotype.
Thank you for the link to Rod Dreher's article. I am just currently composing a piece that addresses "the fact that we must make a concerted effort to remember how we did things “before” digital technology", especially with regard to supporting the current young generation in forming and prioritizing face-to-face relationships. Rather than focusing on resistance to technology (although I think this is essential), I will suggest that we need to emphasize a return to what makes us essentially human, which in turn will allow us to build and strengthen a "parallel polis".
The way I had it taught to me in my pre-postmodern cultural anthro seminar (I've also done some outside reading) was that the 19th century Germans were all about Kultur, and the French emphasized Civilisation. Kultur was about the uniqueness of the Germanic national soul, as expressed in the German language (all those reified compoundings to express semantic concepts) and origin myths (Siegfried, the Rheinmaidens, etc.) A mystical imagining, inevitable trending toward Romaniticism (and vice versa.) Expressed in the spectacular natural realism of paintings like "Wanderer Above The Fog", and all that. Arguably a logical consequence of the consolidation of dozens of scattered feudal kingdoms and duchies into one great big nation-state under the guiding hand of the Prussians. Given that arguably the only thing that held states like Prussia, Swabia, and Bavaria together was a common language- the regions had disparate local lifeways, different religious traditions (Catholic, Lutheran, Mennonite, etc.), varying physical and cultural geographies, political histories and ruling aristocracies, etc.- the tradition of a common Deutsch Kultur had to be assembled as a mythos (high kultur: German composers, Goethe, Schiller, et. al.; volkisch kultur: Bros. Grimm, Wagner, the martial emphasis of the Gymnasium promulgated by the Prussian statists of the Second Reich.)
The Germanic Kulturkomplex was indisputably nativist and culturally ethnocentric, but not race essentialist; The 'Aryan' myth that Hitler later exploited is some cult shit drawn from a selective reading of Theosophical tales and legends, amalgamated with what passed for authoritative Race Science, in that pre-DNA era. Germans are actually rather diverse in their genetic ancestry, especially those south of the Mainz River. Admittedly a point of conceit for some of the Germans with heritage to the north of the Mainz, but not officially encoded as a racial hierarchy in the Second Reich (i.e, the era beginning with King Wilhelm I, largely put together by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.)
By contrast, the French philosophers were Rationalists who emphasized Civilization: French Enlightenment post-revolutionary values of liberty, equality, and common brotherhood; democratic franchise and political pluralism; secular culture that made room for everyone from the Decadent poets and Surrealists to experimental painters (some of whom were incidentally radical socialists or even professed anarchists), and was also able to detect the aesthetic and artistic values found in other cultures (like those of their colonial possessions.) The 19th century French had also enough of religious sectarian internecine conflicts, what with the Catholic clericalist absolutism that had been the source of so many of those wars; the history of France having been scarred by religion-based ethnic cleansing genocides as far back as the 14th century- and also massive amounts of clerical corruption, in an unholy symbiosis with supposedly divinely ordained kings and nobility, officially blessed by the Popes of the era- a great many French intellectuals scoffed at the very idea of an upside to Theism- especially Monotheism. The French national conceit was to imagine that the French concept of civilization was entirely rationalist and objective, even as French imperialism presided over colonial possessions from Algeria to Samoa.
And then there's the lion, unicorn, and brace of dolphins in the room: the United Kingdom, in the era of the post-Napoleonic era British Empire. The British aristocracy didn't require a rationalist philosophical ideal of Civilization; they were consumed with the more practical concern of actually running one, for the benefit of their upper classes. 19th century British philosophy focused on economics and statecraft. Benthamite utilitarian empiricism. Adam Smith. The British educational system- stratified to cultivate a meritocracy, alone with maintaining the legacy privileges of the upper classes-was modeled on the virtues of Greek and Roman Classical ideals, burnished by the then still maturing English Enlightenment values of the 18th century that shifted governing power away from hereditary absolute monarchy and toward the institutions of parliamentary democracy and liberalism. The British were sure that they had it all sussed. Ruskin and Rhodes, the original globalists. It was just a matter of continuing to refine the Paradigm.
Nobody has it All sussed- except, perhaps, those who realize that they don't. The ones who realize that humility is a saving grace and the beginning of wisdom, not an abasement or confession of weakness. Hubris is the fatal flaw of imperialists- and their heirs, the moguls of transnational capitalism. Even when they're taught this, they can't quite get to grasp the full implications. Ah, humanity. The humanist conceit.
I suppose we all long for wholeness but as the Russians would say the correlation of forces is against it. Ever since the Renaissance, atomization has been increasing and each turn of the wheel just makes it worse. On the flip side we are richer and more knowledgeable but it doesn't feel right. So it is going to take an Upheaval to create a new trend.
A great mix of articles. Good to see the Tang Dynasty poem. I came across translations of these some years ago. Many are beautiful. I particularly like those of Li Bai [Bo I think sometime also]. He writes very touching farewells and from the point of view of women left at home waiting for their husband to return from war with the Tartars or from long distance trading.
I was going to mention Iain McGilchrist's work, when I saw that it was brought up in the Koch article. I've just finished his book The Master and His Emissary. I highly recommend his work. I've also seen many interviews with him. Here's a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrlrhuI39K4
fwiw, I've just read that the Chinese auto industry is a main beneficiary of the Russo-Ukrainian economic boycott by other manufacturers, a fact that probably accounts for much of the uptick in Chinese auto sales in 2022 and 2023: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/09/19/7420543/
Brits or is English (Ænglisch) are cousins of the Germans, don't forgot the Philosophy of innateism that came from England that attempted to oppose utilitarianism cocker.
"The Silicon Valley elite have been sending up trial balloons for a while, like the derisive idea of "reality privilege" (https://ricochet.com/1209722/the-have-nots/) and I have argued that a unifying theme of much of our cultural <ahem> upheaval (see what I did there? ;) ) and not just technology, is tied to the pursuit of a disembodied existence."
I can feature dwelling in Virtual Reality as a beneficial option for someone in a situation of being incarcerated.
As always, thanks for this interesting post. I'm reading Barba-Kay's book after seeing Dreher mention it somewhere. It's fascinating but is pretty dense reading. Barba-Kay pushes hard on the virtualization of reality currently being pushed by digital technology at the expense of human interaction with the material. He's right to call this out. The Silicon Valley elite have been sending up trial balloons for a while, like the derisive idea of "reality privilege" (https://ricochet.com/1209722/the-have-nots/) and I have argued that a unifying theme of much of our cultural <ahem> upheaval (see what I did there? ;) ) and not just technology, is tied to the pursuit of a disembodied existence. (https://www.keithlowery.com/disembodied/)
Nevertheless, there is one thing that gives me pause and makes me draw back from giving in to the pessimism that characterizes Barba-Kay. (I'm not finished with his book yet so maybe I overstate his despair.) Human beings are inescapably part of material reality. It is an inseparable part of our design. Even marathon gamers have to eat. So I tend to believe that the nature of our existence will inevitably reassert itself, and digital technology will, for many at least, eventually be put in its proper place, though there may be horrifying casualties along the way. Material reality will, by necessity, reestablish itself at some point, and maybe sooner than later.
Despairing that human beings will inevitably drift into living entirely digital lives may be analogous to expecting your cat to live life as a vegan.
For me, at least, that's what gets in the way of believing too strongly in technology's long term appeal. That, and the tendency of Silicon Valley poohbahs to be insufferable.
I'm on my 2nd reading of Barba-Kay (I'm the one who put Rod onto it), and I'd say that his concern is not so much that humans will drift into living entirely digital lives as it is that the digital will "colonize" the real in such a way that the two will be blurred, and the digital will become the filter/funnel through which the real is perceived and understood.
What I found fascinating about the book is that it spells out in black and white many things that we "tech-critical" folks have long intuited about the digital revolution but haven't seen described in detail. In effect, what he's doing is taking the insights of writers like McLuhan and Postman, expanding upon them, and applying them philosophically to the digital. I admit that it's a dense book, but I think this is due to his desire to be precise.
Thanks for your article link to "The Have Nots"; it is the first time I have come across the term "reality privilege". I agree with you that, because we are made for reality, material reality will in the end reestablish itself. This was actually the exact point that my husband and I discussed a post I am preparing for next week. I also just discovered your blog "Stuff I'm Thinking About"; have you considered moving these posts onto a substack here?
Ok - so I did a thing. You pushed me over the edge and I imported my personal site to Substack. I ran my site on Ghost, and interestingly, Substack is able to import a Ghost-based site. So now I'm up and running on Substack. I'll try this and see how it works. https://keithlowery.substack.com
That's great Keith! I just subscribed and will give you a shout-out on Notes to alert new readers to your new substack :)
You're very kind. Given the subject matter of your own Substack, you might find yourself interested in this piece that I wrote a few months ago on importance of maintaining control of our own attention. Thanks for your encouragement and interest. (https://keithlowery.substack.com/p/a-right-to-our-own-minds)
Thanks Keith - that was an excellent piece which I shall save for later reference. I especially appreciate your discussion of technological complexity as a vehicle for diminishing human agency.
I am increasingly tempted to put my posts on Substack. I originally started my blog as a way to get my posts off of social media and out of the reach of the party poopers at Facebook. Running my own site, it's easy for me to archive and control all of my content. I need to dig into how that works with Substack. It will be more compelling to move things if Substack makes it easy for me to maintain local offline archives of all of my posts. It's something I need to make the time to look into.
I deeply appreciate this gift. As the slough of futility and repetition envelopes much of the resistance on Substack, many of these links address what we are finally left with : the absence of wholeness, transcendence or purpose, i.e. the unhealing wound of our generations. We have a lot of very painful work ahead of us.
Happy trails to you !
Koch’s piece is interesting, but seems to me to be a little confused. He ascribes positivism and scientific materialism to Anglo-American cultural influence, when in fact they’re of French origin (though have captured a lot of Anglo-American mindshare).
Also, I think he’s a little light on the issue of German romanticism (which is sort of what he’s promoting for lack of a griffiger term) fueling Nazism. Yes, it was the “dark shadow,” but it justified itself in precisely all these “holistic,” “authentic,” “Geist-oriented,” contra base-empirical Anglo-Saxonism and bloodless French rationalism, the fullness of Kultur over the meretricious patina of Zivilisation, etc. And it worked. The Germans were much more enthusiastic about Nazism than the Italians ever were about Fascism–the somewhat cynical, somewhat indolent streaks in Mediterranean culture serving as a partial inoculant.
I love Germans and Germany and have for most of my life, but the fact is German culture makes people suckers for Big Ideas. This has its advantages—you get your geniuses cooking up some big-time ideas—but the disadvantages—that people come to believe they are true—are profound and considerable. I’ll take Angelsächsische empirical skepticism any day. (Now if we can both just agree that the French are a serious doubt of terrible ideas… 😉)
great comment. Legitimately thought provoking.
Thanks!
Also also, *fount of terrible ideas
Oh, also, his speaking of English ‘mind’ as a materialist equivalent to ‘brain’ suggests that he’s not as familiar with the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Gedankenwelt as he might think, and in turn be reverting to pre-war stereotype.
https://substack.com/@tangpoetry/
Nice poem - are you aware of this substack?
Thank you for the link to Rod Dreher's article. I am just currently composing a piece that addresses "the fact that we must make a concerted effort to remember how we did things “before” digital technology", especially with regard to supporting the current young generation in forming and prioritizing face-to-face relationships. Rather than focusing on resistance to technology (although I think this is essential), I will suggest that we need to emphasize a return to what makes us essentially human, which in turn will allow us to build and strengthen a "parallel polis".
My husband was recently interviewed for the European Conservative and addressed a similar theme in "Resisting the Machine: An interview with Peco Gaskovski", see https://europeanconservative.com/articles/interviews/resisting-the-machine-an-interview-with-peco-gaskovski/
We desperately need a parallel structure. We aren't going to be able to fix the one we are stuck in.
The way I had it taught to me in my pre-postmodern cultural anthro seminar (I've also done some outside reading) was that the 19th century Germans were all about Kultur, and the French emphasized Civilisation. Kultur was about the uniqueness of the Germanic national soul, as expressed in the German language (all those reified compoundings to express semantic concepts) and origin myths (Siegfried, the Rheinmaidens, etc.) A mystical imagining, inevitable trending toward Romaniticism (and vice versa.) Expressed in the spectacular natural realism of paintings like "Wanderer Above The Fog", and all that. Arguably a logical consequence of the consolidation of dozens of scattered feudal kingdoms and duchies into one great big nation-state under the guiding hand of the Prussians. Given that arguably the only thing that held states like Prussia, Swabia, and Bavaria together was a common language- the regions had disparate local lifeways, different religious traditions (Catholic, Lutheran, Mennonite, etc.), varying physical and cultural geographies, political histories and ruling aristocracies, etc.- the tradition of a common Deutsch Kultur had to be assembled as a mythos (high kultur: German composers, Goethe, Schiller, et. al.; volkisch kultur: Bros. Grimm, Wagner, the martial emphasis of the Gymnasium promulgated by the Prussian statists of the Second Reich.)
The Germanic Kulturkomplex was indisputably nativist and culturally ethnocentric, but not race essentialist; The 'Aryan' myth that Hitler later exploited is some cult shit drawn from a selective reading of Theosophical tales and legends, amalgamated with what passed for authoritative Race Science, in that pre-DNA era. Germans are actually rather diverse in their genetic ancestry, especially those south of the Mainz River. Admittedly a point of conceit for some of the Germans with heritage to the north of the Mainz, but not officially encoded as a racial hierarchy in the Second Reich (i.e, the era beginning with King Wilhelm I, largely put together by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.)
By contrast, the French philosophers were Rationalists who emphasized Civilization: French Enlightenment post-revolutionary values of liberty, equality, and common brotherhood; democratic franchise and political pluralism; secular culture that made room for everyone from the Decadent poets and Surrealists to experimental painters (some of whom were incidentally radical socialists or even professed anarchists), and was also able to detect the aesthetic and artistic values found in other cultures (like those of their colonial possessions.) The 19th century French had also enough of religious sectarian internecine conflicts, what with the Catholic clericalist absolutism that had been the source of so many of those wars; the history of France having been scarred by religion-based ethnic cleansing genocides as far back as the 14th century- and also massive amounts of clerical corruption, in an unholy symbiosis with supposedly divinely ordained kings and nobility, officially blessed by the Popes of the era- a great many French intellectuals scoffed at the very idea of an upside to Theism- especially Monotheism. The French national conceit was to imagine that the French concept of civilization was entirely rationalist and objective, even as French imperialism presided over colonial possessions from Algeria to Samoa.
And then there's the lion, unicorn, and brace of dolphins in the room: the United Kingdom, in the era of the post-Napoleonic era British Empire. The British aristocracy didn't require a rationalist philosophical ideal of Civilization; they were consumed with the more practical concern of actually running one, for the benefit of their upper classes. 19th century British philosophy focused on economics and statecraft. Benthamite utilitarian empiricism. Adam Smith. The British educational system- stratified to cultivate a meritocracy, alone with maintaining the legacy privileges of the upper classes-was modeled on the virtues of Greek and Roman Classical ideals, burnished by the then still maturing English Enlightenment values of the 18th century that shifted governing power away from hereditary absolute monarchy and toward the institutions of parliamentary democracy and liberalism. The British were sure that they had it all sussed. Ruskin and Rhodes, the original globalists. It was just a matter of continuing to refine the Paradigm.
Nobody has it All sussed- except, perhaps, those who realize that they don't. The ones who realize that humility is a saving grace and the beginning of wisdom, not an abasement or confession of weakness. Hubris is the fatal flaw of imperialists- and their heirs, the moguls of transnational capitalism. Even when they're taught this, they can't quite get to grasp the full implications. Ah, humanity. The humanist conceit.
Pretty highbrow stuff. It's all fine and good, mostly conjecture and bullshit.
I'm not sure I understand a single thing in this post.
What happened to the notion that we were going to discuss "what is to be done"?
M. R. Weiss, MD
P2P Foundation has a catalog of 20,000 projects related to Kegan stage 5, “integral theory” type stuff, post-capitalism, post-postmodernism, etc.
Anti-fragility to disruption is a big deal (Vervaeke).
I suppose we all long for wholeness but as the Russians would say the correlation of forces is against it. Ever since the Renaissance, atomization has been increasing and each turn of the wheel just makes it worse. On the flip side we are richer and more knowledgeable but it doesn't feel right. So it is going to take an Upheaval to create a new trend.
A great mix of articles. Good to see the Tang Dynasty poem. I came across translations of these some years ago. Many are beautiful. I particularly like those of Li Bai [Bo I think sometime also]. He writes very touching farewells and from the point of view of women left at home waiting for their husband to return from war with the Tartars or from long distance trading.
I was going to mention Iain McGilchrist's work, when I saw that it was brought up in the Koch article. I've just finished his book The Master and His Emissary. I highly recommend his work. I've also seen many interviews with him. Here's a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrlrhuI39K4
fwiw, I've just read that the Chinese auto industry is a main beneficiary of the Russo-Ukrainian economic boycott by other manufacturers, a fact that probably accounts for much of the uptick in Chinese auto sales in 2022 and 2023: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/09/19/7420543/
Brits or is English (Ænglisch) are cousins of the Germans, don't forgot the Philosophy of innateism that came from England that attempted to oppose utilitarianism cocker.
*or us English (is what I meant to type)
Hoping NS Lyons does an explainer (or points to a good one elsewhere) of the Altman/AI fiasco.
"The Silicon Valley elite have been sending up trial balloons for a while, like the derisive idea of "reality privilege" (https://ricochet.com/1209722/the-have-nots/) and I have argued that a unifying theme of much of our cultural <ahem> upheaval (see what I did there? ;) ) and not just technology, is tied to the pursuit of a disembodied existence."
I can feature dwelling in Virtual Reality as a beneficial option for someone in a situation of being incarcerated.
That Perry article is fucking brutal.
A Photo Link Essay: quotes without comment
Independent UK, 02/20/2013: 'Gucci in Milan: Sex still sells in the capital of commerce' https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/gucci-in-milan-sex-still-sells-in-the-capital-of-commerce-8503881.html
Gucci, 2013 Milan Fashion Show https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2013/02/20/19/pg-22-gucci-getty.jpg?quality=75&width=990&height=614&fit=bounds&format=pjpg&crop=16%3A9%2Coffset-y0.5&auto=webp
Gucci, 2019/20 Milan Fashion Show https://static.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/2019/02/gettyimages-1130934427-h_2019-928x523.jpg
Gucci, 2019/20 Milan Fashion Show https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/milan-italy-february-model-walks-runway-gucci-show-fashion-week-autumn-winter-143964348.jpg
Front page in the Washington Post Style Section, 09/24/2023: 'Does Sex Still Sell In Fashion? At Milan Fashion Week, Designers Were Desperate To Make This Sexy Thing Happen' https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/fashion/2023/09/24/gucci-milan-fashion-week-bottega-veneta/
2023/24 Gucci, Milan Fashion Show: https://c0.lestechnophiles.com/www.madmoizelle.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/pour-gucci-printemps-ete-2024-le-nouveau-directeur-artistique-sabato-de-sarno-propose-du-deja-vu-sexy-et-bankable.jpg?resize=1920,1080&key=a952a8a3
2023/24 Gucci, Milan Fashion Show https://images.livemint.com/img/2023/09/23/1140x641/FASHION-MILAN-GUCCI-12_1695444233989_1695444255756.JPG
2023/24 Gucci, Milan Fashion Show https://tomandlorenzo.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Gucci-Spring-2024-Collection-Milan-Fashion-Week-Runway-Style-Fashion-TLO-5.jpg
Top story in the Washington Post Metro section, 09/25/2023: 'The teens fighting to keep Youngkin’s trans policies out of their schools' https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-teens-fighting-to-keep-youngkin-s-trans-policies-out-of-their-schools/ar-AA1gZjUu
From The Babylon Bee, 02/15/2021: 'Man Asks That You Respect His Preferred Adjectives' https://babylonbee.com/news/man-asks-that-you-respect-his-preferred-adjectives