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With artificial intelligence continuing to dominate corporate strategies and news headlines, Silicon Valley has embraced a new buzzword, one that may feel too close to home for those already feeling embattled by automation. That word is “taste,” and in recent months it has become as much of a tech-world cliché as “disruption” was in the twenty-tens. The esteemed technologist Paul Graham posted on X, “In the AI age, taste will become even more important.” Koen Bok, a founder of the booming A.I. design tool Framer, said on a podcast that “great taste” is what will create the best new products. The bookmarking app Sublime promises to build “a library that reflects your taste,” with the help of A.I.-driven recommendations. The entrepreneur and former Bytedance engineer Cong Wang echoed a new Silicon Valley axiom in a blog post, writing, “In the AI era, personal taste is the moat”—“moat” being entrepreneur lingo for an unreplicable advantage, the thing that makes your company stand out above its competitors. Startups apparently need taste like A.I. needs data centers.

For tech bros, the word seems to have a pragmatic function. By their definition, taste is inherently profitable; it is the ability to discern what will make the most money, whether by choosing your next big software concept or by convincing users that your product is necessary. “The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it,” Graham wrote in an essay from 2002, which he referenced in his recent post. This emphasis on tasteful decision-making makes sense, given that A.I. is gradually democratizing technological production. With the newly powerful likes of Anthropic’s Claude Code assistant, anyone can theoretically program anything—a chatbot companion that surveils you 24/7, for example, or an A.I. matchmaker that helps you land a date. The only task left is to decide what to make, as one might request a wish from a genie. Hence a comment made last year by the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, that, once the A.I. era is fully upon us, V.C., the art of picking worthy investments, “may be one of the last remaining fields.” Of course, he may be somewhat biased.

The uptick in concern about taste is both surprising and discomfiting, because the word comes with particular generational baggage. A decade or two ago, millennial hipsters made a claim to good taste by exercising their preference for, say, craft India pale ales over Budweiser, Arcade Fire over Nickelback, or American Apparel over Abercrombie & Fitch. Hipster identity was built on what one chose to consume, and a fetishization of the lo-fi, the handcrafted, and the artisanal—qualities that were eventually co-opted and absorbed by corporate behemoths such as Meta, via Instagram, and Amazon, via Whole Foods. Now A.I. companies are attempting to hitch themselves to a similar aura of artisanality, even as their core products promise to automate all that is human into obsolescence. Last year, Anthropic hosted a pop-up café in Manhattan (what could be more hipster?) and gave away baseball caps embroidered with the word “thinking.” OpenAI’s recent Super Bowl commercial, titled “You Can Just Build Things,” is shot, with faux-analog cinematographic flair, from a human point of view, with hands gripping the handlebars of a bike, writing in a notebook, and playing chess—never mind that the thing being advertised is a hypothetically omniscient robot. You, too, can be tasteful, the ad seems to say, if only you choose the right chatbot to run your life.

A.I. companies need to associate themselves with taste precisely because their tools are not very palatable, much less cool, to anyone outside of Silicon Valley. Many people view A.I. tools as a threat—to their livelihoods, to their futures, to their senses of self. Few, whom I know, see them as individuality-affirming life-style choices. We might call what’s going on now “taste-washing,” an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism. The Times perpetuated this mythmaking when it launched a poll last week asking users to read passages drawn from well-known works of literature, and passages generated by A.I., and choose which they preferred stylistically. Nearly fifty per cent of participants preferred the texts written by artificial intelligence. Is A.I. now so adept that it can write like Hilary Mantel? Another conclusion might be that the online ecosystem has become so polluted—so fragmented, deceptive, overstimulating, ersatz—that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all.

The jostling hordes of A.I. boosters crow over new ventures launching at dizzying scales and speeds, mediating every facet of daily life. These include A.I. actors, A.I. travel agents, A.I. sommeliers, A.I. eulogy generators, A.I. virtual pets, and A.I. toothbrushes that give you “real-time feedback” on how to brush. The text-editing software Grammarly recently added (and promptly removed) a feature that gave users notes on their writing from chatbot versions of well-known writers, appropriating their sensibilities without getting permission. However discerning the humans behind these endeavors fancy themselves to be, A.I. remains a fundamentally tasteless technology, in at least one respect. The eighteenth-century French philosophers who established a definition of taste in Western thought considered it an ineffable quality, a reminder that the God-given goodness in each of us recognizes that of the rest of the world. Voltaire once wrote that, “in order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it.” No large language model has yet been programmed to feel anything, and no number of branded baseball caps is going to change that. ♦

Since the U.S. and Israel began attacking Iran, President Trump has bragged about “totally destroying the terrorist regime” with “unparallelled firepower” and “unlimited ammunition.” Yet Iran has still managed to halt the flow of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, a conduit for about a fifth of the world’s oil. On Saturday, as gas prices neared their highest level in years, Trump’s frustration seemed evident in a Truth Social post: “We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are.” America’s high-tech war machine is coming up against inexpensive upstart technologies—and it isn’t clear that we’re winning.

If Trump is wrong about American military dominance, then perhaps he’s also wrong about what he calls American energy dominance. His Administration has long promised to “unleash” American oil; last week, his Energy Secretary, the former fracking executive Chris Wright, used the Iran war to explain why BP would be allowed to drill in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. “At a time when Iran and its terrorist proxies attempt to disrupt the global energy supply, the Trump Administration remains committed to strengthening American energy dominance,” Wright said. But America’s fossil-fuel machine should be ready to face an inexpensive upstart technology, too. What if the drone is to warfare as the solar panel is to energy?

Because drones are very cheap, you can make many thousands of them, and hide them anywhere. Smaller unmanned aircraft don’t need a military airstrip to launch. Drones and ballistic missiles can often be intercepted, but the U.S. and Israeli militaries are using expensive weaponry to do that job. Eventually, the gap between a fifty-thousand-dollar drone and a three-million-dollar interceptor becomes important; there were reports, this past weekend, that Israel had begun to run low on interceptors. In other words, inexpensive “small tech” is standing up to expensive high tech—and, over time, the former can seem to gain a kind of advantage.

Something similar may be playing out in the energy sector. America can only achieve its dream of “energy dominance” for as long as the world relies on the enormous and expensive machinery of the fossil-fuel industry: tankers, refineries, gas-fuelled power plants. Much of this infrastructure depends on U.S. companies—which is why Trump recently announced, with uncharacteristic candor, that he didn’t mind the spike in the cost of crude. “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote on Truth Social. Of course, the word “we” was doing a lot of work there. Big Oil makes money, and so do the parasitic politicians that the industry supports. The rest of us pay a lot of money. Gas is up nearly a buck since the war began.

And consumers have responded. In the first two weeks of the war, there has been a surge in the number of Americans looking to save money on energy—by asking for quotes on home solar systems and looking up electric vehicles online. We can expect similar trends in other countries. In India, where many kitchens depend on increasingly scarce and costly liquefied petroleum gas cylinders, consumers are racing to buy induction stoves. Many models are out of stock because restaurants have snatched them up; in the early days of the war, some Mumbai eateries shut their doors because they couldn’t find cooking gas and others stopped selling deep-fried or long-simmering foods because they required too much energy. Crematoria couldn’t find gas for their fires.

During Trump’s first term, the United Kingdom pledged to get off fossil fuels by the middle of the century, largely because of climate concerns. The country’s Labour government has stuck to this pledge. (In contrast, the Trump Administration has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Agreement.) But its green-energy policies, such as a plan to help Britons install electric heat pumps, have been under relentless attack by the Tories, the Reform Party, and right-wing tabloids. Nigel Farage, who is the closest that Britain has to a MAGA politician, has decried the “lunacy” of building wind and solar power. One tabloid-favorite claim is that green-energy plans would cost the U.K. nine trillion pounds. Yet the calculation turned out to rest on faulty assumptions: it overstated the costs of net-zero policies and ignored costs of a dirty energy system.

Since the war in the Middle East began, a growing number of voices have been demanding that the U.K. reopen oil fields in the North Sea. But the problem with the “Drill, baby, drill” argument is that gas prices are set by global markets. The U.K. is unlikely to lower its own prices by extracting oil that it controls—and, anyway, it would take years for proposed oil wells to have an appreciable impact. “We’re a price taker, not a price maker,” the U.K.’s energy secretary, Ed Miliband, recently explained on BBC Sunday. Instead, he argued, “We need homegrown clean power that we control.”

Miliband was arguing that the U.K., like any nation, needs the energy equivalent of drones: solar panels, heat pumps, E.V.s, induction cooktops. We need the small tech that, in Miliband’s words, would let us get off the “fossil-fuel roller coaster.” The sickening effect of that roller-coaster ride was made clear in a new report from the Climate Change Committee, which advises the U.K. on its net-zero goals. It showed that coping with the last big energy price shock, from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, cost taxpayers more than forty-one billion pounds. If the U.K. invested a similar amount in homegrown clean energy, the committee found, it would get much of the way toward its net-zero goals. The best way to save Brits money—and to safeguard the country’s independence from tyrants as diverse as Vladimir Putin, Trump, and the mullahs of the Middle East—is to push ahead quickly toward a clean future.

China has already learned this lesson. As the Columbia scholars Erica Downs and Jason Bordoff wrote in Foreign Policy, recently, China has been preparing “for a world in which energy security is inseparable from geopolitics—by electrifying its economy, securing domestic sources of energy, amassing stockpiles, and dominating clean technology supply chains.” The good news is that none of these technologies are secrets, and we can buy them much more cheaply than we can buy oil. And, once we have them, we’ll no longer depend on the flow of oil through an indefensible, roughly twenty-one-mile-wide ditch. Instead, we’ll rely on a continuous stream of photons from the sun—an energy source that will last another five billion years. ♦

“Why her?” the journalist Mark Oppenheimer writes toward the end of his first biography, “Judy Blume: A Life.” “What is it about Judy and her work that won her so many millions of fans?” Partly talent, he offers, and timing: the iconic children’s author, whose twenty-nine books have sold more than ninety million copies, took off during the seventies, an era “when young readers had more autonomy, when cheap paperbacks, in mall stores, made more books available to them, and when progressive librarians were keen to stock books for them.” She was also meeting a need that had not otherwise been acknowledged, or not in the right way. In Oppenheimer’s view, Blume pioneered and popularized a new genre: “realism for young people.” With the gentle authority of someone in the know, she normalized what seemed harrowing (bodily functions, friendship drama); promised excitement and adventure (first kisses, driver’s licenses, a whole world of adult secrets); and wrote honestly about disappointment.

Oppenheimer, a longtime Blume buff, tested out his “children’s realism” theory of her appeal in a Times article, “Why Judy Blume Endures,” that was published in 1997, shortly after he’d graduated from college. Blume liked the piece, and they struck up an acquaintance. He embarked on a career as a writer and religious-studies scholar. (His previous book, “Squirrel Hill,” explores the aftermath of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting.) In 2022, Blume agreed to let him write her biography—not an authorized one, exactly, but one fed by extensive interviews with her and her circle as well as by notes that she’d compiled for her own scrapped memoir. On March 8th, two days before the book’s release, the Times reported that Blume and Oppenheimer had fallen out over “Judy Blume: A Life,” which Blume is not promoting. (Both Blume and Oppenheimer declined to comment for this article.) As the journalist Elisabeth Egan writes, Blume withdrew her support after Oppenheimer had already spoken to more than a hundred people and composed a first draft, at which point she voiced her objections, sending him a marked-up version of the document he’d given her along with a forty-page memo expressing a “constellation of concerns.” He incorporated many, though not all, of her edits and proceeded to publish the book. “The two have barely been in touch since,” Egan writes.

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Blume might have probed this kind of opaque friendship breakup in one of her novels. But fans of schoolyard intrigue (and thus literary scandal) will be disappointed by the biography’s respectful sense of duty toward its subject. If anything, Oppenheimer can be overly besotted. “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” feels “of a moment with the confessional poetry of writers like Robert Lowell and John Berryman,” he writes. (Elsewhere, he levels about what he views as the shortcomings of Blume’s early work—“ ‘Freckle Juice’ is pleasant but inert.”) He himself has noted the incongruity of a man in his fifties serving as the biographer of the patron saint of getting your period. But his lucid, sensitive evocations of Blume’s suburban girlhood should put the question of his ability to rest. (I did laugh at his perfunctory reconstruction of Blume’s first days as a new mom: “Judy bottle-fed Randy, rocked her to sleep, changed her diapers, comforted her when she cried.”)

The most compelling parts of the new biography concern Blume’s early life. Her mother, Essie, encouraged her to read a wide array of books, and her father, Rudy, “validated his daughter’s creative, adventurous side,” Oppenheimer writes. The Jewish and middle-class Sussman household—Rudy was a dentist and Essie, a homemaker—was sexually progressive and nonchalant about bodies. Blume would shower with her father and her older brother, David. She told Oppenheimer, “I never got bad messages about sex, that sex was dirty.”

At the same time, the biography gestures at what remained unspoken and inadmissible in Blume’s childhood. Though supportive, Rudy could fly into rages. Essie, a perfectionist, had strict expectations about her daughter’s future (college; marriage to a respectably employed, upwardly mobile man; children). Oppenheimer describes Blume’s early years as “Holocaust-haunted” and shadowed by the “serial deaths” of her father’s six siblings, none of whom lived past sixty. Blume was superstitious about Rudy’s health; like the fictional Margaret, she’d petition God in her head, bargaining for more time with her dad. In one of the most affecting stretches in the biography, Oppenheimer recounts how Rudy died prematurely of a heart attack less than a month before Blume’s wedding. Blume held his hand at the end while her more avoidant, buttoned-up mother retired upstairs.

Rudy once told his daughter that “charm” was the “most important five-letter word in the English language.” “If Daddy wants me to have it,” Blume resolved, “I will.” At school, her liveliness and charisma drew other kids in. She developed a big, bookish friend group that changed shape and composition over the years, not without drama. (Blume and her friend Ronne, a member of a club called Pre-Teen Kittens, which became the model for the Pre-Teen Sensations in “Margaret,” feuded over the snobbery of Ronne’s mother.) Oppenheimer describes Blume and her pals holding court in their high-school cafeteria: “the lunch table was the school in microcosm, a site of maximal silliness and admirable studiousness—girls being their fullest selves.” By contrast, Blume’s older brother David was the problem sibling: “a peculiar child, a source of frustration to his parents,” who may have “had a diagnosis” growing up today, yet was labelled simply “ ‘troubled’ or ‘difficult’ ” in the nineteen-forties. “He could build anything . . . beautiful creations, really,” Blume told Oppenheimer. While she rode her bike or saw friends, David would tinker on his projects in the basement. But if life “was easy for me, it was hard for him,” Blume said. “My job was to be happy, to make up for my older brother, who wasn’t.”

As a kid, Blume suffered from eczema—she called it gazeema—the first in a lifelong series of mysterious reactions and ailments, many of which she assumed were anxiety-related. “I was so anxious to please, it hurt,” she wrote in 1995. “I told my parents only what I thought they wanted to hear. I kept everything else to myself. I played my role well, but it took its toll. My rashes were famous all over town.” In a 2015 profile in the Times, Blume discussed her most recent book, “In the Unlikely Event,” which is based on a national news story from her childhood. In the early nineteen-fifties, three planes crashed in her home town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in a span of about two months. She marvelled to the profile writer, Susan Dominus, that she never visited the sites as a girl, nor could she remember how she’d felt about the tragedies. “Was I scared?” Blume wondered. “I could not remember. It must have been buried.”

When Blume started writing, the market category of young-adult (as opposed to children’s) literature was defined by politically motivated novels that took up social issues, such as drugs and teen pregnancy—“problem novels,” Oppenheimer calls them, using the terminology of the time. Blume didn’t write “problem novels,” he stresses. He quotes her in an interview, somewhat indignant, discussing how librarians spoke of “ ‘Judy Blume’s Book About Menstruation,’ or her ‘Book About Wet Dreams,’ or her ‘Book About Masturbation.’ ” “I don’t think of them as problems,” Blume said, when the interviewer suggested that each of her books “selects and deals with a particular problem or experience.” After all, many people engage in self-pleasure; many women get their periods; many boys have ejaculated in their sleep. Blume’s fiction addressed what was ordinary but largely invisible, describing it with humor, warmth, and care. “The truth was, Judy was more interested in unvarnished depictions of children’s normal lives than in imparting any outside drama,” Oppenheimer writes. She wanted to make people feel less alone, to provide what he calls a “pleasurable shock of recognition.” He also quotes her saying that “you write from within, you write what you feel.” Blume found a way to reconcile these motives—she exposed inner sensations that resonated with broad swaths of readers, becoming the bard of what was simultaneously unspoken and generic. She gave us a road map for the most universal things that nobody talked about.

Oppenheimer sees Blume’s emphasis on the everydayness of sex as crucial to her allure. She wrote in the wake of the sixties counterculture, publishing her first novels around the time that “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was drawing sex and body positivity into the mainstream. Her popularity stemmed from kids’ desire to read about puberty, he underlines, but also from their parents’ growing willingness to expose them to such literature. There was “a common misconception that her books scandalized readers (or, rather, their parents),” he writes. “While it’s true that her works have been challenged more than almost anyone’s (in part because they are extremely popular, so tend to draw fire), to focus on the would-be censors is to obscure the far greater number of adults for whom Judy’s books were a safer, less radical alternative to what was out there.” The menstruation scenes in “Margaret” reframe one of puberty’s gorier, freakier transformations as both ordinary and aspirational—aspirational because it is ordinary. Oppenheimer quotes Blume on finally entering her own menarche, at fourteen: “I feel like I’m the luckiest girl alive. It’s not so much that I’m a woman, as that I’m normal.”

Blume made growing up less alienating for her readers, but there were limits to her project of destigmatization. Her books, while mainly politically progressive, tended to center the bystander, not the severely bullied girl (as in “Blubber,” about a kid whose classmate is teased about her weight); the white neighbor, not the Black family (as in “Iggie’s House”); the kid whose friend gets up to no good, not the troublemaker himself (as in “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t,” where the main character covers for a shoplifting peer). She didn’t merely shy away from drugs and gang violence—the salacious stuff of “The Outsiders,” by S. E. Hinton, or of “Go Ask Alice”—she also largely steered clear of unlovely specifics about the Jewish community she came from. Her protagonists are materially comfortable, with adequate friends and sufficiently supportive parents; they’re quirky and complex, but they’d never star in a “problem novel.”

Oppenheimer derisively quotes an editorial, from 1976, in the Interracial Books for Children Bulletin, claiming that Blume upholds “traditional sex roles” and fails to create heroines “who want to take new, assertive, out-front postures on life.” The editorial, he argues, instrumentalizes artists by demanding that they “promote justice” and “offer role models.” If the biography has a critical failing, it’s that it brushes aside this critique of Blume’s work: that she was not boundary-pushing enough, content to redefine what counted as a regular childhood, shift its borders around, but not abolish it. Oppenheimer lauds Blume for offering readers an unadorned image of themselves and their lives, but Blume didn’t become America’s mom, as she’s been dubbed—a guiding figure for Molly Ringwald, Lena Dunham, Jenna Bush Hager, and tens of millions of girls and women—by representing the facts of childhood and adolescence with a grown-up ambiguity. She did it by portraying those facts—from underarm hair to girls being teased about their weight—as reassuringly typical.

The biography’s admiring stance toward its subject doesn’t preclude material that Blume herself might have bristled at: there are candid discussions of the two abortions she had while married to her second husband, Tom Kitchens, including a breezy letter to a friend. (“I hadn’t worried in fifteen years . . . maybe that’s why I got caught!”) There are discrepancies between Blume’s and others’ accounts of delicate situations, such as the erotically exploratory all-girl sleepovers she went on as a kid, and whether she encouraged her seventh-grade clique to ostracize her friend Ronne, the one with the snobbish mother. At one point, Oppenheimer writes that Blume “colluded” in her own infantilizing press coverage; elsewhere, he describes a scene, cut from her adult novel “Wifey,” in which a dog performs oral sex on the main character.

Toward the end of the biography, Oppenheimer notes that Blume seemingly struggled with how to portray her first husband, at one point objecting to a draft he’d shown her because it painted him in too positive a light. Later, she entreated Oppenheimer not to “change him from a saint (your first draft) to an ogre. Like all humans, he was complicated. And he is the father of my children.” There’s a ticklish elusiveness to the portraits of Blume’s husbands in the book, and to those of her kids, Randy and Larry, as well. Oppenheimer alludes to tensions among Blume and the children, but writes regretfully that their “internal family dynamics are opaque to me.” When mother, son, and daughter were being interviewed, he explains, they wanted to protect one another, “as loving families do.”

But it’s hard to pin the breach on any one thing. None of the revelations feels especially explosive. Easier, maybe, to imagine Blume rejecting the general proposition of an author biography, which seeks to root a subject’s work in their specific experiences, dislodging them from a supposedly neutral or unmarked position. If a writer’s novels present the parts of her that she is willing to show, a biographer’s job is to recover what has been swept out of sight: those vivid, occasionally unsettling details that isolate and define her, and that risk placing her beyond the pale. A family is always a bit of a fantasy, requiring some realist puncturing. Every good biographer, then, is a problem child, and every good biography a “problem book.” ♦

Forget everything that you learned in seventh-grade math class. Here’s how to accurately determine the actual probability of your friend showing up to those plans later based on the theoretical probability that they just texted to you.

“I’m 99% sure I can make it tonight.” = 50% chance they’ll make it tonight.

“I’ll for sure be there!” = 83% chance they’ll be there.

“I could be convinced . . . ” = They are in sweatpants, and therefore cannot be convinced.

“I’m 50/50 on going tonight.” = These are actually pretty good odds.

“I’ll 100% be there.” = 30% chance they’ll be there, 70% chance you’ll get a text from them five minutes before the meetup time reporting that they’re two stops away but just threw up and think it’s best if they go home and rest.

“Odds are you’ll beat me there since I’m coming straight from work.” = This person will be too tired to meet you. They’ll ultimately claim that they’re stuck at the office, but they’re going the fuck home. Don’t believe me? Check their location. Yup. They just stopped sharing it with you.

“90% chance I’m gonna make it.” = -3% chance they’re gonna make it.

“When did it get so cold all of a sudden?!” = Start inviting your backup friends.

“I’ll most likely be able to get there a little after 8!” = Bring granola bars. You’ll eat your first bite of dinner at 9:17 P.M.

“I’m 80% in.” = This is a reliable statistic; expect an 80% commitment rate.

“I’m 80% down.” = Very different from “80% in.” Any time someone uses the adjective “down” to describe their willingness, divide their reported odds by two. In this case, your friend is actually 40% down, so go ahead and keep that Korean sheet mask on your face a while longer. Fuck it, take your pants off, too. Nobody’s going anywhere.

“I could be down.” = Let’s use what we learned above. Zero divided by two? Zero.

“We still on for tonight?” = Oof, a question mark? This person unfortunately just got their period, and it was kinda late this month, so it’s heavy and crampy and just not a good scene over there. Send food and don’t expect to see her for at least seventy-two hours.

“O.K. See you tonight. Bring pashmina or similar in case A.C. is blasting in restaurant.” = This is your mom. She will be there early and will have already asked the waiter to switch tables three times before your arrival.

“Tbh there’s about a 10% chance you’ll see me at that shit.” = You will see them at that shit and you will share a magical, life-changing, though strangely platonic, kiss on the lips. I don’t know how else to describe it—you just have to be there to find out.

“Hey u here?” = The 50/50 friend showed up! You didn’t trust our math and figured they weren’t coming, so you bailed. Rookie mistake. ♦

Country Joe McDonald died a little more than a week ago in Berkeley, at the age of eighty-four. He was best known for his turn in the documentary “Woodstock,” in which he led the crowd in an antiwar chant of “F-U-C-K” just before he and his band, the Fish, performed their song “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” with its rousing chorus, “And it’s one, two, three / What are we fighting for? / Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn / Next stop is Vietnam.” McDonald was, as much as anything, a man of his time. Born during the Second World War to parents who were card-carrying members of the Communist Party—and who named their son after Joseph Stalin—he kicked around the West Coast, joined the military at the age of seventeen, and then drifted to Berkeley at the height of the Free Speech Movement, where he started a band. After writing a few songs about the war and playing Woodstock, he did what so many in his folksinging generation did: he kept at it, recording a Woody Guthrie tribute album, trying to save the whales, and making a life that was in line, at least as much as it could be, with the ideals of his younger self.

Reading accounts of that life this past week got me thinking, not for the first time, about how we should remember the hippies. I admit that I’m unusually occupied by this question, because I live in Berkeley and they are still everywhere. I see them in the same coffee shops with the same friends talking the same bullshit, driving their Subarus slowly around the traffic circle near my house, and even at the municipal golf course, where they feed the occasional coyote and take three minutes to line up each putt. I also see them protesting Tesla dealerships, gathering to block new housing developments, and litigating the same old disputes against the same old antagonists. It’s hard not to feel a sense of loss at such sights, a comedown from Woodstock to this. But there’s also a hardened vitality that I can’t help but admire—to imagine that anyone, especially so far along, could be so sure of their convictions. They have a political identity that comes with an aesthetic, one signified not just by tie-dye and long hair but by an aura of rebellion.

Along with their contemporaries in the civil-rights movement, these hippies, for better or worse, established the image of protest in this country. They set the template for what it should look like, what sacrifices it should entail, who should do what and why. Country Joe McDonald and his fellow-folksingers, in particular, set an expectation that moments of great political unrest in this country would come with a soundtrack, preferably one involving a lot of acoustic guitar. This, for the most part, has not materialized during the Trump era, outside of a few stirring but notably nostalgic attempts by artists such as Bruce Springsteen, who wrote the song “Streets of Minneapolis” about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

If there is a modern audio component to what we can loosely call the Resistance, it exists in the form of podcasts and the vertical-video clips they generate: a million short-form videos of people talking into USB microphones have replaced not only rousing political speeches but also music as the main vehicle for rabble-rousing. What this transformation means is that we are producing a flood of effective, enervating, and disposable media about political dissent. It is a theatre for pundits and satirists but not for poets and artists. What I have not been able to decide, reflecting on the legacy of Country Joe, is whether this is a good or a bad thing.

I first saw the clip of McDonald at “Woodstock” when I was in the eighth or ninth grade. It left a deeper impression on me than anything else in the film, save for the flashes of crowd nudity. Around this same time, a kid at my school let me listen to a truly profane album that his father, Patrick Sky—another folksinger, whose career followed a trajectory not unlike McDonald’s—had recorded in the early seventies. “In the draft board here we sit / Covered o’er with Nixon’s shit,” Sky sang. All the cursing and naughtiness felt pretty thrilling, which was probably why I was so struck by Country Joe spelling out “F-U-C-K” with the Woodstock crowd. I also thought these songs were very funny. And although this might sound precocious for a seventh grader—especially one who wasn’t as smart as he thought he was—I recall appreciating that the song was so explicit not only in its language but in its message.

Thinking back, I wonder if my attraction to the directness of the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” might have been a sign that, for work, I would ultimately choose political commentary over novel-writing, which was what I did in my twenties. There was something distinctly unsatisfying to me in a song like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” which felt far too plaintive, almost passive in its protest. What I wasn’t thinking about then—and, frankly, don’t really worry much about now—is how those words would age. A fiction-writing friend of mine back in my youth told me that he wanted his books to feel timeless and eternal. My work, I’ve long accepted, is ultimately ephemeral and meant only to change opinions, not move people’s hearts. It is simply true that direct and topical political dissent is ultimately disposable. We don’t remember “It’s one, two, three / What are we fightin’ for?” as much as we remember “How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man.”

Still, Country Joe did provide a beat and a melody, something large crowds of people could dance to—watching him and the Fish at Woodstock was probably a lot more fun than tweeting angrily on your phone in your bedroom. There is no question that the hippies did a better job at turning dissent into something appealing and dangerous. At the same time, I suspect that what I perceive as the spiritual arrogance of the aging hippies comes from the aesthetic allure that the sixties and seventies still hold over this country.

Why can’t the left generate that kind of aesthetic political identity anymore? Why isn’t there a giant movement of neo-hippies starting phone-free communes somewhere up among the pot farms of Humboldt County, or even in arid West Texas? My suspicion is that the atomized way we now experience so much of what we take in, through social media, discourages it. We get blunt talk and, occasionally, stirring images of big rallies. Nothing else feels as efficient as firing off a tweet, maybe trying to organize an instant protest. The right, by contrast, has produced new tribes that wear the same hats and come up with names for themselves, such as the Groypers, even though they, too, mostly express themselves by talking into microphones and webcams. What I’ve previously called the ideology of the internet—a broad anti-authoritarianism, and a hostility to institutions—is perhaps better suited to reactionary culture.

It’s a strange situation. I tend to think that political talk should be direct rather than swathed in pretty verses and the sound of a dulcimer. But I admit to feeling a bit jealous of the old hippies. They did not all age gracefully, but so many stayed committed to some cause, which is more than I fear I will be able to say for myself. When the war finally ended, the books had been written, and the country more or less agreed that they were right about Vietnam and civil rights, there was still the music and an idea, however increasingly faded, of living free. ♦