Joker 2019 perfectly captured the cultural moment because it perfectly understood the vibe of the country, viz, that we all wanted to go crazy and kill ourselves and everyone around us, however precise or imprecise our understanding of why SOCIETY made us feel that way. The cultural moment of 2024 is so much different because the Biden era has seemingly foreclosed all possibility of that kind of antisocial rebellion. The national mood is not one of unfocused violent passions, but rather of being asleep at the wheel as we drift into inevitable crisis. When we fantasize of adventurism, we cannot bring ourselves to imagine a crowd of Sickos cheering us on, as at the end of the first Joker - instead there is only the crowd of mindless sheep, as at the end of Nashville. Capturing that vibe shift would be an incredibly difficult pivot for the coming second Joker film to make, even putting aside the creative exhaustion that almost invariably accompanies sequel films. So as much as I loved the first film, I will enter the second with low expectations.

Every number in this article reads like somebody accidentally typed an extra zero

Jacobin is by and large good. As another commenter pointed out, they give space to all kinds of lefties. That leads to some pretty lib takes now and then, especially in the online edition. If tendencial purity or hard-line anti-electoralism is your chief desire then sure, not for you. But I think generally it’s good for promoting left unity, discussing historical and current events, propagating trade union news &c. It’s probably the closest we’ve got to a mass left publication in the US.

seems like 3 different rules but ok