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Thursday, April 3rd, 2025
- Economic Sabotage: They could tank the economy by imposing reckless fiscal policies—massive, unsustainable debt through unchecked spending or tax cuts without funding, devaluing the currency by pressuring the central bank to print money excessively, or dismantling key industries through deregulation or punitive tariffs that disrupt trade. Encouraging corruption and cronyism could further drain resources.
- Undermining National Security: Militarily, they might weaken defenses by slashing budgets, pulling out of strategic alliances, or leaking sensitive intelligence to adversaries. Ordering troops into unwinnable, morale-crushing conflicts—or abandoning critical outposts—could erode military strength and global standing.
- Social Division: They could stoke internal conflict by amplifying divisive rhetoric, targeting specific groups with policies that breed resentment, or letting infrastructure and public services crumble to fuel discontent. Misinformation campaigns, either directly or through proxies, could deepen mistrust in institutions.
- Political Erosion: To cripple governance, they might attack the rule of law—pardoning loyalists who break it, stacking courts with unqualified ideologues, or pushing legislation that centralizes power in their hands. Undermining elections through voter suppression or outright fraud could destabilize democracy further.
- International Isolation: They could alienate allies by breaking treaties, insulting partners, or cozying up to hostile regimes, leaving the country diplomatically vulnerable. Withdrawing from global organizations or climate agreements might also diminish soft power and economic leverage.
- Neglecting Crises: In the face of natural disasters, pandemics, or cyberattacks, they could deliberately botch responses—ignoring experts, withholding aid, or spreading confusion—letting chaos compound.
| Time | Event |
| 4:58a | Watch Jazz ‘Hot’, the Rare 1938 Short Film With Jazz Legend Django Reinhardt
Here’s a remarkable short film of the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, violinist Stéphane Grappelli and their band the Quintette du Hot Club de France performing on a movie set in 1938. The film was hastily organized by the band’s British agent Lew Grade as a way to introduce the band’s unique style of guitar- and violin-based jazz to the British public before their first UK tour. As Michael Dregni writes in Gypsy Jazz: In Search of Django Reinhardt and the Soul of Gypsy Swing: The Quintette was unknown to the British public, and there was no telling how their new music would resonate. So, Grade sought to educate his audience. He hired a movie crew to film a six-minute-plus promotional short entitled Jazz “Hot” to be shown in British theaters providing a lesson in jazz appreciation to warm up the crowds. That would explain the didactic tone of the first two and a half minutes of the film, which plods along as a remedial lesson on the nature of jazz. It opens with an orchestra giving a note-for-note performance of Handel’s “Largo,” from the opera Xerxes, which the narrator then contrasts to the freedom of jazz improvisation. But the film really comes alive when Django arrives on the screen and launches into a jazz arrangement of the popular French song “J’attendrai.” (The name means “I will wait,” and it’s a reworking of a 1933 Italian song, “Tornerai” or “You Will Return,” by Dino Olivieri and Nino Rastelli.) Although the sequences of Reinhardt and the band performing were obviously synchronized to a previously recorded track, Jazz “Hot” is the best surviving visual document of the legendary guitarist’s two-fingered fretting technique, which he developed after losing the use of most of his left hand in a fire. To learn more about Reinhardt, visit the links in the Relateds below. Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013. Related Content: Watch Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli Play Masterfully Together in Vivid Color (1938) Django Reinhardt Demonstrates His Guitar Genius in Rare Footage From the 1930s, 40s & 50s |
| 7:00p | Why the Romans Stopped Reading Books
Nobody reads books anymore. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve probably heard it expressed fairly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiquity. During that time, as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video above, the “book trade declined with the educated elite that had supported it. The copying of secular texts slowed, and finally ceased. The books in Roman libraries, public and private, crumbled on their shelves. Only a small contingent of survivors found their way into monasteries.” As went the reading culture of the empire, so went the empire itself. Some may be tempted to draw parallels with certain countries in existence today. But what may be more surprising is the extent of Roman reading at its height. Though only about one in ten Romans could read, Ryan explains, “the Roman elite defined themselves by a sophisticated literary education, and filled their cities with texts.” Those included the Acta Diurna, a kind of proto-newspaper carved into stone or metal and displayed in public places. But from the reign of Augustus onward, “the city of Rome boasted an impressive array of public libraries,” filled with texts written on papyrus scrolls, and later — especially in the third and fourth centuries — on codices, whose format closely resembles books as we know them today. Rome even had tabernae librariae, which we’d recognize as bookstores, whose techniques included painting the titles of bestsellers on their exterior columns. Some of them also published the books they sold, setting an early example of what we’d call “vertical integration.” Roman readers of the first century would all have had at least some familiarity with Martial’s Epigrams, but even such a big contemporary hit would have been outsold by a classic like the Aeneid, “the one book that any family with a library owned.” With 99 percent of its literature lost to us, we’re unlikely ever to determine if, like modern-day America, ancient Rome was really saturated with less-respectable works, its own equivalents of self help, business memoir, and genre fiction. Who knows? Perhaps Rome, too, had romantasy. Related content: What Was Actually Lost When the Library of Alexandria Burned? Explore the Roman Cookbook, De Re Coquinaria, the Oldest Known Cookbook in Existence Is America Declining Like Ancient Rome? The First Work of Science Fiction: Read Lucian’s 2nd-Century Space Travelogue A True Story How 99% of Ancient Literature Was Lost Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
| 8:49p | The Steps a President Would Take to Destroy His Nation, According to Elon Musk’s AI Chatbot, Grok
Just out of curiosity, and apropos of nothing, we asked Grok (the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk) the following question: If a president of a superpower wanted to destroy his own country, what steps would he take? Here’s what Grok had to say: If a president of a superpower aimed to deliberately undermine their own nation, they could theoretically take steps to weaken its economic, social, military, and political foundations. Here’s a hypothetical breakdown of such actions, assuming they have enough influence and control to push them through: Grok continues: “In practice, any president trying this would face massive resistance: checks and balances, public backlash, legal barriers, and pushback from their own administration or military. It’d take more than intent—sophisticated manipulation and loyal enablers would be key. Historically, no leader has pulled this off fully, but you can see echoes in cases like Venezuela under Maduro, where mismanagement and authoritarianism led to collapse—though even there, self-destruction wasn’t the explicit goal. Intentional ruin would be a slow burn, not a switch flipped overnight.” As you read this, you might hear a lot of boxes being checked in your mind, and you might wonder if Grok is calling the shots. But, dear reader, this is all purely theoretical. As they say in the movies, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Related Content Toni Morrison Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Countries to Fascism (1995) Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism |
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