They're All Saying the Same Thing (06/13/26)(The Five for 06/12/26)
Plus: a Nazi tattoo and an Israeli flag walk into a Maine primary, UFC fighters behaving badly, Ridley Scott's cannibals movie cannibals, and a German in Buccees.
Hey, welcome to The Five, a publication about the the stories that matter, but don’t always make the front page.
It’s Friday, so dive’s dive into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
A tenured philosophy professor…who writes under a pseudonym on Substack…sat down last spring and wrote the thing every professor thinks.
Myself included. I spent years as an adjunct.
The post went viral. Fifteen thousand people hit like. Twenty-five hundred wrote in. Most of them were other professors saying the same thing: yes, this, all of it.
His thesis is one sentence. Most college students today can’t read.
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.
I truly wish I could wrap this up on a hopeful note. I’ve got nothing.
I spent six years in those classrooms. I know firsthand.
College students can’t read.
[two]
The first trailer for The Social Reckoning dropped today. Sony is calling it a companion piece to The Social Network, not a sequel. That distinction matters, because these are all new actors portraying the same real life people that we first saw on screen 16 years ago.
A lot of movies try to ask big questions and fall flat. That’s usually because they’re not actually telling a story. They’re shoving the director’s agenda down your throat. Don’t Look Up wanted to be a searing climate allegory and ended up being two and a half hours of Leonardo DiCaprio yelling at you. Amsterdam had David O. Russell, Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and Robert De Niro, and still managed to feel like a lecture with a costume budget. Audiences can smell the propaganda from a mile away. When the message is the point, the movie is already dead. (Side note, neither of those movies had any cultural influence within two weeks of release, despite huge star power).
The difference with Sorkin is that he’s not trying to make a point. He’s trying to win. Put him in a courtroom or a hearing room and he’s to dramatic courtroom dialogue what Keanu Reeves is to acrobatic gunplay in the John Wick series. Nobody does it better, and you don’t question it for a second. A Few Good Men wraps with an ending you can’t look away from, even if you’ve seen the movie twenty times. The Trial of the Chicago 7 made a fifty-year-old legal case feel like it was happening right now. Molly’s Game is one of the most underrated films of the last decade. A former Olympic skier running an illegal poker empire for Hollywood royalty and Russian oligarchs, told entirely through depositions and flashbacks. It works because Sorkin trusts the story.
That’s the thing here. The Frances Haugen story is not well known to anyone who doesn’t read the New York Times, which is most people. That’s not a knock, as I’m also not an NYT subscriber. It just means Sorkin gets to introduce this to a wide audience cold, and he’s walking in with a heck of a hand.
The story centers on Frances Haugen, a Facebook engineer who walked out in 2021 carrying thousands of internal documents. Those files became the Wall Street Journal‘s Facebook Files investigation. What they showed was that Facebook knew…that Instagram worsened body image issues in teenage girls. Facebook knew that 13.5% of teen girls said Instagram made suicidal thoughts worse. Facebook knew that 17% said it contributed to eating disorders. They, and kept the algorithm running anyway.
That’s the domestic story. The international story is worse.
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Myanmar told reporters: “As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media.” In 2018, the UN reported that Facebook played a significant role in the 2017 Rohingya genocide. The Rohingya are a Muslim minority in a majority-Buddhist country, and the Myanmar military used Facebook to spread years of dehumanizing propaganda against them, laying the groundwork for a campaign of mass killings, rape, and forced displacement. Facebook was identified as a useful instrument for spreading that hate speech. Military pages were used to distribute it for months, if not years, before Facebook finally pulled them down. More than 650,000 Rohingya fled into Bangladesh. The death toll runs into the thousands.
Facebook knew about the hate speech problem in Myanmar. They didn’t have enough Burmese-language content moderators to handle it. They kept the platform running anyway. (You’re seeing a theme here, right?)
The Social Network came out in 2010. It was a great film. It made Zuckerberg look like a sociopath who stole a company from his best friend. It won three Oscars. And then Facebook had its biggest growth decade ever.
Movies don’t change behavior. But every once in a while one comes along that is both important enough to matter and entertaining enough that people actually watch it. That’s a rare combination. Sorkin has done it before. The trailer suggests he’s done it again.
The Social Reckoning hits theaters October 9.
A quick word before we continue.
I spend most of my time in this newsletter finding the story underneath the story. Turns out that’s also what I do for a living.
Organizations that have something worth saying and no idea how to say it. A mission that sounds like every other mission. A history nobody knows about. A brand that exists but doesn’t have a voice yet. I’ve worked with universities, nonprofits, churches, tech startups, and financial institutions. I find the story and tell it.
Not an agency. One person. No deck before I’ve earned it.
If that sounds familiar, email sethtowerhurd [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line “help me now.”
Now, back to it.
[three]
Let me connect three things from this week.
One. Graham Platner just won the Maine Democratic Senate primary. He carried a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for nearly two decades. He praised Hamas tactics on a Reddit forum in 2014 (read the whole thing here). He survived allegations of misconduct toward women. Democrats still handed him the nomination. Elizabeth Warren called him “my kind of man.”
At a rally in Portland this week, a reporter asked a supporter whether an Israeli flag tattoo would be a dealbreaker in a relationship.
“Honestly yeah,” the woman said, “because I don’t support genocide.”
The crowd didn’t boo. Nobody corrected her.
Two. UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell went on a podcast this week and threatened to beat up Ben Shapiro. His exact words: “I promise you, if you lay one little greasy finger on Candace Owens, I’ma beat your a**. He wants us to go die and bomb Muslim kids for his Jewish people.” (See the video) Mitchell has previously called Hitler a good man, denied the Holocaust happened, and accused Israel of orchestrating 9/11. I’d be more disgusted if his face didn’t allude to a non-zero chance of being the product of inbreeding.
Three. UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland was not invited to Sunday’s UFC Freedom 250 at the white house His explanation: “I made fun of Israel and Epstein. The only male American champ banned at the White House because I said Trump is owned by Benjamin Netanyahu.” He’s planning to show up outside the gates with a bullhorn. (Spoiler alert: nobody will much care).
So. You have a Democratic voter whose supporters think an Israeli flag tattoo signals support for genocide. You have a UFC fighter threatening a Jewish commentator while invoking every trope in the handbook. And you have a UFC champion who got skipped for a White House celebration because he won’t stop implying Jews run the government.
The far left and the fringe right have finally found common ground. It’s just not the ground anyone should be proud of.
Do I think all these people are Nazis? No. Platner is an idiot who loves terrorism, but…the quote below gets it right. Strickland is playing a WWE character in the UFC. He usually says outlandish things to raise his profile, then apologizes later. That leaves Mitchell…who is the best walking endorsement for not dating at a family reunion that I’ve ever seen.
But whether or not they all believe the same things…they’re all saying the same thing, to very little societal consequence.
And that grim fact deserves more attention than it's getting.
I don't think Graham Platner actually "is a Nazi" - i.e., someone who supports the goals of the German NSDAP political party.
I think he is a former alcoholic mercenary, who got one of the most famous Nazi symbols as a tattoo to show he is a "killer," and is currently struggling with giant infidelity and woman-abuse scandals.
Watching lib-fem type friends passionately support him is thus, still, very funny.
[four]
The World Cup has it’s first, and most unexpected, star.
A German named Freddy has become the unlikely MVP of the tournament’s opening week. He landed in Atlanta, worked his way through the Martin Luther King National Historical Park, Stone Mountain, Waffle House, and Walmart, posting the whole thing in real time, and then he walked into a Buc-ee’s.
He called Beaver Nuggets “intoxicatingly good.” He wrote: “A place like this could ONLY exist in America and I LOVE it.”
He’s not wrong. Buc-ee’s is reportedly the world’s largest convenience store at 75,593 square feet with 120 gas pumps. It has its own merch line, its own fandom, and apparently its own power to reduce grown European men to all-caps texting at 1am over brisket.
A Swedish woman discovered ranch dressing in Indianapolis. A Scottish fan saw a Simba Cam at a Mets game. Then Freddy made it to Auburn for a World Cup warm-up match at Jordan-Hare Stadium and wrote: “This is the most ‘the European mind can’t comprehend this’ moment of my life.”
College football. Buc-ee’s. Waffle House at midnight.
We’ve been arguing about this country for so long we forgot what it looks like to someone seeing it for the first time.
Freddy sees it. He’s got 200,000 new followers and a stomach full of Beaver Nuggets.
Good for him.
[five]
As always, let’s head into the weekend with a pop culture roundup.
[movies] You can now be buried in one of four custom Ninja Turtles caskets, if you’re a wierdo.
[shows] I don’t have a lot to say about Elle, the Legally Blonde TV spinoff/prequel, but it’s a big cultural moment so here’s the trailer. The actress does bear a striking resemblance to Reese Witherspoon (who returns as writer/executive producer). Streaming 07/01 on Prime Video. // Navy SEAL revenge thriller The Terminal List finally returns to Prime Video on October 21st (more on that below).
[music] Taylor Swift’s song for Toy Story 5 broke a bunch of streaming records or whatever. It just sounded like more Taylor Swift type stuff to me…I was a fan at one point, but she’s turned in back to back bad albums…hard for me to pretend like I care with that much mediocrity going on.
[games] The XBOX reboot of Fable will release on February 7, 2027. Haley Atwell (Captain America, Mission Impossible) will voice the villain.
One of the unbreakable rules in my life is that I see every David Ayer (End of Watch, Fury) movie, epsecially when he’s teaming back up with Brad Pitt (the pair made my favorite WWII flick), J.K. Simmons (Juno, Whiplash) joining this story of survialism in Alaska,featuring a former sniper and his service dog…is the kind of thing that would have been Oscar bait 30 years ago, before movie awards went to pretentious crap no one sees.
Out 09/25… I’ll be there.
A dystopian world of killer cannibals (wait, I just repeated myself didn’t I?), directed by Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Blackhawk Down) and starring Jacob Elordi (Saltburn, Priscilla), Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, Sicario), and Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Substance).
A flu virus wipes out most of humanity. The survivors face roving bands of cannibalistic scavengers. A pilot and a hardened ex-Marine carve out a life on an abandoned Colorado airbase…until a radio transmission suggests something better exists out there.
Dope. Out 08/28.
[new music]
Do we really need new versions of the best tracks on NEEDTOBREATHE’s The Long Surrender so soon after the record released?
After hearing Live at RCA Studios, I’ll vote yes.
The sonic fingerprints here are Tom Petty’s Wildflowers era, the vocal weight of Marcus Mumford, and the soulful stomp of Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats. Bear Rinehart’s raspy wail carries pain and weathered hope at the same time, and stripping the production back to acoustic guitar, piano, and subtle percussion just puts it more in the room with you. Once again produced by Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton), and you can hear it.
[read and learn]
Jack Carr is best known for the Chris Pratt led Prime Video show The Terminal List…but also churns out an impressive amount of both quality and quantity in both TV, including The Terminal List spinoff Dark Wolf starring Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights, The Revenant) and books (both fiction and nonficiton.
Carr popped onto GunTuber Colion Noir’s podcast to discuss his new fiction series The Fourth Option…another Navy SEAL fiction story. I haven’t gotten to the novel yet (which has only been out for a few weeks), but reviews are saying it’s one of Carr’s best.
Before we get there, a quick reminder of the author’s recent…issues.
Ibram X Kendi launched the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University in 2020 with $50 million and a promise to “solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequality and injustice.” Three years in, the center had produced two original research papers. He laid off most of the staff, the center was investigated, and Boston University eventually shut the whole thing down. Meanwile, Kendi charges $20,000 per speaking engagement. He is fine.
Now he’s back with Chain of Ideas, a 550-page book arguing that great replacement theory is the animating force behind every authoritarian movement on earth. The framework is the same one he’s been running for years — sort everyone into in-groups and out-groups, declare the out-group the villain, and work backwards from there. Even a sympathetic reviewer noted that Kendi tends to treat racist ideas as an all-powerful means of control while treating the real economic grievances driving right-wing populism as an afterthought. YouTube
The most glaring example is his treatment of MS-13 in El Salvador a criminal organization that Kendi somehow treats as persecuted underclass. You know, the gang that ripped the hearts out of victims in LA, strangled, shot, slashed and dismembered the same six victims, and slashed an Ohio teen SEVENTY times with machetes (good Lord, you an only kill someone once), It’s the kind of argument that works in a faculty lounge and nowhere else.
I think you should read the books that people are talking about. I did. This one is a 20-hour slog with a premise so flawed it collapses under its own weight, and it does not appear that an editor touched it. This “chain of ideas” is better left on the shelf.
Until the next one,
-sth