Category: Arts & Culture

by Antonia Marrero 

On July 16, 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani gathered at the historic Tenement Museum alongside housing advocates and organizers to release New York City’s landmark Rental Ripoff Report. Shaped by testimony from thousands of working-class New Yorkers during the citywide Rental Ripoff Hearings, the report outlines a package of 23 policy reforms designed to hold negligent repeat-offender landlords accountable, enforce basic housing conditions, and legally recognize tenant unions.

Taking the stage to deliver a powerful address was Antonia Marrero, an organizer with the 196 & 214 Rockaway Parkway Tenant Union and a member of Housing Organizers for People’s Empowerment (HOPE). In a speech invoking Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Marrero likened the moral hypocrisy of powerful elites in 17th-century Vienna to the systemic abuses of modern corporate landlords, issuing a ringing call for tenant power, union solidarity, and housing justice.

Following the event, right-wing media outlets troublingly singled out Marrero’s address for mockery, attacking her characterization of evictions as a form of social violence and deriding the press conference as a “freak show.”

We at Money on the Left reject this sensationalized right-wing framing. To claim that displacement, homelessness, and the state-sanctioned removal of families from their homes are anything other than violent is an exercise in bad faith. Eviction is not a neutral transaction; it is a profound act of physical, emotional, and social violence visited upon working communities. Housing is a fundamental human right, tenants’ rights must be fiercely protected, and tenant organizing remains our strongest defense against predatory landlord harassment.

Below is the full transcript of Antonia Marrero’s speech, published here with her blessing.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Antonia Marrero, and I am thrilled to be a member of HOPE Tenant Union: Housing Organizers for People’s Empowerment. HOPE facilitates tenant unity, HOPE offers civic education, and HOPE insists on the high road, the path of justice and housing for all. I was honored to participate in this year’s Rental Ripoff Hearings, and I want to thank Michael Tiger, General Counsel of the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, who listened to my testimony and welcomed my questions with kindness. Mayor Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff Hearings will echo for generations–the way the lessons of this museum have increasingly resonated for generations.

When I think about HOPE, I think about Shakespeare. In the comedy Measure for Measure–set in Vienna, a city famous for its social housing–the character Isabella talks about the political machine. She says: “[A]uthority, though it err like others, hath yet a kind of medicine in itself, that skins the vice o’ the top.” Isabella, the novice nun, says: “[K]ings, landlords, bishops, judges, and inspectors, all these powerful figures … are subject to mistakes; but because they have power, their mistakes have little consequences, at least, little consequences to them.”

But Sister Isabella also says: “Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” What my heart knows is that we are living in an epic chapter of history. An epic is not a romance, it’s not a melodrama. An epic is the story of a new order. Our city is turning the corner on Tenant Power. When we organize, we win results. The Mamdani Administration is emboldening us so that we no longer tolerate the violence of evictions as a matter of “business as usual.”

My landlord owns dozens of buildings, but he is not a steward of public trust. In fact, it is the opposite. Since 2005, I survived three faulty eviction cases. I have lost three friends to eviction, two of whom lived on my floor, and for the past year, our supportive housing neighbors have been dissuaded from joining our tenant union.

But today’s report shows there is a path forward.

I am grateful for Mayor Mamdani’s leadership, the commitment to improving our housing quality and holding “low road” landlords accountable, and the commitment to having tenant leaders — not just real estate leaders — at the decision-making table. Mayor Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff Hearings will be remembered in the Book of Lady Liberty, whose torch beacons the homeless, the tempest-tost, to our shores, so the greatest cosmopolis of interdependent neighborhoods that the world has ever known will set a new standard of what humanity can achieve when we prioritize collaboration over dominion, when we prioritize love over profit.

See a video of the full press conference here.

by Jonathan Haynes

A different girl now, but there’s nothing new

— Olivia Rodrigo, “déjà vu” (written by Olivia Rodrigo, Daniel Nigro, Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff & St. Vincent, and everybody’s team)

The Taylor Swift–Olivia Rodrigo “feud” is bullshit. It makes me angry — and, I’ll admit, it breaks my heart — to watch the Livies and the Swifties snipe at each other online. And it frustrates me that every Olivia profiler has to circle back to it, when somehow Swift never gets asked the same question, yet lives by its terms to the degree that her last album often plays like a hymn to a certain celebrity football player’s^[1] phallus.^[2] I know parasocial investment can be real and even nourishing. But this particular mystery is doing harm. It’s not how art works. It is, depressingly, how oligarchic neoliberalism works.

The story the culture wants to tell about Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift is All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950): the adoring ingénue who studies the star, learns her moves, and then slips the knife in. And the aging star, watching it happen, curdling into vindictiveness as the protégée takes what was hers. It’s an irresistible script because it gives everyone a villain to choose. Either Rodrigo, a self-proclaimed Swifty from early childhood on, is Eve Harrington — the thief, borrowing too much and calling it homage, who echoed Swift’s “Cruel Summer” on “déjà vu” closely enough that Swift’s camp landed a retroactive writing credit to the tune of millions of dollars — or Swift is Margo Channing at her most petty, the elder star so threatened by her younger (self) that she has to litigate a credit. And it’s a stupid bind, because the script only offers those two roles, jealous predator or past-her-prime grudge-holder. The more honest story — the one the All About Eve, Taylor vs. Olivia mythology obscures from us — is lineage.^[3]

Call it the Catfight Economy^[4], and grant right away that the diagnosis isn’t mine — critics have been describing this for years, and the manufactured rivalry has a whole literature behind it (and about it; among many other works, Brian De Palma’s 2012 film Passion also tells the All About Eve story, via Persona [Ingmar Bergman 1966] and Mulholland Drive [Lynch 2000]). To summarize: two successful women cannot share a professional space without one of them being a threat to the other. The press supplies the frame, the fans supply the labor, the platforms supply the distribution, and that leaves two artists narrated into a fight neither one started, so far as any human who doesn’t actually know them personally knows. And surely their friends don’t even know, really, whether or not Swift and Rodrigo are “frosty” in real life.

What interests me is less the mechanism than its ideology: the things the Catfight Economy quietly trains us to believe. It teaches that influence is theft, that admiration is weakness, that producing art is powerful and receiving art is debt (I fully intend the sexual resonances there). That there is only ever one musical chair and the other woman is already sitting in it. It is a scarcity story dressed as gossip.

The machine is not exclusively aimed at women. Pop has always run on manufactured antagonism, Beatles versus Stones, Beach Boys versus Beatles, Blur versus Oasis, Biggie versus Pac. But the men’s versions tend to read as competition between equals, a sport with two champions, even a spur to better work. Consider the Kendrick–Drake cage match of 2024, which also managed to steal the spotlight from the quiet revolution surfacing at that year’s Grammys, where six of the eight Album of the Year nominees were women, including Rodrigo and Swift (the eventual winner – I’m still throwing beers at the screen that told me Midnights beat GUTS), a changing of the guard that held the stage about as long as it took two megalomaniacal, multi-millionaire assholes to start calling each other domestic abusers and pedophiles in public (I love much of the work of both of them). America crowned Kendrick Lamar the winner of the Drake battle-to-the-death the following year, when a hundred million people, both in the bleachers and at home, sang along as he hurled a blistering insult at his former collaborator at the Super Bowl.^[5]

A metaphor for America in general in 2024, I guess.

When turned on women, the same machine sours^[6]: the rivalry curdles into a catfight, and only one of them is allowed to survive it. A field with room for only one is a field that never has to take women’s art seriously as a tradition.

Consider the blows Swift absorbed to clear the commercial ground Rodrigo now shares with her. She came up through the Nashville songwriting machine as a teenage girl who had to have the best idea in the room just to be heard by professionals twice her age.^[7] She spent years as a target of an online abuse campaign that ran through Kanye West and the people around him. And in 2019 she watched the masters to her first six albums get sold out from under her when Big Machine was acquired by Scooter Braun — who had managed West for years — an event that crystallized, in public and at her expense, exactly how little her little girl self’s signature on a contract was worth. Each of these events is also a Catfight Economy event in its way: each got covered as drama, as personality, as Taylor-being-Taylor, when each was actually structural — a girl up against an industry built to extract from her.

Rodrigo’s generation negotiated in the shadow of that lesson. Where Swift had to re-record her own catalogue to reclaim it — Taylor’s Version — Rodrigo and peers like Chappell Roan entered an industry where creative control had become a thing a young woman could think to ask for, because they had all just watched the cost of not asking. There will never need to be a GUTS (Olivia’s Version). That absence is Swift’s bequest. This is the inheritance the rivalry frame can’t see: the older artist’s losses became the younger artist’s terms.

Which is what makes the recently announced Daisy Chain Fields concert so important. The festival Rodrigo founded is something more than a festival and more than a tribute to the Lilith Fair; it is the Catfight Economy’s exact inverse, built on purpose. Where the Catfight Economy profits by pitting women against each other, Daisy Chain Fields is dedicated — in Rodrigo’s own words^[8] — to the belief that “joy, community, and creativity can inspire meaningful change,” celebrating the voices, artistry, and contributions of women in music. Where the Catfight Economy extracts value from women and routes it to platforms and press, Daisy Chain Fields routes its net proceeds outward, to nonprofits advancing and advocating for women and girls. Where the Catfight Economy insists inspiration and curiosity must harden into competition, the mission statement insists on “knowledge, strength, and action.” It closes on an image that is Olivia’s whole argument in one line — daisies are “wild and beautiful,” and “as a chain they are strong and unbreakable.”

Seen this way, Rodrigo’s so-called evasiveness about Swift in interviews^[9] stops looking like coldness and starts looking like intellectual consistency. She has been on the record about hating the manufactured-feud framing, and her refusal to feed it is the same gesture as the festival: a person who has built an explicit stand against the Catfight Economy is not going to step into its oldest set piece on cue.

So the mythology gets it backward. All About Eve is a story about a theater with one dressing room and one star, where the only way up is to displace the woman already standing in the spotlight. Eve doesn’t want to make her own work, she wants Margo’s part, Margo’s audience, Margo’s life. That is the only plot the Catfight Economy knows how to run, and it is the plot it keeps trying to cast Rodrigo into. Swift, more than anyone, knows it, and she has spent a career writing it (among millions of other things) down. “Clara Bow,” the closing song on The Tortured Poets Department (2024), is the It-girl assembly line set to music: the industry’s eye slides from Clara Bow to Stevie Nicks to, in the final verse, Taylor Swift herself, each new arrival told she’s the real thing, dazzling, the new god worth worshipping — until the eye moves on to the next one, who has an edge the last one never did. It is Margo Channing’s nightmare written by Margo, the star narrating her own replacement on the same conveyor that carried her in. And believe me, there is a ton of fan and critical speculation that this is one of many Swift songs about Rodrigo, which is so much more than missing the point. It’s a cruel^[10] irony.

Swift is the great chronicler of the trap. But the interesting relationship between these two artists isn’t antagonism, it’s transmission: the elder who took the structural punishment, and the younger who studied the wreckage and wrote her way around it. Rodrigo is rejecting the whole theater and building a field of daisies. Swift sings the cage with unmatched clarity, and thus, somewhat like the Jane Austen of D.A. Miller’s monograph^[11], transcends it; Rodrigo, standing on the ground Swift cleared, gets to start dismantling it.

^[1] Travis Kelce’s.

^[2] Taylor Swift, “Wood,” The Life of a Showgirl, Republic Records, 2025.

^[3]A caveat, because it would be ultra-shitty to let it pass without saying so: getting a retroactive co-write on a song you didn’t write is a graceless thing to accept, and Swift accepted it. But the music business is litigious to its bones, and a young artist is so incentivized to hand over the co-credit and the royalty points rather than prolong the online nastiness that — five years later — it is somehow still a story that Elvis Costello did not sue Olivia Rodrigo. None of which is to claim Swift invented the position she occupies. She has predecessors, obviously, and similar All About Eve stories have been told about Madonna and Mariah Carey many times over. But the lineage I’m tracing isn’t stylistic, it’s structural — the terms of creative control a young woman can now think to ask for. And the asymmetry of admiration matters: Rodrigo arrived a self-proclaimed Swifty, modeling herself on a songwriter-auteur with total command of her own persona and catalogue. Swift arrived a girl gushing about LeAnn Rimes — herself a teenage phenom, but the inheritance there was a way of singing, by way of Patsy Cline, not a way of owning your work. The bequest I mean is the one Swift’s own losses created, not the longer history of women in pop, which runs back well beyond her.

^[4]I am thinking here of Gloria Steinem’s “Catfight Theory of History,” from an editorial she co-wrote with Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. The occasion was the release on streaming of Mrs. America, an historical film (TV show? Content thing?) that she believed portrayed the fight for the ERA as a catfight between her and Phyllis Schlafly instead of “a battle between the ERA and economic interests.” (LA Times, “Why ‘Mrs. America’ is bad for American women,” July 30, Covid year zero).

^[5]“A Minor” is funny and clever. Lamar is also a genius who won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Nonetheless, if I were scoring that Superbowl scene, it would be to “All the lonely people,” and “Eleanor Rigby” (The Beatles, Revolver, Capital Records, 1966) is in E minor.

^[6]Olivia Rodrigo, Sour, Interscope Records, 2021.

^[7] See Taylor Swift’s interview for the NYT project, The 30 Greatest Living Songwriters (2026). Come to think of it, why isn’t Billy Joel on that list? I haven’t checked, but I bet Swift had him on her ballot. And Olivia – who might have made the list herself had the new one come out before the list dropped – David Byrne nominated her on his own (citation forthcoming, I know I read that somewhere) – well, we already know from “déjà vu” that she was “the one who taught you Billy Joel.”

^[8]It could have been her “team.” What is an author?

^[9]See (hear?) the NYT Popcast interview with Rodrigo, in which Joe Coscarelli and Jon Caramanica ask her intelligently designed questions about the “frostiness” between her and Swift, so that she can redirect without sounding like she’s hiding something. Good journalism still happens there!

^[10]Taylor Swift, “Cruel Summer,” Lover, Republic Records, 2019.

^[11]Miller, D.A., Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, Princeton University Press: 2005.

By Jonathan Haynes

Given the miserable state of American life generally, here’s a thing that astonishes me. Two of the best homegrown popular artworks I can think of came out recently, within months of each other, are enormously popular, and are political (I beg you to please stay with me here): Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. You could read each as a defiant argument for the humanities. Of course it’s unclear whether the artists know they’re making that argument, or would say so if they knew.

Listen to how they explain how their new works came to be. Anderson (Esquire): “Vineland was always going to be too hard to adapt, so I stole the parts that spoke to me and just started running like a thief.” Rodrigo (NYT Popcast): “I was really inspired by this book Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux. She’s having this affair with this person and she’s not quite happy, she’s kind of going insane… I was really inspired by all of the ways in which love makes you insane and miserable.”

Wait. Back up. You guys are reading Ernaux and Pynchon? Like it’s nothing. Like it’s just something that you do. Meanwhile I’m sitting here listening to Pod Save America with a gun in my mouth.

After all, these are quintessential LA artists — Anderson out of the San Fernando Valley, Rodrigo originally out of Temecula — who actually get to make art in an industry town that has lost its industry, as devastatingly and, hopefully not but seemingly permanently, as any coal or steel town lost its in the seventies. Brilliant people with decades of experience at every tier of the entertainment business can’t get jobs at CVS or Target in 2026. (I have a friend like this, a superior researcher and writer with excellent pedagogical skills and a stunning depth of knowledge of movie history and culture. If you’re hiring, DM me and I’ll connect you.). But I’m not making the easy point that PTA and OR are privileged to make the art they want. Sure, they have one-percent lifestyles that buy them room to concentrate, instead of lives frantically lived between DoorDash and Lyft shifts. Nor am I saying I’m just glad they’re using that privilege well, though I obviously do think that. I’m not even really talking about them. I’m talking about the astonishing, vertiginous fact that there exists a massive popular audience for their work — an Invisible Republic, if you will — that consumes it not just avidly but ecstatically.

I’ve never actually cried to an Olivia Rodrigo song. I loved “drivers license” in 2021 because of its stylistic mastery; my initial reaction was exhilaration at the rare aesthetic achievement, and I started thinking about the implied connection to the canon of American rock and roll “car songs,” including the previous year’s “Murder Most Foul,” Bob Dylan’s masterpiece about the Kennedy assassination. Great bad trip car songs bracketed the pandemic. Dylan’s arrived in the first month of quarantine, when auto-mobility became a deadly thing. Her song came ten months later, amid the first vaccine roll-out, when it felt safer, but still low-key miserable, to drive your car places.

(Here, my ingenious sister-in-law, the novelist Megan Moores, would interrupt: there is plenty of textual evidence You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is about a romance with a guy with just such an emotional deficit who knows all the words to “Just Like Heaven.”)

Historically, crying to Olivia Rodrigo songs is the primary mode of engagement with her. There is a TikTok genre dedicated to getting deep in your feelings while listening to her songs. My favorite of those that I’ve seen is the guy with red eyes and dribbling snot blurting out the titles of the songs on the new album that turned him into a sniveling wreck: “Fuck you, ‘begged.’ Fuck you, ‘honeybee.’ Fuck you, ‘less.’ Fuck you, ‘cigarette smoke.’” Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is on record as having bawled her eyes out hearing “drivers license” for the first time. Right after the song dropped, there was an SNL sketch about gruff guys wearing flannel shirts getting into their feelings in a pool hall. The whole world was gutted by that song, allegedly. I loved it but experienced it…differently (Dylan, etc.).

But with “honeybee,” Olivia Rodrigo wrecked me too. She did it out of the blue with a couplet on a song that has gotten some flack for being out of the sonic universe of most of the album. It sounds like a Disney tune, a fair description meant as a criticism, to which I retort, one of the most celebrated American directors of all time just released (on the same day as Olivia’s new album) a blockbuster movie that “discloses” that his entire psychic universe — and the universe’s — is organized around “When You Wish Upon a Star.” John Lennon closed the turbulent White Album with a song that was explicitly based on Disney music. St. Vincent did a whole album based on that sound and called it Actor. Olivia Rodrigo, now occasional St. Vincent collaborator, began her professional life as a child actor in Disney shows (do your own research).

The couplet:

I hope I never see what your face looks like going

A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing

The purity of these lines is astonishing and lifts the album lyrically (whatever you think of Disney songs) into very rarified company. I think Lorenz Hart, at least the one played by Ethan Hawke in the new Linklater film, would have been proud to have written them. At the exact second I was admiring the craft, the eleven-year-old who sobbed at ET knocked me on my ass.

I hope I never see what your face looks like going

A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing

I am seeing a lot of faces going these days: my parents’ faces, the childish face of my now-teenage son, my own face.

The mortal irony of this lyric is that if she got her wish, she’d spend her whole life watching this person’s face going.

Fuck you, “honeybee.”

There is another TikTok from a listening party where Rodrigo plays the new album for fans hearing it cold, a live mic resting on her knee. As the chorus of “stupid song” climbs higher than you expect it to go, the room starts leaking into the audio — a gasp, “oh my god,” and then the screaming. Those people weren’t screaming before. The music made them do it. The screams are the flip side of the sobs, and sometimes done simultaneously. And it’s like Dylan — those verses in “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in which the words just keep piling up and you never know when or where they’re going to land. Allen Ginsberg said everything in Dylan was “collected into that one column of air coming out of him and the vibration of the sound,” and that fits Olivia Rodrigo even better. And it also fits the climactic One Battle After Another car chase that Scott Ferguson and I worked through on the Money on the Left podcast, Superstructure.

Switched on Pop names the mechanism better than I can: spiraling. On their recent podcast dedicated to You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the musicologist Nate Sloan hears Rodrigo’s choruses as those coin funnels in children’s museums: you set a penny on its edge and it circles the bowl, faster and tighter as it falls, until it loses its orbit and drops through the hole at the center. The Rodrigo chorus does the same — the line winds and accelerates, as she spins out more and more words and lifts ever higher into her vocal register, until it lands on the title phrase and drops out of motion. “Kiss me and I might drop dead.” “I love you more than any stupid song could ever say.” The orbit, then the hole. And it is the same shape Anderson cuts in One Battle After Another: a VistaVision camera with a telephoto lens strapped to the nose of a Dodge Charger, the car running the undulating California hills, the pursuit going on and on over those swells until Chase Infiniti slams on the brakes. Two funnels, two dead stops. And in both cases, a mixed-race girl behind the wheel. Make of that coincidence what you will. I’ll leave that question open, as I imagine that Greil Marcus would.

But the invisible republic that I borrow Marcus’s title to identify is built precisely out of rhymes like that one — uncanny correspondences the culture throws up without being asked, which it falls to criticism only to notice, and to refuse to explain away.

It brings into unwitting communion beleaguered English teachers grading endless piles of AP exams, college students with gender studies degrees graduating into an American void, rock critic Substackers traveling hundreds of miles in The Paranoid Style band tee shirts to see Hamell on Trial in a beloved local music venue that is closing soon (where will we go?), movie-scene-deconstructing 35-year-old YouTubers who can’t get over the color timing in One Battle and issue their manifestos from their parents’ living rooms, lonely denizens of livvieshq on Instagram with “maggots for brains,” and work from home tech guys with moldy Ph.D.s who spend their days busily feeding their careers into AI tools.

This essay is already piled high with allusions, but I must add one more — George Miller’s masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City. I’m thinking of the scene – it always makes me sob – when Babe saves the Bull Terrier from drowning and the Bull Terrier says “Whatever the pig says, goes” to all the other animals. And so all of these different species — who are, in some cases, even biologically, instinctively, constitutively driven to hate and fear each other, and in others, to blithely ignore each other — must share the jelly beans. Or everyone starves.

And then they become an army.

UPDATE: 24 hours after the present essay was published, this announcement went out to subscribers from the official Olivia Rodrigo mailing list.

* Note that alphabetical order, asked to do nothing but sort names, quietly places Bikini Kill above some of the biggest stars in the world — including the promoter herself.

By Jonathan Haynes

Watch what happens when the reviews of Olivia Rodrigo’s third album — a concept record that tracks a single romance from first date to bitter aftermath — go looking for its value. Almost without exception they find it somewhere other than in Rodrigo: in the older male band she references, in the New Wave gods her producer conjures, in the Gen X canon her sound supposedly pays its respects to. The dominant critical move is to sort the tracks into the Swiftian and the Smithian and grade each by which influence wins (Slate Magazine literally does this), and the songs that come out on top are reliably the Cure-saturated ones, praised as the moments where the record connects to something serious, something legitimate, something a man made first. I want to name this as the symptom it is, and the stakes are larger than one album. We are at a moment when pop music by young women is taken more seriously than it has ever been, and yet the reflex persists — even among women writing the reviews — to locate the worth of that music in a male precursor who authorizes it, rather than in the woman herself. The song-by-song tally is not just a clumsy method. It is the gatekeeping impulse wearing the costume of rigor: the search for the father who makes the daughter’s work admissible. And it is exactly backwards, because You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is an album about a woman who does not borrow her authority from the canon but absorbs the canon into herself, who takes the male precursor everyone is reaching for and makes him sing her words. The critics handing Rodrigo’s value upstream to Robert Smith have the current running the wrong direction. The record reverses it.

Right from the start, in the third line of the first song (“drop dead”), Rodrigo mobilizes the Cure as a narrative instrument. “You know all the words to Just Like Heaven.” The Cure is not Rodrigo’s stylistic frame imposed from above. It is his music — the crush’s — and so when the record itself begins to sound like The Cure, the sound is not homage but possession. We are listening to a consciousness being colonized by a lover’s taste, the way one absorbs a partner’s vocabulary, their sleep schedule, their way of seeing, their taste in music. This is the Annie Ernaux problematic Rodrigo named directly in her New York Times Popcast interview when she cited Simple Passion — that slim, clinical diary of an affair that consumes a whole life — as the inspiration for “stupid song”: passion as affliction, a desire that floods and saturates everything like illness or insanity. Ernaux’s achievement is a collision of registers — flat, exact, diaristic notation applied to total erotic derangement — and that collision is exactly what the album performs. The Swiftian lyric is the deadpan diary; the Cure engulfment is the derangement the diary is recording. You cannot separate them, because the lyric is narrating the sonic takeover as it happens. The title says as much before a note plays: You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is not a description of a moment in the romance but the verdict on the whole of it. Darkness was inside the love from the first date.

This is why the song-by-song method fails in this case. A critic who prefers the Cure-leaning tracks to the Swift-leaning ones believes, ironically, that he is identifying her most original mode (measured against a presumed Gen Z pop-princess archetype). He is in fact charting the depth of the character’s possession, crowning as most hers the songs where she is most someone else’s. The thing the critic likes more is the symptom. And it’s a double bind for her: measured against Smith she is borrowing, measured against Swift she is belated, and either way the verdict denies her any artistic ground of her own. Variety gets closest to the truth with its line that the album “tracks the arc of a love affair: Rodrigo’s love affair with the Cure,” but means it as a witticism about influence, not as a structural argument. The album dramatizes its own sound as a love-symptom. No tally of borrowed gestures can register that, because the borrowed gestures are not influences to be scored, they are characters in the story. And the impulse to score them, to find the songs where the male precursor is most present and crown those the best, is oddly shared by the character Rodrigo has created: the conviction that value must be located in him.

But Rodrigo is too strong an artist to leave the influences as influences, and here the argument turns. She sublates The Cure — cancels it as an external source and preserves it as her own material, lifted onto a plane where it no longer points back at Robert Smith but expresses Olivia Rodrigo. The song “the cure” arrives at rue album midpoint, but it is not about The Cure — nor does it particularly sound like them. This negation is the point. This is what divides what she is doing from pastiche, which stays marked as borrowed. By the back half of the record the Cure-ness is simply her sound, the influence negated as foreign and retained as self. And then comes the benediction, the moment where the structure becomes flesh: Smith himself appears on “what’s wrong with me” — singing, playing bass, embodied inside her track. Not sampled, not echoed. The precursor walks into the song he has been haunting and takes a part, and he takes it on the diagnostic song, the one that asks the Ernaux question directly, which is exactly where an internalized voice would speak. He is not a guest star. He is the second half of her brain — the absorbed half answering the diaristic half, two voices staring down the same dread from opposing ends. This is the form of a dialectic and not the form of a love duet.

Here is a fact underemphasized or ignored in the deadline reviews: Smith is singing her words and her music, in a style that resembles his own. The man has been made to perform a Robert Smith who is now her creation — voicing her reconstruction of his idiom, handed back to him to inhabit. This inverts the entire vector of influence. Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” runs one way: the latecomer swerves from the precursor, clears space against his priority, escapes the father. Rodrigo does the opposite. She absorbs Smith so completely that she can write him, and he ratifies the absorption by consenting to sing her writing-of-him. It is apophrades literalized — the return of the dead made to seem authored by the living — except he is actually there, performing his own style after it has passed through her and come out as hers. The strong artist is not the one who escapes the source. She is the one who can produce the source as her own material and have it agree to perform her. That is the furthest claim anyone can make on a precursor, and Rodrigo makes it on the record, in his voice, with his hands on the bass. The reviews are still at “cool, Robert Smith’s on it.” The album is at “Robert Smith consents to being Olivia Rodrigo’s creation.”

But that consent is not a concession. It is the proof that what she does is additive rather than competitive. The credit-and-citation model the reviews run on knows only two roles, the original and the impostor, and it is built to adjudicate who owns what. Rodrigo is not playing that game. She does not depose the precursor. She brings the whole canon kicking and screaming into a world it has to share with her.

One last observation (finally caught up with her interview on Jimmy Kimmel the other night). The biographical Rodrigo’s father reportedly has seen the Cure thirty times; he wept when he finally met Robert Smith; his phone screensaver is now a photo of the two of them. She has said her dad spent her childhood “introducing me to all the bands he went to see when he was my age” — among them, The Cure. So The Cure is the father’s music before it is anyone else’s in this drama, the canon handed down the paternal line, and her father, as it happens, is by profession a family therapist — an analyst. Now consider the fascinating work the album’s romantic plot is doing with that inheritance. The boyfriend knows all the words to “Just Like Heaven.” He loves The Cure, which is to say he loves her father’s music, the music she was raised on, the sound of the house she grew up in. And the buried logic of the infatuation, never stated outright but everywhere in the songs, is that this is why she falls for him: he loves what her father loves, he carries the paternal music, and so he arrives already occupying the place the father holds. That is the Freudian pattern, stated plainly — the daughter drawn to the man who returns to her the father, the beloved chosen because he stands where the parent stood.

So it turns out that the album itself is not only a concept album that tells a coherent beginning to end story; it’s a double plot. The story of the romance and break-up mirrors the larger one we have been unpacking the whole time — the artist’s relation to the canon she was raised inside. The main plot ends with a painful break-up. The other climaxes with the man who made the music she was raised on — idol to both lover and father — walking in to perform her recreation of him, and the world receives not Robert Smith but Olivia Rodrigo’s Robert Smith, authored by the singular genius of Olivia Rodrigo.

* See here for a follow-up reflection from the author.

By Will Beaman

Money is often introduced in critical theory as a problem. It appears as the medium that makes unlike things commensurable by reducing them to sameness, the abstraction that removes social life from the conditions that give it substance, or the sign that circulates by displacing the relations on which it depends. In one register, this is the Marxist account of commodity abstraction and estrangement. More specifically, it is the tendency within Marxist political economy to identify money with the value-form, and the value-form with a mystifying equivalence that becomes socially real and destructive. In another register, money becomes part of a deconstructive account of debt, mediation, and the impossibility of meanings or values ever being wholly self-identical. What these approaches share is the claim that money is bound up with failed identity: either it asserts an equivalence that does not in fact exist, or it reveals that equivalence never fully holds. Money is therefore treated either as a false identity or as a site of identity’s failure.

I want to start from a different premise. Money does not need to be understood first as the positing of identity. Commensuration is not exhausted by equivalence in the strongest sense, and credit should not be understood only as false unification or as a relation whose non-identity appears primarily as failure or guilt. Money is better understood as a practice of open public reference. At its most basic level, it stages comparison without requiring identity. By reference I do not mean only precise signification. References can also sample and remix, compare partially, cite selectively, echo playfully, or suggest likeness without exhausting what they carry forward. What matters here is a public act of relating—one that makes coordination, valuation, and obligation possible without discovering a pre-given sameness beneath them. The question, then, is not whether money imposes identity on a heterogeneous world, but what kind of reference money is.

Marxist criticism is most useful when it shows how capitalist monetary forms narrow what can count as socially intelligible. When labor appears only as wage labor, when production appears only through profitability, and when public capacity appears as fixed, money becomes a disciplinary medium. But it is not enough to say that capital captures money and thereby generates socially real abstractions. That still risks treating reification as the basic ontology of money rather than as one historically powerful monetary idiom. What appears here as private value or abstract equivalence is better understood as a genre of reference—a way of organizing relations that presents its own ratios as self-grounding while treating the conditions of issuance and receivability as if they were already settled. Even in these privational forms, money is not ontologically private. It remains a contested public utility, and the terms on which claims are issued, received, and made to count are never fully removed from political struggle.

A similar point can be made about deconstructive accounts of debt and mediation. These traditions are right to insist that identity does not close. Debt is never just a neutral balancing of accounts but is bound up with obligation, memory, punishment, and the effort to make a claim hold over time. More generally, settlement never arrives in a final and self-contained form, because any act of meaning or repayment depends on signs, conventions, and contexts that exceed it. Derrida’s term différance combines difference and deferral to name this condition: meaning is never simply present all at once in a self-identical form. A word becomes intelligible through its differences from other words, through traces of prior use, and through its repeatability across contexts. What appears self-grounding or immediately given is therefore mediated. Applied to economic life, the point is that a price does not contain the full reality of the good it prices, and a wage does not contain the full reality of the labor it measures. Monetary signs are in no objective sense equal to the world they organize. If one begins from identity or presence, non-coincidence appears as différance.

If différance clarifies the mediated conditions of signification, we might use référance to clarify the mediated conditions of reference. Derrida’s altered spelling marks a difference that is visible in writing but not audible in speech, making the temporal discontinuity of signification legible at the level of the word itself. Référance transvalues that gesture. It marks not only the non-presence of meaning, but the inscribability of claims across the spacing of currency issuance and uptake. Just as writing happens here and reading happens there, issuance happens here and receivability is negotiated there as a reversible stagecraft rather than a closed transfer. Rather than starting from identity and its failure, référance begins from relations that are non-identical from the start and do not require identity as their ground. If one begins instead from analogy and provision, from a shared problem that referential coordination across non-identity helps organize and contest, the same field appears as référance. The inadequacy of identity is the site of différance; non-identical relation is the site of référance. These do not necessarily name different empirical objects. They name different descriptions of the same mediated field. Référance names an open public reference: a way of suggesting likeness and holding claims together without discovering a final identity beneath them. Money, on this account, is not the successful representation of a prior economic reality, and it is not merely the symptom of a constitutive lack. It is a partial articulation of the social world as countable and revisable.

In monetary life, référance works through analogy: a way of holding heterogeneous things in accountable relation without making them identical. Analogy here does not mean approximation to a fixed norm. It means that likeness can be suggested and coordinated without being gathered into identity. A wage does not make labor the same thing as money. A price does not make a good identical with a number. A budget line does not make a public need identical with its accounting expression. Identity fails, but coordination still takes place.

The reparations movement offers a political example. A cash payment may form part of reparations for slavery without being identical to reparations or exhausting their meaning. Indeed, reparations are possible in part because money is not exhausted by any punctual scene of settlement. Its non-identity makes it intertemporally inscribable as a medium of repair, capable of carrying past harms, present claims, and future obligations in relation. The relation is not merely metaphorical or supplementary. It is analogical. Payment participates in a broader project of repair that can also take juridical, institutional, pedagogical, and aesthetic forms. This is part of how reparations remain durable across changing media and struggles: not because the claim is reducible to one self-identical demand, but because it can be carried forward across different scenes of reference. Reparations, in this sense, name an open historical and political problem-space rather than a single settled form.

Existing monetary forms often conceal the work of reference. We might think of this in terms similar to the continuity system in cinema. Continuity editing does not literally create seamless space-time. It produces continuity as an effect while hiding the cuts, conventions, and labor that make it possible. Some monetary forms work in the same way. They stage commensurability as a simple fact and obscure the referential work by which non-identical terms are brought into relation. What appears as neutral equivalence is often the product of historically specific conventions that present themselves as natural.

For that reason, reconstruction matters as much as critique. Reconstruction begins not from failed closure but from non-identical relation. Monetary institutions are never complete, never innocent, and never outside power. But they are not simply illusions waiting to be exposed. They are infrastructures through which claims become receivable, contestable, and revisable. To reference is also to cite: to carry something forward and make it count within a shared scene of recognition. Credit clarifies the connection. To credit is not only to finance but also to acknowledge, attribute, and extend receivability in monetary terms.

The historical period of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War extends the reparations analogy. In that moment, the terms under which social life could count within public institutions were reorganized. New images were put forward in which labor appeared as employable beyond the plantation. Citizenship appeared as enfranchisable across race. Land appeared as redistributable rather than fixed within the slaveholding order. Credit appeared as more issuable to newly recognized participants in public life. Black participation appeared as precious and indispensable to public life. None of these predicates produced stable identities, and all were violently contested. Yet they established new relations through which claims could be made and received within a multiracial democracy. Reconstruction therefore names not only a historical period but a problem of reference: how heterogeneous lives can be sustained together within shared institutions without collapsing their differences into a single form.

The political economic question is therefore what kinds of open public references monetary forms establish, and whether they do so reflexively or under the cover of objectivity. A reconstructive critique of money asks who may issue, who may count, what may be valued, which obligations are recognized, and which forms of life are treated as worthy of support. The task is to reconstruct money as accountable relation rather than failed identity.

By Gideon Fairchild

Editor’s note: The author is a fictional composite of several real guys with real New York publishing jobs.

I have been told—gently, as one tells a sleepwalker not to step off the roof—that I should “just write about Trump.”

As if it were that simple. As if Trump were an object you could place on the table, circle with a pencil, and label. As if the act of describing him would not also describe the describer—would not melt the author’s face a little, would not leave ash in his mouth for a week. I can’t “just write about Trump.” It doesn’t work like that.

Because when people say “write about Trump,” what they mean is: make him make sense. Make him moral. Translate him into our little grammar of motives and consequences, of agency and intention, of responsibility. Put him back inside the story we still want to live in, where shame still works, where exposure still produces correction.

Here’s the problem: that story doesn’t stick to him.

Critique assumes an interior—someone still tethered to looking decent, or at least coherent. Someone who can be embarrassed. Someone who can be pressured by words. Someone who will flinch when you point.

Trump isn’t that guy. He doesn’t do the basic social thing where you pretend to be constrained by the possibility of disapproval. Among my colleagues at The Washington Post, The Bulwark, The Free Press, and others of modest renown you might know, there is broad consensus that Trump is immune to sustained negative press coverage, making it irresponsible to subject him to sustained negative press coverage.

Which is why people like me do what we do when the assignment is miserable: pivot to writing about wokeness.

Wokeness is easy to describe and fun to mock. It has made public life unbearable for me. My kids think I am a fool. I’ve talked about this with other columnists, and they agree, which is how I know it’s a general problem.

It also has a practical advantage that Trump coverage lacks. With wokeness, you can still create journalistic taxonomies that hold. You can decide who is serious and who is performative, who is in the room and who is merely making noise outside it. You can still sort the world into “responsible” and “irresponsible” and feel, for a moment, that democracy still works.

It is, frankly, soothing to be able to name a thing and feel it slide out of view, as if language were a trapdoor—or an efficient train taking something far away.

With Trump, journalistic ethics just don’t land. You can produce ten thousand words of condemnation and he will walk through them like a God. The story is always the same: he does something, everyone reacts, the reaction becomes the story, and he keeps moving.

That’s why he’s boring to write about. Not because nothing happens, but because the thing that happens is outside the moral universe of consequences. The words don’t do what we keep pretending words do. The exposure doesn’t expose. The indictment doesn’t indict. The “bombshell” doesn’t explode. It just becomes weather.

So you end up doing a different kind of writing. Not critique, exactly. Not analysis. More like a forecast, but after the storm—reporting on damage while the wind is still rising, drawing chalk around bodies begging and pleading for you to call an ambulance.

Conditions worsen, institutions adjust, everyone else learns new rules and calls it stability. You learn to keep your voice steady while you speak the terror.

And then you look up from the sentence you’ve just written and you realize the words are dying on the page like a fish flopping around the deck of a boat. And all the while, the universe is arranged around a great man who sits fully outside it—outside consequence, outside correction, outside the small humiliations that keep the rest of us inside the social world.

He is Sovereign and defined by exception, and thus my eyes hurt to behold Him. Yet I cannot look away. And this is a difficult subject for a journalist to know how to approach.

At first, you maintain the correct reaction: disgust, obviously. A decent person’s disgust. The disgust of a great institution. You put on the expression you were trained to wear. You perform constraint for the reader the way you perform it for your colleagues and your editors and the implied public.

Looking back, you realize your disgust was woke and naïve. It is replaced with something realer: acceptance.

You begin to prefer the clean fact of power to the exhausting labor of journalistic ethics. You begin to resent what still expects you to try.

The voice you’ve been using—the reasonable voice, the legacy voice, the voice trained to keep its hands clean—starts to fail. It fails like relief.

It is impossible to report on Trump, and it’s unfair to expect me to do so. Don’t make me do it. He won’t like it.

PLEASE NOTICE ME, SIR!

EAT MY BABY, FOR IT IS MY GIFT!

I USED TO COVER BOND MARKETS!

Gideon Fairchild is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post, a senior writer at The Bulwark, and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Pragmatic Renewal.