Getting out of the Machine
The Week in Review: September 22, 2025
Earlier this week, Leighton Woodhouse reviewed Paul Kingsnorth’s new book Against the Machine in our pages. In the opening of the review, Woodhouse compared Kingsnorth’s critique of “the Machine” (“the matrix of social and technological forces that have degraded humanity over the centuries into something less than we once were”) to Speed Levitch’s critique of Manhattan’s “Grid Plan.”
In Bennett Miller’s 1998 documentary The Cruise, Levitch complains that:
To me the Grid Plan is puritan, it’s homogenizing . . . Let’s just blow up the Grid Plan, and rewrite the streets to be much more a self-portraiture of our personal struggles, rather than some real estate broker’s wet dream from 1807.
Surely, the lack of such a “puritanical” grid plan in New York City’s boroughs has shaped the development of their distinctive cultures over the years. Yet, as I noted in my review of Ross Barkan’s latest novel (and in an essay I wrote for Romanticon, which I’ll be reading at Matthew Gasda’s Brooklyn Center for Theater Research this Sunday night), Manhattan’s bourgeois cultural ethos is seeping into certain neighborhoods in the boroughs (namely Williamsburg and Bushwick in Brooklyn).
The neoliberal economic policies that have given rise to such a cultural ethos have brough us to a point where the fault lines between right and left are shifting. This ideological realignment was the focus of several pieces in Compact this week: Matthew Wilson covered the boomers who are struggling to comprehend the zoomers who are pivoting to the far right, Edward Remus examined how the death of Charlie Kirk is emblematic of the internal war within the Democratic Party, and now that the Democrats have abandoned the working class, Daniel Kishi argues that the GOP needs to take up the cause of labor.
Also in Compact this week:
Juan David Rojas on the Trump administration’s attempt to support Argentina’s flailing economy
Michael Behrent on Emanuel Macron’s undemocratic liberalism
George Beebe covers Trump’s Ukraine gamble
On the podcast, the team discusses Charlie Kirk’s funeral, California banning ICE agents from masking, and RFK Jr.’s announcement that Tylenol can cause autism