Man they don't make em like that anymore. What a woman.

By almost any measure Dolly embodied "the American Dream." Some people come from nothing and make it big and then consider the problem of poverty now solved. If they ever even consider it again. Others will remember that there are still so many people with nothing and use what they have to help.

Just something to think about during this latest round of "this person who isn't poor wants to improve the lives of others" we've been hearing so much about whenever a DSA member has more to their name than a barrel with straps on it.

I'm sorry to poison Dolly's memory with this transition here but it's something I saw yesterday and just severely depressed me. I know it's nothing new. I know this is exactly how the right thinks. But it's nevertheless illuminating to see it spelled out so plainly.

After winning the special election Republican primary to assume her late brother's senate seat in South Carolina Darline Graham explained how she differs from her opponent Annie Andrews.

“Gun control, government-run health care, abortion until the moment of birth—bad idea after bad idea. Annie Andrews backs them all,” she said on Tuesday.

“I have a different background and vision for our state.… I grew up in the back of a bar and a liquor store in one room in central South Carolina. My parents worked long, hard hours to make ends meet. We didn’t take vacations. If they were sick, they had to get up and go to work because if the doors weren’t open, we weren’t making money. My mother passed away when I was 11, and my father just over a year later.”

And that is as good as it should ever be for anyone. We all must suffer like that.

I'm thinking now about the contrast between the days Lindsey Graham and Dolly Parton died. Virtually no one had a single bad thing to say about the latter. We're all going to die but – as I wrote here – I think the only thing is to try live your life in such a way that no one wishes you gone.

I quite liked this piece by Rahawa Haile.

"For those of us not born to wealth, conviction is our greatest fortune. Dolly never squandered hers. Her values were clear: Pay your union dues, stand with labor, love the castaways, put money directly in people’s pockets. Make great art (and own your work). Share books freely. Uplift the land as the land has lifted and lifted you. Higher still, even. And help the people climb."

For more reading on Dolly please see Natalie Weiner here:

Or here:

Niko Stratis also has a lovely piece on Dolly and her mother here:

When I was young, never to be old, music was something that came with stories told by my mom in her kitchen. I write little notes in the app on my phone about the silence and the cicadas. I think about Dolly being gone. I make coffee and move through our apartment, Bowie is asleep in his bed, the cats the same, and I’m alone but not really alone. Dolly on the stereo. I text Lysh to tell her the sad news, then my mom, who did not call me back but does respond to my text with a heart emoji. We text back and forth about her, about her music, about how my mom saw Linda Ronstadt once, a story she has told me countless times before. I will listen to it again, I will listen to all of them forever if I could. I will absolutely be annoyed at times about her repeating stories, and I will miss them when they’re gone. It will destroy me when the stories stop.

I called my parents too the other night when I heard the news. Of course they both had heard. Of course they both were sad. I listened as they told me a couple of stories about her life as reflected through their own lives even ones I already knew the endings of. Like this great punchline about refusing to sign over publishing rights to Elvis when he wanted to record I Will Always Love You.

When the 1974 recording of the song reached number one on the country charts, Elvis Presley indicated that he wanted to record the song. Parton was interested until Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told her that it was standard procedure for the songwriter to sign over half of the publishing rights to any song Elvis recorded. Parton refused. She recalls:

I said, 'I'm really sorry,' and I cried all night. I mean, it was like the worst thing. You know, it's like, 'Oh, my God… Elvis Presley.' And other people were saying, 'You're nuts. It's Elvis Presley.' […] I said, 'I can't do that. Something in my heart says, Don't do that .' And I just didn't do it[…] He would have killed it. But anyway, so he didn't. Then when Whitney [Houston's version] came out, I made enough money to buy Graceland.

We're probably going to do a Dolly Parton week at Flaming Hydra next week. Maybe I'll write more then. In the meantime I'll be listening to this.

Speaking of Flaming Hydra the next edition of the print magazine will be shipped out soon. It looks so good! This one is about the end of Gawker. For my contribution AJ and I went back to an interview we did years ago and annotated it. Older versions of ourselves commenting on the things we said earlier.

I would like to make sure that another sad passing does not go unnoticed. Soraya Roberts was a long time online pal and respected colleague and she also left us this week.

You can find much of her recent work highlighted anew at Defector right now. She was a talented writer and a critic of taste. Most importantly for me we shared a strident anger over the years about how freelancers are treated in this business and would both speak out against it regularly.

Soraya's former partner and Hell World contributor Corey Atad has written a beautiful and moving piece about her life and work here:

Paid subscribers can keep reading for more from me down below. Thank you for being here.

Here's a newish poem for the road.

Hospitality

Four pigs waddled into the restaurant and let the wooden door slam shut behind them on its rickety hinges. The clap startled the dinner crowd. They tucked their fat asses into a booth without asking and began ordering the hostess around. Just a minute she said heading back toward the kitchen to consult with her grandmother. Their stench spread like poison throughout a room that had a moment ago smelled of peppers and cooking oil. Desecrating a place of community. There's one just like it where you live too. In almost every town in the country. We love their food here so much. Our food. They laughed amongst themselves about whatever it is hogs find funny and waited impatiently for the staff to prepare their meal and to serve it with eyes down all the while knowing that they were shortly going to ruin as many of their lives as they could. On full stomachs. The dishwasher had already left so the owner was in the weeds now trying to catch up. The cook’s hands grasping his knife unsteadily. Praying to God. Not Jesus today but one of the meaner ones. They have laws against this. Every person knows that. In every culture throughout human history we have had laws written and unwritten about this exact thing. Not here though. The blender behind the bar had stopped whirring.

Oh my god dude you have got to watch this video loooolllll holy shit. What in the world are they thinking?

About a year ago I started looking at digital cameras. I describe myself as a perpetual hobbyist because I love trying out new things. I wanted to take a photography class, and the good classes near my house required a fancy camera. The hobby would've had a practical purpose. Most of the photos on be the future are ones I've taken over many years. I'm starting to feel like I've run out. It's taken me a year because I'm allergic to impulsive purchases (except for tinned fish). But the thought lingered; the tabs piled up. I wanted a camera that wasn't attached to the distraction machine in my pocket.

Like a good number of Gen Zers, I've grown disenchanted by my phone's camera. It's convenient but not intentional. Or I'll go days without realizing I haven't taken any photos. My phone comes out but I'm as likely to check my email as I am to take a picture. It didn't take me long (a year lol) to realize that I didn't need to spend over a grand to buy the camera I wanted. I didn't need a fancy expensive DSLR with interchangeable lenses. A decade-old point-and-shoot gives me a camera I can bring everywhere at a fraction of the cost. I bought one about a week ago. It's so much fun to use!

storytelling

Why was a camera so important to me? Photography fixes a moment in time. Light enters the lens like a rudimentary eye. The film or digital sensor collects an imprint of the light that reaches it. But photography is not impartial—it's an art form, impressionistic. We decide what to focus on. We choose the angle, the lighting, whether we want our subjects to pose or act natural. AI smoothing and digital effects are now native to phone cameras. Before them, retouching and other analog tricks accomplished the same thing. With these tools we can even appear to edit reality itself. David Levi Strauss writes, "We manipulate images, in part, to obscure how much they are manipulating us." These manipulations are choices. Every time when we take a picture, we choose what to remember and how to remember it.

the sum of memory

Photos tell a story in ways that extend beyond the artifact itself. A collection of photos can carry memories of an entire age. They can speak to a life or a fragment of one. My archive of pictures, sorted in date stamped folders, speak volumes to me now. They tell stories of cooperation, friendship, family, distance, and solitude. Given enough time, my photos become my memories. They keep a record of days I might otherwise forget. They fix in time the people I filled my life with, the ones I spent those days with. I hope I have many memories left to make. I'm grateful to have found another small way to remember them.

It was all so slippery. The way it went down; the way it sounded, too. Just when you thought you had a grip on Frank Ocean, he slid through your fingers and vanished, leaving behind nothing but a cloud of smoke and streaks of light. Elusiveness is his nature, his essence, and yet so is profound emotional resonance. It’s what made Blonde so alluring back then, and why an album defined by impermanence has so powerfully endured.

The post <em>Blonde</em> Turns 10 appeared first on Stereogum.

Imagine that you have a nation that is one thousand square miles in size. Ninety percent of the nation is taken up by a city of ten million people. The other ten percent is empty desert and wilderness, populated only by a grizzled hermit named Jim. Tasked with inventing a representative political system for this country, you say, “Well, looks like there are two areas here, so I’ll draw a line between the city and Jim’s land, and I’ll give each an equal number of representatives. When the ten million city people want something they will have to negotiate with Jim, who has a power equal to all of them combined.”

Stupid, right? Yes. This is the United States Senate. This is quite literally the design of the U.S. Senate. The state of Wyoming, with 590,000 residents, has two Senators, and the state of California, with 39 million residents, also has two Senators. Every citizen of Wyoming has, proportionally, 66 times more representation in the Senate than each citizen of California. If you believe in “one person, one vote”—this is the opposite of that. The design of the Senate is inherently (and purposely) not just undemocratic but anti-democratic. Anyone who favors small-d democracy and believes that all people are created equal and deserve equal political representation must wish for the abolition of the Senate, which serves to act in opposition to those principles.

Sometimes, people will say “Well each state deserves equal representation,” as a way of defending the Senate’s existence. This is the sort of propaganda that they teach you in elementary school so that you are never required to think deeply about the flaws of your nation if you don’t want to. Really? Each little state drawn on the map, no matter how small or large, no matter how absurd the reasons for its existence, deserves equal representation? Is that what our political system is for—to represent dirt and rocks, rather than people? We have “balance out” the “urban” priorities of large states with the “rural” priorities of small states? This is just nonsense. Look closely: Do the rocks vote? Does the dirt vote? Do the squirrels and deer vote? No, they do not. Not even in Wyoming. The people vote. It’s just that each person in a less populated state is awarded far more power than each person in a more populous state. In other words, the Senate is not some sort of wise balancing system for representing culture and environment; it is, like all political systems, a system for representing people. It just does its job in a biased, irrational, and harmful way.

Each state deserves equal power? Rhode Island, at 1,545 square miles, gets the same number of Senators as Alaska, at 665,384 square miles. This idiot argument fails even on its own idiot terms. Also, see what happens when you tell a defender of the Senate as a hallowed institution that you are going to make DC and Puerto Rico states and give Democrats four new Senate seats. Outrage! Oh? The places where we murdered all the natives and made up imaginary lines and called them “states” are absolutely sacred up until the year 2026 but must never be altered after that because of… history?

The discussion you will hear on this topic tends to be quite shallow.

Want to know a representative political system that makes more sense? We have one! The House of Representatives. There are 435 reps there and they each represent an equal number of people. It is fair. As the population of the country grows, the number of people that each member represents grows equally. In order to improve the quality of representation, some people advocate expanding the number of representatives in the House. That would be fine. Each member would still be representing an equal number of citizens. See how that works? Equality. Democracy. Basic stuff here.

The fact that the unequal, unrepresentative, and undemocratic Senate sits in a position above the equal and democratic House of Representatives is clearly detrimental to the ability of our political system to give each citizen equal representation and political rights and power. It is anti-democratic. No big surprise, of course—the Senate was created to be anti-democratic, to give the ruling class of the late 1700s a way to disempower the masses in our fledgling democracy. The founders were very open about this. They did not believe in true democracy. Other evidence of their hostility to democracy is the Electoral College, the fact that they did not let women vote, and the fact that they did not let black people vote but did allow black people to be owned as slaves. Some of those atrocious elements of America’s design at its founding have been corrected since then, and some have not.

If you go back far enough in US history it was considered crazy to say that slavery should be abolished, and it was considered wacky to say that women deserved the vote, and it was considered ridiculous to say that voting power should not discriminate by race. Eventually the movements to change those things succeeded and now we look back on the establishment that opposed those changes as the real fools. The design of the Senate is just as obviously anti-democratic as those things, and if we ever get around to abolishing the Senate in the name of improving our democracy, future generations will look at its existence as just another flawed and prejudicial black mark on American history that it took us a long, long time to rise above.

You do not need to be some brilliant political theorist to understand all of this. You just have to genuinely believe in democracy and the equality of all citizens, and then to look at the design and function of the Senate, and then try a teeny tiny bit to free your mind from the the contents of public school social studies textbooks and 4th of July speeches that may have lodged inside there. Every honest person who has thought about it for more than two seconds either A) understands the flawed nature of the Senate and that our democracy would be strengthened if the Senate did not exist, B) understands the flawed nature of the Senate but does not actually want to have a fair democracy in America and therefore supports the anti-democratic function of the Senate, or C) is dumb and/ or lying.

That’s all of the possibilities. A lot of regular people have never spent much time thinking about this, which is fine. A lot of other people are politically and ideologically hostile to the principles of democracy, and therefore favor the existence of the Senate as a way to hobble the power of the masses. This is not fine—it’s dictatorial, elitist, and is the sort of thing that we allegedly had a revolution here to overcome—but it is, I guess, honest. What is neither fine nor honest is to stand up and argue that the Senate is good for our democracy and that anyone calling for the abolition of the Senate is wacky and ridiculous and dumb. Whenever you hear this, I advise you to just imagine fat guys with mustaches and cigars in the late 1800s arguing against the enfranchisement of women, for many of the same reasons.

This is a topic on which there is not really much new to say, on a theoretical level. The Senate is plainly an institution that makes our government worse and the sooner we can get rid of it, the better. Victor Berger, a socialist member of the House of Representatives, introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate in 1911. There has been no reason for anyone to find this position shocking for more than 100 years. Hell, this is all so rudimentary that even a Gawker blogger was calling to abolish the Senate a decade ago.

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So why am I wasting all of our time rehashing this? Because, recently, it came to the attention of professional political operatives and then to the attention of some of the shallowest political thinkers of America, all of whom are employed by major media outlets, that the Democratic Socialists of America want to abolish the Senate. Since DSA is having electoral political success right now, that means that many news outlets now preface their discussions of DSA with the factoid that they want to abolish the Senate, presented in a context that implies that it is a wacky and extremist far left position. Worse, the true professional propagandists who work at places like the Washington Post editorial board take this as an opportunity to metaphorically place their hands on their face in the manner of Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone” and shriek that Angie Nixon has won a Senate primary and yet she is a member of DSA and DSA wants to abolish the Senate and isn’t that crazy??????

As someone who has been professionally obligated to read things like this for decades now, I have developed a robust immune reaction that protects me from this sort of penny ante sophistry written by guys who like to masturbate to the idea of shaking Jeff Bezos’s hand. (The quality of right wing opinion writing on offer at house organs like the WSJ and Washington Post editorial pages today in fact gives me great optimism for socialism, because our intellectual opponents seem capable of building little more than straw houses in the face of our mighty wind.) Yet I know that, as with many structural issues, the fact that much of the general public has not given this much thought until now may allow them to be easily swayed by shallow bullshit.

So let us all be clear about this: The Senate is anti-democratic by design, it gives much greater power to citizens of small and rural states than to citizens of large and populous states for no rational reason, and our political system would be fairer and more democratic if the Senate were abolished. Does that mean it is going to happen soon? No. Does that mean that it is hypocritical for a socialist to win a Senate seat? No. The long path to reforming our system will ultimately require gaining the support of many people in the Senate. As long as the Senate exists, we need to fight for power there. All of this is pretty straightforward.

What is grating is that the group of people—politicians, political theorists, pundits, the political media—who are responsible for creating a healthy public conversation about the quality of our political system instead become either party hacks or get their jobs just by being good at having beautiful hair on television and therefore act all shocked and discombobulated at the common sense suggestion that we should reform our political system where it is flawed. Jesus, it’s so tedious. If you are paid to discuss this stuff for the public please stop being a lying asshole or smug prick about it. Thank you.

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• Related reading: Abolish the Electoral College (And the US Senate) [2012]; Fight Inequality: Abolish the Senate [2015]; Well We Still Haven’t Done Anything About the Electoral College; People Don’t Know Anything About the Government.

• In December of 2024, I published an interview with Heather Hardy, a professional boxer from Brooklyn who is suffering from traumatic brain injury as a result of her fighting career. It is a challenge for Heather to support herself as a boxing trainer now, given her ongoing health issues. She recently put up a GoFundMe to help with her living costs, and I know that any and all donations would be greatly appreciated. Many How Things Work readers asked how to donate to Heather after reading our interview. Here is your chance.

• The idiot Washington Post editorial page is supported by a billionaire and the Wall Street Journal editorial page is supported by Wall Street, but the How Things Work editorial page is only supported by the people. We are able to publish and I am able to pay my bills only because people just like you become paid subscribers. I hope you’ll consider clicking the button below and doing that now. Together we will prevail, my friends.

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The “Queen of Country” Dolly Parton has died in Nashville, Tennessee, her family announced on Tuesday. The music icon was 80.

“After bravely facing a brief battle with cancer, Dolly departed her Earthly life today at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center surrounded by loved ones,” Parton’s publicist, Marcel Pariseau, said Tuesday.

Parton’s death reverberated across her home state, including among Black lawmakers who celebrated her artistry and unwavering devotion to Tennessee.

“Tennessee has lost a legend,” Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson said Tuesday. “Dolly Parton was an extraordinary songwriter, singer, music icon, a Tennessee hero, and someone who never lost touch with her Tennessee roots.”

Pearson added that Parton, known for her platinum wigs and her wit, “was as generous as she was gifted, providing millions of books to children through her Imagination Library and giving to causes dear to her heart.”

Yet Parton’s reach extended far beyond Tennessee — and far beyond country music. Her impact spanned genres and generations, making an undeniable mark on Black life and culture.

Whitney Houston

Houston, beloved as The Voice, famously covered Parton’s song, “I Will Always Love You,” for The Bodyguard in 1992. Her rendition topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 14 weeks. Parton later revealed in 2021 that she used some of the royalties from Houston’s version to invest in a historically Black Nashville neighborhood.

Beyoncé

Parton’s influence is all over Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning 2024 album, Cowboy Carter. Beyoncé reimagines the Parton classic “Jolene,” features the country legend on the spoken-word interlude “Dolly P,” and includes her in a cameo at the beginning of “Tyrant.”

Lil Nas X

During a performance in 2021, Lil Nas X put his own spin on “Jolene,” singing Parton’s original without changing the pronouns used in the lyrics. A longtime LGBTQ rights advocate, Parton praised the rapper, saying that she was “honored and flattered” by his take on her tune.

Pras, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and Mýa

For 1998’s “Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are),” Pras teamed up with Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Mýa. The worldwide smash interpolates the melody of “Islands in the Stream,” the 1983 hit by Parton and Kenny Rogers.

The post Dolly Parton Made an Undeniable Mark on Black Culture appeared first on Capital B News.