The Sorensen Monologues
A Smaller Tent
In my experience, Dems do better when they at least acknowledge the concerns of different factions of the Big Tent. In 2004, during the height of Iraq war jingoism, they were at their milquetoast Republican-lite worst — and Kerry lost to Bush. This era was was formational to me as a cartoonist; it was a time when many were galvanized to build a more progressive party that reflected its own constituents. My growing concern with the Democratic party this election season isn’t coming from a place of “purity” per se, but fears that they are underestimating the risk of alienating voters they need to win — not fringe zealots, but people who care about the basic values of human rights, democracy, inclusivity, and intellectual honesty. Republican-lite pandering makes the party less able to deal with the pressing issues of our time: the Supreme Court, big money in politics, authoritarianism, and other crises that require the courage to speak frankly. Cede too much ground and you’ve lost moral clarity and moral authority.
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Are You Experienced?
At some point, marketers began slapping the words “curated experience” on just about anything. An internet search brings up nice hotel rooms in Nigeria, a visit with coconut shell carvers in the Andaman islands, countless restaurants, event planners billing themselves as “Experience Curators,” advice for realtors on creating curated experiences for their clients (that is, figuring out what they really need)… the list goes on. Today, “curated” simply means that someone or more likely something — such as an AI algorithm — picked stuff, while experience has become so vague that it refers to every waking moment, which isn’t saying much.
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Billionaires Fund Human Intelligence
AI technology has spread into every nook and cranny of digital life with alarming speed. Now Apple has just announced they’re getting in on the game. So much of it feels like gilding the lily, adding unnecessary bloat to things that worked well enough already. I’m not the first to make this comparison, but AI-assisted software reminds me of Clippy, the famously annoying animated paperclip from Microsoft Word who constantly offered unwanted help. And the models are being trained on the stolen work of artists and writers who are already struggling to find new ways of earning a living. While I’m sure there are some narrower areas where AI is useful, much of it seems like Silicon Valley cloaking self-interest in the language of altruism.
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Shell Game
I had to simplify the story of Red Lobster’s bankruptcy a bit for the cartoon, so for further details I recommend this piece by Gretchen Morgenson. So many headlines refer to the endless shrimp deal because it sounds like something that would drive a company into bankruptcy, and it makes for a funny, clickable story. But those losses were a drop in the bucket compared to the plundering by the private equity firm, Golden Gate Capital. The landlord that they sold the properties to, American Realty Capital Partners, leased the stores back at above-market rates, placing a heavy burden on the restaurant chain. (In 2020, Golden Gate sold Red Lobster off to the seafood company that provided the shrimp, which is another story of self-dealing.)
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Upside-down Alito
Alito blamed the upside-down flag on his wife, but as others have pointed out, he didn’t apologize or distance himself from the symbol used at a deadly attack on the Capitol just eleven days earlier. Any decent person would at least have said “I’m very sorry this happened. I strongly condemn the false claim that the election was stolen in 2020 as well as the violent insurrection of January 6.” Yet here we are with no mechanism to get rid of him, with Democrats unwilling to overtly call for his ouster and a fascism-normalizing chattering class that would chastise them if they did.
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The Great Regression
Like many Americans, I marvel at the speed with which we went from the historic election of Barack Obama to the brink of fascism. Clearly these events are not unrelated; racial resentment exploded in reaction to Obama’s presidency. But this moment of reactionary politics goes well beyond that historical first and now seems to permeate every aspect of life, anywhere some degree of social progress has been achieved. What we’re seeing is a broad-based backsliding on many fronts, with rights that took decades to achieve — or even hundreds of years — disappearing before our eyes. It’s important to keep in mind that this is largely a top-down movement, driven by billionaires and corporate interests. Plenty of them are lining up behind Trump.
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Growing Hypocrisy
I’ve noticed that some people who seem fine with rampant development — and in some cases have profited mightily from it — suddenly become very concerned about growth when the need to build affordable housing arises in their own neighborhood. I do think that growth without any thought to the kind of dense development being created can also be a disaster. Are the new buildings ugly and so cheaply constructed that residents can hear everything their neighbors do through the walls? Are we allowing vehicle size to increase enormously at the same time we are trying to put people in ever denser spaces where they walk and bike? Are we regulating vehicle noise (and leaf blowers!) so people can live and sleep in these denser spaces? Are we keeping some nature? It seems to me that we need to do a number of things differently if we are to create livable cities that accommodate more people.
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Where’s the Crisis?
Only a few weeks ago, the world was aghast at Israel’s killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in three separate vehicles, and an investigation revealed the IDF’s AI targeting system that tolerated enormous numbers of civilian casualties. It’s no mystery why students are protesting. While many politicians and journalists vilified the protesters and openly discussed denying them future employment, displaced Gazans in Rafah thanked them with signs and spray paint graffiti on the sides of their tents. One such message read “Thank you, students in solidarity with Gaza. Your message has reached (us).” Yet in American media coverage, the fact that these kids are protesting is treated like the far greater crisis, worse than the actual death and destruction being rained down on real human beings.
Since I finished this cartoon, people occupied a building at Columbia, and pro-Palestinian students at UCLA were violently attacked by counterprotesters — it’s hard to keep up with the news cycle.
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Virtual Spring
I truly don’t understand how anyone accepts the constant wailing of leaf blowers as normal. It’s like sitting on a plane with a screaming baby, except an internal combustion baby. I read a little while ago that Portland, Oregon is phasing out gas-powered leaf blowers starting in 2026, with the goal of “improving public health and quality of life for landscape workers and other residents.” Now THAT’S civilized.
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America’s Most Wanted Librarians
GOP-controlled statehouses have been cranking out reams of preposterous and frightening library legislation. One proposed bill in Louisiana, HB 777, would make it a crime for librarians to use public funds to join the American Librarian Association or attend an ALA conference, punishable with prison time and hard labor for up to two years. I think Deborah Caldwell-Stone of the ALA put it best: “This is not a culture war; it’s a threat to our democracy.”
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If media talked about the donor class the way it talks about college students
Insulting college students is part of a long history of right-wing demonization of academia. Many current pundits, appealing to a lefty-hating donor class, continue this long tradition. It seems like hardly a day goes by without a hand-wringing article about those CRAZY COLLEGE KIDS appearing somewhere in the mainstream press. Obviously there’s been tension over the last year due to the Israel-Gaza conflict, including some ugly incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia that should be condemned. But to take a wider lens, it seems to me that college protesters have mostly been on the right side of history — from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War to apartheid in South Africa. The draconian crackdown on student protests by university administrators (and the doxxing and bullying we’ve seen from right-leaning donors over this and other issues) has been an appalling attack on the First Amendment.
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The Dirty Food Dilemma
This Guardian article lists various foods that tend to be high in toxic PFAS, commonly known as “forever chemicals,” which are used to make products stain- and water-resistant. To quote from the report, “Among the main sources of food contamination are tainted water, greaseproof food wrappers, some plastics, pesticides, or farms where PFAS-tainted sewage sludge is spread as fertilizer.” As for microplastics, where to begin? They’re everywhere, from human placentas to the oceans to Mount Everest.
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