This is Newport Folk Festival weekend, so I won’t be around for the comments here until later. Next week will be the recap of the festival. As I didn’t have a lot of time in Chile for writing these posts, I still had one show from May that I had not discussed. When I went to see my brother in Texas in May, I saw that Max Stalling was playing at Dan’s Silver Leaf in Denton. Now, Dan’s is one of those great places that is everything good about Texas. It basically hasn’t changed in 20 years either. It’s still the home of cheap beer, smoking on the patio, and the best singer-songwriter Texan music that exists. I saw James McMurtry there. I saw Dale Watson there. I saw Turnpike Troubadours there when they were just another semi-popular Texas band. Enough of this type of artist still rises up too that it’s not just ancient singers holding on like at a lot of folk spaces. Max Stalling is just one of those guys who is a big deal in Texas and almost totally unknown outside of it, a very fine singer and songwriter making damned fine country music, in tandem with his wife Heather on fiddle and a quite good band. The opener was super fun too, Matt Hillyer, the singer of Eleven Hundred Springs, almost the prototypical Texas band that never made it outside of Texas but played forever inside the state. A show like that, it’s basically the best of what Texas offers to the world.

Other News:

I’ve seen a few music documentaries recently worth discussing. I have never been a fan of Brian Eno or his work or that whole scene, but I didn’t regret watching Gary Hustwit’s recent documentary on him. The documentary is called a “generative documentary” in that some of the film changes each time you watch it based on a random number generator. This seems incredibly dumb to me though evidently it really does take several viewings to see most of the scenes. Once seems enough for my purposes. But I guess it represents a kind of spirit of Eno messing around with electronics and in fact, he wanted the film this way because of course he did. What’s more interesting about the film to me is the inability by Eno or Bowie or anyone else to describe exactly what it is that Eno ever did. He’s just kind of a spirit or a house intellectual. He doesn’t really play a lot and certainly never played a lot of notes when he did. But who could possibly overstate his influence on culture in the last 50 years? He’s an interesting guy, if nothing else. And for me, really it doesn’t go too far beyond that.

I also watched This Ain’t No Mouse Music, the 2013 Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon documentary about Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz, who was one of these massive American folk music obsessives from the early 60s who decided he needed to record everyone he could and save all this old culture. A German immigrant, he brings a certain sense of, er, purity culture to it all. Yeah, he festishized the fuck out of American folkways. But he also found Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins, did an enormous amount of work to save old conjunto records from the border region, helped make relative stars of Clifton Chenier and Flaco Jimenez, I mean you take him being a total crank for all this. And he was definitely a total crank and pretty clearly a gigantic asshole when he didn’t get his way, the film doesn’t even pretend to hide this. Of course, lots of commentary from other musicians about him in the film.

Finally, I watched Kavery Dutta Kaul’s 1988 film One Hand Don’t Clap, about the calypso scene in Trinidad, mostly around Lord Kitchener but also some around Calypso Rose. It’s alright as a film. I’m not a huge calypso guy and the material on the socio/cultural side of all this is a bit more marginal to it than I’d like, so I’d say this is basically OK, with some good footage and some spirited performances. But it’s really better for active fans of the music than your more casual viewer, like me.

Joe Melson, Roy Orbison’s songwriting partner who cowrote “Only the Lonely,” among other songs, died at 91. That’s kind of the perfect song.

If you are a Gen X person and want to feel real old, Dave Kendall, host of 120 Minutes, died at 63. Also, I confess that I never had really thought about the musicians behind “The Pink Panther” soundtrack, other than Henry Mancini of course, but Plas Johnson, who played the iconic saxophone for it, died at 94.

So this is pretty cool–the entirely of shows I have been to being released as a live recording is one William Parker song off The Peach Orchard. But now, the Joel Harrison-led version of In a Silent Way from Big Ears 2025 has been released on Bandcamp. My God this was a great show, one of the all-time highlights of live shows in my life. So I am glad to be able to buy it!

This week’s playlist:

1. Brandi Carlisle, The Firewatcher’s Daughter
2. Palace Brothers, There Is No-One What Would Take Care of You
3. Joe Ely, Live at Liberty Lunch
4. Emily Scott Robinson, Appalachia
5. Margo Price, All American Made
6. Nicholas Hodges/Fred Sherry/London Symphony Orchestra, The Music of Elliott Carter, Vol. 7
7. Quantic/Alice Russell, Look Around the Corner
8. S.G. Goodman, Planting by the Signs
9. Nico Segal, Surf
10. Mourn, Self Worth
11. Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose
12. Harriet Tubman/Georgia Anne Muldrow, Electrical Field of Love
13. Priests, Bodies and Control and Money and Power
14. Buddy and Julie Miller, In the Throes
15. Charlotte Gainsbourg, IRM
16. Sharon Van Etten and the Attachment Theory, self-titled
17. Whitney Rose, Rosie
18. Max Roach, We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite
19. Neil Young, Hitchhiker
20. Dave Rawlings Machine, Nashville Obsolete
21. Leonard Cohen, Ten New Songs
22. Jim & Jennie & The Pinetops, One More in the Cabin
23. Missy Raines & Allegheny, Love & Trouble
24. The Alan Lomax Collection, Vol. 1
25. Charlie Rich, Behind Closed Doors
26. Jose Gonzalez, Veneer
27. Tropical Fuck Storm, Brain Drops
28. Empress Of, I’m Your Empress Of
29. Sun Mi-Hong, Fourth Page: Meaning of a Nest
30. Django Reinhardt, Djangology 49
31. McCoy Tyner, Together
32. Buddy Tabor, Writing on Stone
33. Led Zeppelin, IV
34. Ken Pomeroy, Cruel Joke
35. Tom T. Hall, The Storyteller
36. Mitski, Laurel Hell
37. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life, disc 1
38. John Coltrane, Giant Steps
39. Bill Frisell, Floratone
40. Dave, Psychodrama
41. Chris Stapleton, Traveller
42. Hank Thompson, Seven Decades
43. Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, De Facto
44. Loudon Wainwright III, Unrequited
45. Eric Taylor, self-titled
46. Sunny Sweeney, Trophy
47. Christopher Paul Stelling, Itinerant Arias
48. Gary Stewart, The Essential
49. Bonnie Prince Billy, We Are Together Again
50. Bobby Bare, The Winner and Other Losers
51. Merle Haggard & Bonnie Owens, Just Between the Two of Us

Album Reviews, something of a Newport Folk Festival prep week for me:

Feeble Little Horse, Bitknot

I’m not going to make any huge claims that this Pittsburgh band is a great rock outfit exactly but I do like them quite a bit. Lydia Slocum is a very good vocalist and I do like the juxtaposition between the often singer-songwriter through shoegaze sort of vocals and the very loud rock and roll sound between them. I guess you could say the same thing about MJ Lenderman, who is the prince of indie rock these days, even though I don’t really think he deserves that title. Girl With Fish really got me as the type of rock album I like a lot. Bitknot, the new album, ain’t bad either. The sound is heavier here, which raises the contrast with the vocals. Sometimes, I wish the vocals could match that intensity. The theme: it sucks to be in your 20s. These days, it’s hard to argue with that, not with the horrors the internet and AI have unleashed on the world, subjects of these songs. Ain’t much better in your 50s though, so at least they have that to look forward to.

B

Mavis Staples, Sad and Beautiful World

Any new Mavis Staples album is a treasure. Her voice isn’t what it was 50 years ago, but whose is? She’s still a force and one of the things I treasure her for is her mentorship of young musicians. She is all over Newport Folk, even if she isn’t on the schedule. Last year, I saw her come out and play with Lucius because of course she did. Can you imagine Mavis Staples wanting to sing with you? Must be amazing. Anyway, she doesn’t hide herself away like lot of older musicians or just ignore the present. She doesn’t have some belief that her heyday was the best. She knows that there’s great music now just as there was then and she wants to be part of that.

So one of the really nice things about her new album is that she has great tastes in songs that aren’t just covering another Dylan tune. She starts here totally reworking the Tom Waits song “Chicago.” And then she goes right into a touching version of Kevin Morby’s “Beautiful Strangers,” which is a very nice song both here and on Morby’s album, about gun violence. There’s covers of Sparklehorse’s “Sad and Beautiful World, ” Gillian Welch’s “Hard Times,” Curtis Mayfield’s “We Got to Have Peace,” and then Eddie Hinton’s “Everybody Needs Love” to close the album, a song that got revived by the Drive-By Truckers about 15 years ago. There’s also a new track written by Hozier and Alison Russell. Staples basically rethinks the idea of the Great American Songbook to realize that there are great songs written in the past but there are just as many great songs written today. The band, which includes MJ Lenderman and hosts of other first rate and mostly youngish musicians, is first rate. It’s like the spirit of Newport Folk in one album by one of the greatest artists to ever sing in this nation. Also, good for her to recognize that the old songs are not better than the new songs, and this from a woman who not only loved Dylan’s music but who had a marriage proposal from Bob.

A-

Altun Gün, Garip

I ran across one of this Turkish band based in Amsterdam’s album last year and loved its rock-psych-garage Turkish feel. So when I saw there was a new album, I had to hear it. Turns out it’s pretty damn good! I don’t know that there’s really any big difference than their previous work, but, well, I will say this: I would absolutely prioritze the hell out of seeing this band at Big Ears if there’s any way to make that happen.

A-

Ambrose Akinmusire/Mary Halvorson, Slo-Mo Luminate Hoverings

Akinmusire and Halvorson are two of the real geniuses of contemporary jazz. This is project they’ve worked on for years. Is it OK to say that I don’t find it overly enjoyable? Yeah, it is. It comes down to much of the problem with a lot of duet jazz albums, which is that there’s not much to hold onto except for their rather occasional notes. For me, this is the kind of jazz that feels like an art project more than an album, not because they aren’t great at what they do. They obviously are, the technical skill is obvious. It’s because I just don’t much care to listen this sort of slowish album unless it manages to touch me in some way and this never quite gets there for me, with the exception of the last track on the album, which I thought quite powerful. It’s all good, they both have albums I love and I can listen to those.

B–

Billy Bragg, The Roaring Forty, 1983-2023

Bragg isn’t playing at Newport this year, but the one time I saw him was at Newport, two years ago. My general impression of him, both live and what recordings I’ve heard, is that I like him more in principle than in fact, as agitprop as songwriting can only go so far. So I like the idea of listening to his 40th anniversary collection, which is 40 songs, to set my thoughts on a stronger foundation. I have a few. First, no one should listen to this much Billy Bragg at one time. Second, he sure has grown as a vocalist over the years. His early tracks–many of which include his best songs, such as “St. Swithin’s Day” are pretty rough, which makes sense since his roots are in punk, but the solo voice with electric guitar didn’t always serve him that well. Third, his best songs really are great. Fourth, I never need to hear that version of “The Internationale” again. Or any version, for that matter. Fifth, he has a great knack for writing a political song overnight, but they don’t always hold up. Sixth, he sounds so good with Wilco backing him up on the Mermaid Avenue tracks, most of which are included here. Bragg is in the end not a great artist, but I am glad he is out there. I just need to hear a track now and then rather than whole albums.

B+

Lone Justice, Viva Lone Justice

The early 80s LA scene was incredibly fertile–X, The Blasters, Los Lobos, Concrete Blonde, Dwight Yoakam, Tom Waits as older but still around, all these people were hanging out and learning from each other. One of the greatest, if short-lived, bands from this scene was Lone Justice, the early alt-country outfit helmed by Maria McKee, who would go on to have a good, if not transcendent, solo career. I picked up an EP of there’s called The Western Tapes, which is 20 minutes long and which has become one of most listened to albums. In 2024, the band went back and put this release together from old material updated with some modern dubs. It shows what a band this could have been had Geffen not ruined them, a classic tale of a major label fucking up something great. At times, she sounds like Exene, other times you are hearing fiddle tunes. There’s also a refreshing lack of the brittle 80s production values that were so terrible for bands like this (seriously, of every rootsy/songwriting artist or band who started in the 60s and 70s, who was actually putting out good material in the 80s, other than Richard Thompson? It’s grim). The wide variety of styles here means it doesn’t quite cohere as a great album might, but it’s certainly a fun listen at the least. Plus she has the balls to cover “I Will Always Love You” and does a pretty good job of it because she doesn’t try to hit that Dolly/Whitney high note AND follows it directly with MC5s “Sister Anne.” How can you not love that?

A-

Hayley Williams, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

I like Hayley Williams and her old band Paramore just fine. Why she is closing the Friday set at Newport it an interesting question. By the time this post is published, I will have already decided whether to deal with the traffic jam at the end of the day in order to see this. Probably I won’t. I wouldn’t mind seeing her at all, but you have to then get home like 3 hours later than you would otherwise. It’s a big commitment.

I have little interest in hashing out the meaning of “folk music” in 2026 and Newport has long ago put away Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. So in 2026, I guess Hayley Williams closes a day here because anyone who writes their own songs and plays a guitar is “folk” music. Well, so be it, I suppose.I will say one thing where this makes sense–Williams is a very good songwriter. The title track, about “I’m the biggest star at this racist country singer’s bar/No use shootin’ for the moon, no use chasing waterfalls” is pretty great. The following track, “Hard” is a banger as well. Why can’t folk music be completely contemporary with contemporary production anyway? Don’t ask Chris Strachwitz that though.

B+

As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.

The post Music Notes appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Back during the first Trump administration, I sometimess encountered a subtype of ‘resistance’ Twitter user. I don’t have a clever name for them, but they would occasionally show up in my replies. Their basic shtik, sometimes accompanied by a ‘meme,’ was that Trump was fundamentally illegitimate. The reasons why varied. But the most common was that Russian electoral interference rendered his presidency inherently extralegal. In consequence, they claimed, everything he had done — the laws that he signed, the international agreements he made, and, in particular, his judicial nominations — were null and void. Thus, when Democrats retook power, they could magically undo them.

My typical response can be a summed up by a now-venerable — because the half-life of online mimetic culture is very, very short — ‘reaction .gif’:

Russian election meddling might render Trump’s election illegitimate in a substantive and normative sense. This is what Hilary Clinton meant in a comment that launched a thousand false equivalencies. Despite its violations of campaign-finance laws, I don’t think one can dispute that Trump won a free and fair election — at least by our admittedly decaying standards.

By way of comparison, consider Mitch McConnell’s embargo of Merrick Garland’s nomination and his subsequent handling of the Amy Coney Barrett nomination. The first violated an informal, long-standing process norm; the second violated the rule that supposedly overrode that norm. But McConnell’s actions were lawful. They satisfied narrow, formal criteria for procedural legitimacy. They were also normatively illegitimate. (I don’t think we need to make a complicated argument here about republican values, principles of fairness, or whatever. McConnell himself believed that his actions were illegitimate under controlling norms and principles. Otherwise he would not have felt compelled to invent new, superseding ones.)

There’s also another problem with this niche variant of ‘resistance’ argumentation. There are no plausible mechanisms available for ‘voiding’ an entire presidency. In the case of Trump’s judicial appointments, the Democrats would need 67 votes in the Senate to remove them. If Democrats somehow get there on any given ‘Trump judge,’ it almost certainly would not be on the grounds that the appointments and confirmations were themselves illegitimate.,

Impeachment and conviction are not the equivalent of making a judicial appointment ‘null and void.’ They do not automatically invalidate a judge’s rulings. Nor does the successful impeachment of a president undo the legislation that they signed into law, expunge the executive orders that they implemented, or immediately rehire the civil servants that they fired.

So this sub-genre of ‘resistance’ discourse was a fantasy — one built on an extremely shaky premise. But the fundamental logic was… sound. We are under no obligation to respect either illegitimate practices or the outcome of those practices. Indeed, we have a presumptive, but not absolute, duty to undo them.

At least two of Trump’s first-term Court appointments were and remain normatively illegitimate. This gives future Democratic majorities both the legal and the moral right to respond by unpacking the Court. Indeed, Court unpacking is an appropriate response: it is both feasible and proportional. The Court has two members that lack the authority to compel our behavior. We cannot remove them, but we can ensure that outcomes always depend on the votes of legitimate justices.

More importantly, the first Trump administration did have a legitimacy deficit. The second Trump administration? It long ago forfeited any claim to legitimate rule. Its offenses against the law and the Constitution are too numerous to list here. Each day brings a new betrayal of the public trust, the rules of law, or bedrock republican principles. If you want “evidence” then you can read any number of posts here.

I do want to return to the Supreme Court, though. While it seems clear that an overwhelming majority of Democrats view Trump as illegitimate, people have been slower to reject the Court’s authority. Even many pro-democracy legal elites seem, at least anecdotally, particularly reluctant to give up on the Court. They watch the anomalies accumulate, but they resist changing their paradigm.

But it is imperative that we stop according legitimacy to the Court. The Supreme Court is an existential threat to constitutional democracy. This threat cannot be dismissed as ‘merely’ an ideological disagreement about outcome legitimacy (which, I recognize, is a strange thing to write about an institution that is systematically dismantling the foundations of American electoral democracy. But whatever). The Court has also lost any claim to procedural legitimacy. Which is kind of a problem for the branch of government most dependent upon rational-legal authority.* The Court is quite literally lawless. Justices affirm, or even pen, decisions that rely on incommensurable standards of adjudication. They are contemptuous of long-standing precedents, including ones that have guided decades of legislation. Their opinions are riddled with misrepresentations and fabrications.

The Roberts Court has, in essence, replaced the rule of law with a permanent state of exception — and appointed itself sovereign. Yes, it has often used that power to give legal cover to the Trump administration’s own lawlessness. But that is a symptom of its underlying corruption, not the rot itself.

Once we recognize the fundamental illegitimacy of the Roberts Court — and the threat it poses to democracy and the rule of law — the obvious response is reform: unpacking, stripping, and all the rest. But that’s not enough. We must treat the Roberts Court’s decisions as ‘null and void.” A Court that cares nothing for precedent loses the right to make precedent. The Court can choose to create a state of legal exception. We can honor their choice. We can treat their dictates as exceptional and, by definition, irrelevant to any Court, or any regime, that governs according to the rule of law

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For thirty years, Wenzhou Dinggu Technology Co. made molds for manufacturers of bathroom fittings. In 2018, they decided to do their own thing and lean into design, forming a spin-off called AIM Faucet. The company now does OEM/ODM design and manufacturing for other brands.

The strategy has paid off, and this year the company's won an iF Design Award for their deconstructed three-section kitchen faucet:

The faucet features a tri-sectional rotating system, where the faucet body, connecting arm, and spout move independently. This allows 360° sink coverage, reaching every corner of the sink and handling large pots or containers effortlessly.

Each segment can be adjusted freely, ensuring flexible kitchen faucet operation and eliminating the blind spots typical in conventional faucets.

Beyond its striking aesthetics, the faucet improves efficiency and usability, reducing countertop cleaning frequency while offering a premium dual water flow experience.

The question is: Now that this former moldmaker has bagged a coveted design award, how long until they become a brand in their own right, able to compete with Kohler and Grohe on the global market?

It’s worth having a discussion over Mamdani not dropping his attacks on Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal, saying he would like to arrest Netanyahu upon his entrance to New York, and admitting that while he does not in fact have that power, the U.S. should arrest Netanyahu upon entry to the United States and send him to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Now, this description of Netanyahu is absolutely true, whether you want to dicker about whether what has happened in Gaza is a “genocide” or not. Personally, I think the academic definitions of this term are pretty lame–as a friend of mine who is a scholar of fascism notes, most of the people particularly concerned about this are Holocaust scholars defining everything that was not the Holocaust as not genocide. Fundamentally, genocide is a political term and within that context, the mass deaths of Palestinians in Gaza and the open calls to take over much of that land is ethnic cleansing or genocide or whatever, but it’s deeply evil and should be unacceptable for any nation. A decent country, were we one, would absolutely arrest that war criminal and deliver him over to the same process that Slobodan Milosevic went through, dying in prison.

To me, somewhat more interesting is how uncompromising Mamdani is on this because he knows he has the politics behind him. It’s things like this, as well as the war he’s declared on the Democratic establishment in New York, that has the New York Times conducting interviews with him with barely disguised hostility (the best part of this interview is him asking the interviewer what her favorite park is in the city, she replaying “Central Park of course” and him laughing in her face as a symbol of how out of touch Times people are). Like, he could not say these things at this point and his life would probably be easier. But that’s not what he is going to do. He believes in justice. He can’t run for president because he’s not born in the U.S., but he can be a huge mouthpiece for the left. As of this time, he’s been enormously successful. He clearly sees no personal downside in demanding justice in Gaza, something that no major American politician has been able to articulate for decades. And so far, he’s been right about everything important, at least from a political sense. It’ll be interesting to see how this sort of thing evolves.

The post Mamdani and Netanyahu appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I am not saying this to take any position in the Michigan Senate primary — the candidate I most liked from afar dropped out and I am happy to defer to Michigan voters about the other two — and I don’t mind a little harmless pandering. But this is really not harmless:

• The larger idea that you can fund a Scandinavian-style welfare state by only taxing BILLIONAIRES is a dangerous lie that fundamentally plays into Republican anti-tax tropes. The kind of safety net El-Sayed wants — which includes universal public health insurance more ambitious than Canada’s — requires higher taxes not only on the wealthy but on the middle class.
• Current tax levels aren’t enough to properly sustain even the relatively modest social welfare commitments of the US right now.
• Of all the groups to exempt from tax increases, seniors are the least deserving — this is flat-out upward wealth redistribution on balance. Moreover, providing incentives for seniors to stay in houses that could be used to house young families instead of downsizing is insanely bad housing policy.
• It’s the least important point, but to me there’s something particularly amusingly unserious about “just tax the billionaires” as a universal solvent in the context of local property taxes. Can’t fund schools or police because your property tax base is shrinking? Just tax every billionaire living in Flint or Saginaw! Problem solved!

This is pernicious, reactionary bullshit, and if he’s the nominee I hope someone can convince him to cut it out.

The post The slopulist tendency in American politics appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

If there’s one message that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign to redefine healthy eating has imparted, it’s that Americans need to eat their beef. In January, the health secretary rolled out the new food pyramid—with a marbled rib eye in the pole position. Weeks later, Kennedy modeled good beef-eating behavior, posing for a pic on his 72nd birthday while tucking in to a bone-in steak decked out with candles. In February, he dropped by the trade show CattleCon and begged the assembled ranchers to increase the size of their herds. “I eat beef every day, twice a day,” Kennedy boasted to the hooting crowd.

The secretary’s beef-intensive diet, which is shared by other members of the Cabinet, including Vice President Vance, is informed by the idea that people should be eating as our prehistoric ancestors did. When the Department of Health and Human Services put out its update to the food pyramid, it also published a 90-page document laying out the “scientific foundation” for the new advice. The report cited several papers on the benefits of the Paleo diet. One specifically endorses eating wild game, and argues that every person should strive to change their diet to “become a 21st-century hunter-gatherer.”

This mode of thinking can be traced back to at least the 19th century, but its current incarnation—the version that has wormed its way inside the U.S. government—dates to the 1970s, when the growing plague of heart disease and obesity was starting to receive sustained attention on Capitol Hill. That’s also when a Seattle gastroenterologist named Walter Voegtlin published a pale volume with a drawing of a loincloth-wearing hominid on the cover. His book was called The Stone Age Diet, and on the title page was a modest proclamation: “It’s Safe, It’s Sane, It’s Simple, and It Really Works!”

Voegtlin’s approach to nutrition may not have been any of those things, but it set the model for the glut of Paleo-diet books that were to come. The book laid out its author’s odd ideas and strong opinions, such as his profound loathing of “baleful salads” and especially the garlicky Caesar, which he regarded as a “gastric atrocity.” Beef, on the other hand, is an excellent source of protein, Voegtlin said. He noted that the man who eats a roast-beef sandwich gets all the amino acids he needs while the peanut-butter-sandwich eater does not. But Voegtlin wasn’t wedded to any single flavor of carnivory. In fact, he had some beef misgivings. Eating cows might not be sustainable, he argued, in a world teeming with billions of slavering Homo sapiens.

Perhaps another beast could be used for making hamburgers instead. Voegtlin had a notion: Instead of land cows, we should eat sea cows, or manatees. And he was not the first American scientist—and far from the most famous one—to hit on this very notion. In fact, schemes to radically expand the nation’s deli counter have been a strange motif in U.S. history.

Voegtlin’s book laid out the premise for the modern Paleo diet. According to its basic theory,  Homo sapiens as a species moved so rapidly from hunting and gathering to buying food at supermarkets that our genes never caught up. We’re Stone Agers on the inside, built to eat whatever could be plucked from the bushes or clubbed to death on the savanna, but now we’re marooned in a sickening landscape of nachos and pizza. The goal, for Voegtlin and the people he inspired, was to get back to eating whatever it was that our primitive ancestors ate. The challenge was to figure out what exactly appeared on the caveman food pyramid.

Given the patchy nature of Paleolithic evidence, this matter has provoked many disagreements, which began long before the publication of The Stone Age Diet. In his 1913 book, My Life With the Eskimo, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an Arctic explorer and anthropologist, described how he believed an Inuit community he’d met in Canada’s far North provided a window into the lifestyles and dietary habits of our Stone Age ancestors. Stefansson’s polar adventures made him famous, especially for the all-meat diet he ate while camping in an igloo: seal flipper and whale tongue; raw and boiled caribou; grizzly-bear jerky and polar-bear steaks; blood soup and tallow-dipped ptarmigan feathers; and, on one desperate occasion, his own bootlaces.

[From the November 1945 issue: Vilhjalmur Stefansson reports on the dental benefits of an all-meat diet]

Tales of Stefansson’s gastronomical feats circulated at a moment when Americans were also exploring new kinds of food. The First World War brought meat shortages and a national austerity campaign, launched in 1917, that encouraged “Meatless Tuesdays” and “Porkless Thursdays.” For years, naturalists with the American Museum of Natural History, which funded some of Stefansson’s expeditions, had been arguing that Americans should really eat more whale. During the war, the U.S. government got on board, promoting the consumption of fresh and canned leviathan and explaining that because these sea monsters were mammals, their flesh tasted like beef or venison, not fish. The feds published a bulletin with 32 cetacean recipes, including “Stuffed Roast Whale,” “Whale Croquettes,” and “Corned Porpoise.” And the museum hosted a widely publicized “whale steak luncheon,” which more than one newspaperman described as sweet revenge for poor Jonah.

[Read: I ate whale meat]

Meanwhile, Alexander Graham Bell, the renowned inventor and a co-founder of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, was out with a related plan for solving America’s meat crisis. In a statement published in the Journal of Heredity, Bell suggested that the government should look into the possibility of domesticating manatees. Although Florida lawmakers had recently criminalized the killing of these charismatic animals, which one 1891 children’s-book author had called “as amiable, mild, gentle, playful, kindly a creature as ever drew breath,” Bell noted that the sea cow offered “many points of superiority” over even such a promising candidate for husbandry as the pygmy hippopotamus, which the journal had previously considered. “Dr. Bell wants to see the south dotted with manatee ranches,” The Augusta Herald reported in an article about the idea that included recipes for broiled, stewed, and curried manatee, and explained that the sea cow’s tail was usually pickled and served cold.

This was not a bonkers notion. Manatees had been a coveted food source for the Seminole peoples and for southern Americans extending into even the 20th century. “The fattest, juiciest Tennessee beef is by no means equal to it and I doubt if there is anything in the animal kingdom that is so utterly delicious,” one manatee enthusiast wrote in 1885. Bell’s scheme, presented in a journal devoted to eugenics and geared toward optimizing dietary protein, would later resurface at another moment of food anxiety, when Walter Voegtlin was inventing the Paleo diet in the 1970s.

After training as a doctor and specializing in gastroenterology, Voegtlin had devoted most of his career to trying to find a cure for alcoholism. But on the side he was a nutritional contrarian, arguing in talks that human digestion is better suited to a diet rich in fat and protein than one based on carbohydrates. To prove this point, he cited Stefansson’s tales of Stone Age eating and his own early lab research on dogs.

Voegtlin’s anti-starch opinions spread, at first, on the basis of these lectures. By the 1950s, they were being touted in Prevention, a magazine known for its back-to-nature ethos and openness to vaccine-skeptical views. The Stone Age Diet, his first and only published work on caveman nutrition, did not come out until 1975, just months before his death. Voegtlin saw Mother Nature’s food chain in simple terms: Herbivores eat plants, and carnivores eat herbivores. Humans are in the latter group, with digestive tracts that are “practically identical” to those of dogs, he said. (Voegtlin conceded that omnivores exist, but he argued they are merely “transitional forms.”) But if man is a “pure carnivore,” as Voegtlin claimed, he is flexible as to what kinds of meat ought to go in the tank. Bugs, snails, worms, snakes, leeches, monkeys, lizards, the stomach contents of sharks: All are regarded as delicacies by some human societies, according to the book.

Indeed, for Voegtlin, the future of the species might depend on man’s willingness to broaden his horizons with respect to meat. Writing at a time when concerns about the impending human “population bomb” were widespread, Voegtlin thought the world was not harvesting enough protein to fend off malnutrition. He argued that people might need to start eating up the world’s predators, because they competed with humans for flesh. “There are four thousand tigers left in India and each tiger eats six thousand pounds of meat each year,” Voegtlin noted with alarm. Alligators, crocodiles, lions, tigers, and bears might have to become supper. Ocean predators such as the seal, whale, dolphin, and walrus would be hunted down and made into supermarket steaks. And in the brutal, man-eat-dog world of the book’s imagination, human populations, too, would need to be controlled: Voegtlin proposed that reproduction should be limited to “superior types of individuals” under the watch of an “omnipotent Bureau of World Census.”

As for nature’s mermaid—the gentle, seagrass-chewing sea cow—she might carry on her lineage in water farms, domesticated as a novel form of floating livestock. “This marine mammal, as does its dry land counterpart, eats only vegetation, totally unfit for human consumption,” Voegtlin noted. Sea cows are superior to land cows, Voegtlin suggested, because land cows eat grains, which humans could survive on in a pinch. Since manatees live on baleful sea-salads and don’t deplete the world’s meat supply, they could live alongside humans in peace—until such time as they were ground into meatballs.

Voegtlin’s book did not initially garner much attention. One of its few reviews, in the journal Medical History, described it as full of “opinions that oppose accepted belief and substantiated fact.” Academics who promoted Paleolithic nutrition in the 1980s called for plenty of plant foods in the diet and ignored Voegtlin, perhaps on account of his endorsement of eugenics. But by the time the Paleo world was coalescing online in the ’90s, Voegtlin’s book was cited as a pioneering work. Its message would be channeled through the 2010s as the Paleo lifestyle became associated with zealous meat-eating and an emerging band of popular “meatfluencers.”

But as it turned out, the archaeology would prove Voegtlin wrong: It wasn’t true that Stone Age humans never touched a processed grain. Starch residue found on 30,000-year-old grinding stones indicates that Paleolithic peoples may have eaten bread. Ancient bits of DNA suggest that genes for starch-digesting enzymes might have been proliferating as early as 800,000 years ago, when cave-chefs started roasting primordial potatoes. Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist and the author of a 2013 book that debunked some of Voegtlin’s arguments, recalled how the Paleo community dealt with this evidence that challenged their largely carb-avoidant worldview. “They liked the word tuber,” Zuk told me. “The word tuber was very popular because it sounded more caveman-y.”

[Read: How close are manatees to extinction?]

Even for its time, The Stone Age Diet missed the mark with its sharp dichotomy between herbivores and carnivores (and its bizarre denial of omnivores). These distinctions can be fuzzy: Crocodilians, for example, may eat kumquats and pond apples in the wild, while cows and sheep will snack on baby birds. Even the kindly Florida manatee, connoisseur of bayou seagrass, sometimes flies into a carnivorous rage, snapping up fish and gnashing them in its terrible teeth.

Yet no branch of science has debunked the idea that humans are neglecting lots of opportunities for ingesting animals. Indeed, the notion that we should be eating strange meats has been backed by a range of influential authorities. Voegtlin got his vision of sea-cow cuisine not directly from Bell but from Scientific American, which had proposed that we domesticate not just the manatee but also the “palatable” capybara, and from The Journal of the American Medical Association, which lent its weight to the idea of building enormous blue-whale farms in the Pacific Ocean, fenced in by coral reefs. More recently, advocates of livestock alternatives have zeroed in on smaller animals: In 2013, the United Nations released a report on global food security that argued for the mass cultivation of edible insects. The report noted that various groups have made a habit of consuming beetles, caterpillars, wasps, mealworms, and dragonflies.

I’m not here to suggest that the logic of evidence-based nutrition demands that we consume more manatee meatloaf or chili con capybara or dragonfly dumplings. But there’s something ho-hum about the fact that a norm-breaking MAHA administration, led by a carnivorous health secretary who has boasted that he’s a “very adventurous eater” and will “eat virtually anything,” has stuck so monotonously to beef. It’s not as if beef has been shown to be healthier than any other meat. Examined through a political lens, though, Kennedy’s bovine-forward dietary approach makes perfect sense, Amy Bentley, a food historian, told me. The burger is the quintessential American meal, and beef-related imagery calls to mind the virile cowboys who drove cattle and made America great by filling its larders with sirloin. There’s a resonance between this sentimentality for the Old West and the Paleo-nostalgia that animates the carnivore community, she said, in that both are romantic fantasies about a time when men were unapologetic warriors. “When gender roles are being questioned, there’s often renewed interest in the vitality-giving properties of animal flesh,” Adrienne Bitar, a food scholar who has written about Voegtlin, told me.

Proposals to put manatees or mealworms on the food pyramid would face challenges. On the left, a plan to farm sea cows would enrage conservationists, even though Trichechus manatus has in recent years been downgraded from “endangered” to “threatened.” On the right, the UN’s edible-insect report sparked an “I will not eat the bugs” campaign from skeptics of climate-driven policies. Perhaps that’s why, for all of the MAHA bluster about remaking the American diet, the architects of our new dietary guidelines have turned out to be picky eaters when it comes to meat. We’re all a bit afraid to try new things. That tendency, which may have been with us since the Stone Age, today serves the interests of our cumbersome friends in the Florida Everglades. For now, at least, pickled manatee tail is off the table.