"The 21st Century is starting now..."

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One cool part of this job is that I get to talk to people whose writing — and thinking — I really admire.

At the top of that list is Steven Hyden, the author of the “Evil Speakers” Substack (and the forthcoming book about The Strokes — among other things — called “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of the Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll).”

Yes, Steven is by trade a music critic. But, at root, he’s an analyst of our culture — where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going.

Steven writes about the culture through the lens of music. I write about it through the lens of politics. But we often arrive at similar conclusions.

Which, to me, is very cool!

Steven and I initially scheduled Thursday’s Substack Live chat so we could go over his picks for the best music of 2026 (so far). Which we did!

But he said something amid our chat that really struck me as deep — and right. I wanted to share it:

I started feeling like last year that the 21st century is really starting now. Like the things that carried over from the 20th century, you really feel like, oh yeah, like these things that I thought would always be around, they’re going away. Yeah. And they’re being replaced by something else and we don’t know what it is.

That is EXACTLY what I wrote about last week in response to the Gallup polling about the decline of institutional trust (and the lack of anything to replace it…yet).

Anyway, I think our whole chat is worth your time.

We covered critics of music critics, whether I need to get into Rush, Noah Kahan, Olivia Rodrigo and, yes, Steven’s favorite music from the first six months of the year.

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