Ted Gioia
Published 5 Nov 2018This is the latest installment in a series of informal, unscripted videos featuring music historian Ted Gioia. In this video, Gioia talks about the legacy of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. For more information on Ted Gioia, visit his website at http://www.tedgioia.com or follow him on Twitter at / tedgioia
September 25, 2026
John Coltrane, Prophet and Seer
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How True was Lord of War? Surplus from the Warsaw Pact (w/ Val Forgett)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 May 2026When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a gold rush for the surplus guns held by all the various newly independent republics, as well as the Warsaw Pact nations. Lord of War is not far off … and Val Forgett was there, bringing guns into the US for Navy Arms.
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September 24, 2026
More than you ever wanted to know about the Teapot Dome scandal
At The Grim Historian, Carlyn Beccia has a long, long post about the scandal that (probably) killed President Harding: the Teapot Dome scandal.
“The Teapot Dome scandal” by Clifford Berryman, 1924
Granger Collection
Washington, 1922. Somewhere around H Street, a piano is still playing after midnight. The car turns off the avenue and slows outside a townhouse with the shades already drawn.
Warren Harding steps onto the sidewalk. Presidential seal on the door he just closed. Another beautiful woman on his arm, history declined to name. He doesn’t look around. He doesn’t have to.
Warren Harding is handsome. Everybody always says so. He was a notorious ladies’ man, carried on a fifteen-year affair with one married woman, fathered a child with another, and left historians enough love letters that we know far too many bawdy details about “Jerry”. (Jerry was the nickname he gave his penis.)
[…]
Either way, Harding’s genial personality probably helped. Harding liked people, people liked Harding. He had what the kids call the rizz. (Or so Jerry claimed.) And he must have had some charisma because 1920 voters handed him one of the biggest landslide victories in American history.
Now, Harding liked bringing his buddies along for the ride. Men seeking government jobs drifted through the rooms alongside men who already had them.
Attorney General Harry Daugherty is here. Daugherty is Harding’s longtime political manager and friend. Daugherty would soon become engulfed in investigations involving influence peddling and government property, and would refuse to surrender records to Senate investigators. Calvin Coolidge eventually forced him out. He later stood trial twice on charges of defrauding the government. Neither trial produced a conviction.
Harding’s unofficial fixer, Jess Smith, was there too. He technically held no federal office but nevertheless had a desk and room inside the Justice Department, used official stationery, dictated to department secretaries, carried government files, and gave orders people obeyed. Jess Smith died by suicide in 1923 while corruption allegations were swirling around the Justice Department.
The cluster of men who swarmed around Harding became known as the Ohio Gang?—?old political friends, poker companions, fixers and assorted hangers-on who had followed him to Washington and discovered that federal office came with considerably better party favors.
Harding’s cabinet, 1921. A few members of the Ohio Gang are hiding among the respectable people. They look very serious here. After hours was another story.
[…]
For years, Theodore Roosevelt and other conservationists had worried that private companies would simply gobble up America’s petroleum reserves. So Roosevelt ordered federal geologists to identify oil deposits worth protecting. Taft then withdrew millions of acres from private development and established naval petroleum reserves in California. Woodrow Wilson added another in Wyoming. In 1920, Congress gave the Navy power to manage and lease all three.
The reason was not complicated. American battleships were switching from coal to oil. If another war came along, perhaps it would be prudent for the United States Navy to own some oil.
Wild concept.
So the government had locked away huge underground deposits in California and Wyoming as an emergency stockpile. Together, the three reserves were believed to contain roughly 435 million barrels?—?about as much oil as the entire United States produced in a year.
There were two big California fields, Elk Hills and Buena Vista, and one Wyoming reserve called Teapot Dome.
Teapot Dome was not even the great petroleum monster of the group. Elk Hills would eventually become one of the country’s most productive oil fields and produce its billionth barrel in 1992. Teapot Dome, by contrast, occupied just 9,481 acres and produced about 22 million barrels during its later decades of federal operation.
Teapot Dome simply had better branding. It was named for a nearby sandstone formation that allegedly resembled a teapot.
Teapot Rock on an old postcard from around 1922
Public DomainYes, that’s a teapot. Apparently, Wyoming whiskey was excellent.
So Fall wanted control of all three reserves, and Harding gave it to him. On May 31, 1921, the president signed an executive order transferring administrative authority from the Navy to Fall’s Interior Department.
Shortly thereafter, Fall undergoes a miraculous financial renaissance. Remember Fall’s ranch with ten years of unpaid taxes and the general Grapes of Wrath ambiance?
Yeah, so by June 2022, Fall pays those taxes. He buys neighboring property. He makes substantial improvements to Three Rivers. The formerly cash-starved rancher suddenly throws money around like he’s discovered oil under the sofa cushions.
He had not. He had discovered oilmen. Two of them, specifically.
[…]
Meanwhile, President Harding was having a truly shitty year. In the spring of 1923, Jess Smith was dead, Charles Forbes had resigned from the Veterans Bureau in disgrace, and Fall had quietly resigned from Interior to work for none other than Harry Sinclair.
For once, it wasn’t Jerry keeping Harding up at night.
So that summer, Harding left on a cross-country speaking tour. During this time, Harding reportedly told a journalist: “I have no trouble with my enemies … But my goddamn friends … they’re the ones who keep me walking the floors nights!”
Those friends would drive him to an early death. On August 2, 1923, Warren Harding died in a San Francisco hotel room, probably of a sudden heart attack. He was only 57 years old.
Then Calvin Coolidge became President, and he wasn’t into playing footsy with poker players.
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Making 200-Year-Old Mayonnaise – How has it changed?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 31 Mar 2026Thick, creamy mayonnaise made with tarragon vinegar and gelatin
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1828Mayonnaise (or magnonnaise, as Carême calls it in this recipe from 1828), didn’t really become popular until the early 19th century. First popular in France, by the 1850s, cookbooks in other countries were including recipes for it, sometimes with several variations. Earlier recipes commonly used gelatin, but by the end of the 19th century, the recipe looked very much like what we make today.
Homemade mayonnaise is vastly better than anything you can buy. There’s a nice zing from the vinegar in this one, and even if you don’t like store bought mayonnaise, I think you should give this a try; it’s really delicious. If you’re not worried about historical accuracy, you could make this without the gelatin.
White Magnonnaise Sauce
Place into a medium bowl two egg yolks (as pale as possible), a large pinch of white salt, the same of white pepper, and a quarter of a tablespoon of tarragon vinegar. You briskly stir this mixture with a wooden spoon; and as soon as it begins to thicken, you add half a tablespoon of oil from Aix. As soon as the sauce thickens, you add a few drops of vinegar, then oil, and so on, taking care to work it constantly … As it thickens, you add a little oil at a time, as well as vinegar and a small amount of aspic jelly … by adding the oil and vinegar little by little…you see it gradually come together, becoming firm and velvety like a well-set cream. Finally, after having incorporated two glass of oil, half a glass of aspic jelly, and the necessary vinegar to make it pleasantly tangy, you use it immediately.
— Le cuisinier parisien by Marie-Antoine Carême, 1828
September 23, 2026
Doctor Who – the early Doctors
One of my earliest memories of television involve a BBC children’s TV show that began in 1963: Doctor Who. My mother claims I watched every episode from behind the settee, but I wouldn’t let her turn it off even though I was clearly terrified. I was young enough that I don’t remember particular stories — I don’t even remember being surprised when the actor portraying the lead character suddenly changed from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton. After my family came to Canada, I only occasionally caught an episode on TV, and I don’t think I saw anything produced after the late 1980s, so all the modern casting choices (and the controversy) passed me by.
Millennial Woes provides a helpful guide to the show from the first episode through to the late 1980s, which may be of interest to some of you:
Several people have asked me to write a guide to Doctor Who, so here it is. I think most readers will be familiar with the show so I won’t waste time introducing it. Suffice it to say, we’re talking about a somewhat silly family sci-fi show, but one that frequently had soul, style, humour, and a lot of warmth. As with so much contemporaneous TV drama, Doctor Who had charm that seems to be simply impossible to achieve nowadays.
This guide is a difficult one to write because there are simply so many stories to survey, and because the show has multiple eras which are very distinct — almost different TV shows altogether. (Broadly, I would say the eras are 1963-69, 1970-81, 1982-87, and 1988-89.)
[…]
Something you will notice is that I talk about the incidental music almost as much as the stories themselves. I find Doctor Who‘s music, across the various eras, very stimulating and enjoyable in its own right. (This indicates how big a part it must play in the show itself.)
The First Doctor was played by William Hartnell. This was Doctor Who at its very beginnings, in 1963, so it is radically different not only from the modern 2005 show but even from the Pertwee era seven years later, by which time TV production had advanced in leaps and bounds.
I must confess to being barely acquainted with Hartnell’s era, having watched only four or five stories in total. It is too slow-moving for my tastes. However, I can certainly recommend one episode …
“An Unearthly Child”
This is the very first episode. Though it is technically the first of a four-part story, it is really a “standalone” episode to set up the programme. The introduction of now-iconic elements is beautifully done. Everything at this stage seems darker and more mysterious than it will later be. The Doctor is secretive, unfriendly and sinister. The TARDIS is scary and doesn’t seem reliable, its first “flight” being a genuinely unnerving experience.
The atmosphere is terrific throughout. The whole thing is in grainy black & white reminiscent of a 1930s horror film. It is excellent, in my opinion. Had the show continued in this vein it would probably have been much shorter-lived but less lightweight. I guess things are always better while they still have their mystery.
The Second Doctor was played by Patrick Troughton. He was perhaps the most talented — as an actor — of the men who played the role in the classic era. His turn on the character is much more playful and irreverent than Hartnell’s. I am again very unfamiliar with the era, so am somewhat at a loss for recommendations.
“The Three Doctors”
This is a cheat since this story is actually in the Third Doctor’s era, but I think the Second really dominates proceedings so it feels appropriate to cite this story as one of his. You get a strong sense of how different he is from the Third, whom Troughton effortlessly upstages. And it’s a good story.
The Third Doctor was played by Jon Pertwee, then known mostly for comedy work. During most of this era the Doctor is confined to Earth, working as “scientific advisor” to UNIT led by the Brigadier, and battling his Timelord nemesis the Master. A lot of the stories are 6 or 7-parters, formats that work very well; there is more world-building than in the 4-parters, which start to seem slightly lacking by comparison.
The third was perhaps the least “alien” incarnation of the Doctor. You can easily imagine him being a heroic leader in the Empire or a maverick figure in British government or business, up to about 1970 (after which such mavericks were tamed or filtered out by bureaucracy). Aristocratic but still practical and “a man of action”, he is constantly innovating and questioning, and being frustrated by the lack of imagination in the lesser men around him. But he is very much a man, not an alien. That choice was probably dictated by Pertwee’s own personality, and it would be reversed when his successor arrived.
Nevertheless, this era was a peak for Doctor Who. The storytelling is very competent, the production style has real charm and the acting (RP galore!) is consistent and endearing. All of this means the stories bear rewatching, remaining enjoyable time after time.
In terms of choice, you can hardly go wrong with this era. The only bad stories are “Carnival of Monsters” and “The Mutants“, with the rest being uniformly great fun.
The Korean War Week 118 – The Outpost Armor – September 22, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 22 Sep 2026This week we take a look at the hilltop armor used by the UN for the outpost war — the pros and cons. There’s still plenty of fighting this week, for Old Baldy, for Outpost Kelly, and behind the scenes a whole lot of South Korean POWs held by the UN may be soon going home.
00:00 Intro
00:48 Old Baldy
02:50 Outpost Kelly
06:42 The Tanks
09:26 Korean Guerrillas
12:00 Civilian Internees?
15:10 Summary
15:22 Conclusion
15:58 Mobilisation
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Corporatism and Fake Mussolini
Feral Historian
Published 22 May 2026No direct sci-fi angle here, just a clarification of a widely-held misconception about what Fascists believed, exemplified by an oft-repeated fake quote with some tangents on Eco, Gramsci, and others. Since the subject of Fascism and mythologizing of WWII comes up a lot here, it seems appropriate to address this one.
And here’s a link to Umberto Eco’s essay for those who are interested. https://ia802906.us.archive.org/31/it…
Back to the usual science fiction as cultural artifact essays next week.
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September 22, 2026
Trumpian economics – making Mercantilism great again
President Donald Trump is remarkably inconsistent on a lot of issues, but one thing that keeps coming back is his apparent allegiance to protectionism and mercantilism:
Politics is an industry in which ideas demonstrated to be ineffective and morally reprehensible live on long after they should have died. That’s the case with President Donald Trump’s fondness for mercantilism, as he espouses hoary old nostrums about the alleged benefits of hoarding money and preventing Americans from using their capital to purchase desired goods from other countries. Like a throwback to the 18th century, the president mistakes accumulating the means of exchange for building actual prosperity, as if we’d all be better off with overstuffed wallets than with the things our funds can purchase.
“Losing” Money on Voluntary Transactions?
Last week, when asked about the eternal political bogeyman of “trade deficits”, Trump responded, “If we lose $50 billion a year with a country, and we say, ‘we’re not going to trade with you anymore’, we don’t lose $50 billion a year. It’s very simple. Right?”
The president’s comments continued a theme he’d expounded on Truth Social, where he wrote, “If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year.”
Earlier this month, the president threatened to entirely stop Americans from trading with businesses in countries with which the Unted States runs a trade deficit — that is, from which we overall buy more than its residents purchase from Americans. His position seems to be that we’re better off hoarding cash than we would be using (or losing, from his perspective) our money to purchase things that we want.
But as the late economist Milton Friedman commented during an earlier incarnation of the eternal debate over the “fairness” or lack thereof of international trade, “the goods and services we import, they provide us with TV sets we can watch, automobiles we can drive, with all sorts of nice things for us to use. The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports. And the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible, for as small a volume of exports as possible.”
[…]
Everybody Benefits From Free Trade
“Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade”, Smith warned in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. “When two places trade with one another, this doctrine supposes that, if the balance be even, neither of them either loses or gains; but if it leans in any degree to one side, that one of them loses, and the other gains, in proportion to its declension from the exact equilibrium. Both suppositions are false.” In fact, he pointed out, “trade which, without force or constraint, is naturally and regularly carried on between any two places, is always advantageous, though not always equally so, to both”.
As Smith’s criticism makes clear, the ideas of “balance of trade” and “trade deficits” are archaic throwbacks to mercantilism, even though they’re still popular among politicians playing to ill-informed voters. Smith’s points prevail among economists even in cases where one country burdens its population with trade barriers while allowing relatively unhindered exports.
The Forgotten Scandal Behind Britain’s Favourite Poem
The History Chap
Published 14 May 2026In January 1896, a small column of mounted men rode into the Transvaal — uninvited, unsanctioned, and about to hand the British Empire one of its most embarrassing scandals of the Victorian era. Their leader was Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, trusted fixer of Cecil Rhodes, and a man absolutely certain he was doing the right thing. Within days, he was a prisoner of the Boers. But this is not simply a story of a military disaster. It is the story of how a disgraced Victorian adventurer — stripped of his reputation, imprisoned in Holloway, and abandoned by the powerful men he had protected — became the inspiration for the most famous poem in the English language.
Rudyard Kipling’s “If—” has been quoted by parents, coaches, and prime ministers for over a century. What almost nobody knows is the man Kipling had in mind when he wrote it — and the extraordinary story of how Jameson faced catastrophe with a silence and dignity that left Kipling genuinely moved. In this video, I tell the full story: the Jameson Raid, the cover-up that reached the highest levels of the British government, the parliamentary inquiry that should have destroyed several careers, and the remarkable rehabilitation of the man at the centre of it all.
It is a story about loyalty, resilience, and the gap between a man’s reputation and his character. Which is, when you think about it, exactly what “If—” is about.
0:00 Britain’s Favourite Poem
1:14 Leander Starr Jameson
2:40 Rhodes’s Plot
4:02 Joseph Chamberlain
4:36 Jameson Loses His Head
5:35 The Jameson Raid
6:31 Battle of Doornkop
8:26 Triumph & Disaster
9:26 Jameson on Trial
10:23 Holloway Prison
11:15 Before Parliament
13:46 Redemption
14:11 “If-” Poem
15:10 Jameson’s Death
16:12 “A Man, My Son”
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September 21, 2026
Price controls work … but not the way they’re intended to
Politicians love to intervene in markets, trying to impose their preferred solution to “problems” like high prices. But markets don’t work the way politicians think they do:
Price ceilings don’t manage markets, they destroy them. In 1946 the US meat market collapsed because of it.
The Office of Price Administration set beef ceiling prices during World War II. Ranchers and meatpackers adapted: some held cattle rather than sell at a loss, others shifted product to black markets, and slaughter volumes dropped. The OPA briefly lifted controls in mid-1946 under pressure. Beef flooded back into stores almost immediately.
Then Congress, drowning in constituent complaints about inflation, reimposed ceilings in August 1946. Slaughter collapsed within weeks. By October 1946, beef virtually disappeared from American grocery store shelves. You could walk into a butcher shop in Chicago or New York and find nothing. Scarcity was manufactured entirely by Washington bureaucrats setting prices below what producers needed to cover costs.
Mises explained the mechanism precisely: a price ceiling creates a shortage, which produces political pressure for rationing and further controls, spiraling into comprehensive economic disorganization. The OPA ran that experiment in real time on the American food supply.
President Truman ended meat controls on November 9, 1946. Beef returned within days. The supply existed the entire time. Ranchers and packers simply refused to sell at confiscatory prices, and they were correct to refuse. Coercive price suppression causes economic destruction, and 1946 proved it at the grocery counter.
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Custom-Order Walthers: Model HP and P38 in 7.65mm Parabellum
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 May 2026When Walther first developed the P38, it was designated the Heerespistole — “Army Pistol”. Only after getting official Wehrmacht adoption did it get the designation P38. Walther offered models with both designations for commercial sale, albeit not to just anyone. Army officers, Party members, and other high-placed individuals could get pistols from Walther outside military orders. About 20,000 such guns were made during the war, and a tiny subset of them — just 225 — were made specifically in 7.65mm Parabellum instead of 9mm Parabellum. Today we are looking at two examples of those.
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QotD: Military doctrine
Doctrine. Something I keep promising to write about and then don’t. Doctrine is, “the body of formal knowledge that tells a fighting force how it is expected to fight” (Parshall and Tully, 83). it is not a plan for a specific war, but the general planning framework a military brings to every war; think of it like a very complex list of “best practices”. This is necessary because war is too complex to make this stuff up on the fly. That said, just because a military has a written out doctrine doesn’t mean they can execute on that doctrine; the doctrine may call for things that military (or its political leaders) are simply not capable or willing to do. That said, a military that finds itself operating well outside its own doctrine is likely in trouble. Russian maneuver warfare doctrine generally goes by the moniker Deep Battle or Deep Operations (Глубокая операция) and to say that the Russian Armed Forces [in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine] have not managed to pull off their doctrine in practice is a significant understatement.
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
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September 20, 2026
“Honest” graft
Politicians and corruption go together like wine and cheese but not like crime and punishment for some reason. It’s almost as though the path to wealth and influence goes through political connections rather than economic efficiency and innovation. Chris Bray points out the difference between the “honest” graft of days gone by and the kind of all-consuming corruption we see far too often these days:
Tammany had honest graft: They said they would build a bridge or a park, and then they built it. The cost would be sort of not nakedly obscene, and no money would be missing if there was an audit. But by the most remarkable coincidence, the land where the park or the highway or the approaches to the bridge would go turned out to be owned by very close friends of the Tammany machine, who then got paid a nice little premium for the acquisition of land that was needed for a public purpose, and maybe the people who sold the concrete and the lumber and supplied the labor also turned out to be awfully close friends of the politicians who approved the project, but at the end, there’s the bridge. There’s the new highway, and it cost something within shouting distance of what you would expect the thing to cost. It added up, but they did some fairly polite stealing. There was respect in it. It wasn’t honest, but it wasn’t wide-open looting.
An extremely common form of graft in American politics is the “Three Bs” that Robert Caro famously described in Texas politics: beef, bourbon, and blondes. Cocktails, steak dinners, and maybe if you were a legislator who played ball a nice young lady came and visited your hotel room during the legislative session. But that graft was about topics like who got the state highway contract. Some money traded hands, there was dishonesty in the allocation of public resources, and the highway got re-paved.
The Quality Learing Center model, or the high-speed rail model, or the 800 hospices in Los Angeles with patients that never died, all represent a model of grift that comes from a culture of complete shamelessness. In California, nearly 700 non-profit corporations exist to provide shelter to the homeless, and over 500 non-profit corporations exist to prevent homelessness and provide social services to the homeless or to people who may become homeless. There’s quite a bit of overlap between those categories, so there aren’t 1200+ non-profits, but there are hundreds, and they have billions of dollars in income.
Some are entirely legitimate and do real work. There are people in California who will be fed and sheltered tonight by a non-profit corporation that will keep them from sleeping on the street. It’s not at all my argument that no one in any non-profit anywhere ever does anything real. But the overall picture is theft, and the premise that the flood of money is ending homelessness (or is meant to) is a lie, and a dark one. Gavin Newsom presented his ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness in 2008.
Update, 22 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
What Caused the War of 1812?
Real Time History
Published 17 Apr 2026The War of 1812 broke out after a series of escalations between Great Britain and the still young United States. The impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy desperate to crew their ships in the ongoing war against Napoleon, the question if the US could trade with Britain and France at the same time and thus profit of the war, all came to a head after failed negotiations.
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