Los Campesinos! Break Down What It Actually Costs To Tour North America by Gareth David

It’s been more than thirty years since I had a chance to interview a couple members of the band Eleventh Dream Day at one of their concerts. I don’t remember a lot about that conversation, but one detail has genuinely haunted me ever since. The band’s album Beet had recently been a big hit on the college charts, and they were signed to major label Atlantic Records. My assumption was that they’d moved to a place where making music was now comfortably their prime occupation. Instead, they seemed a little defeated. Touring was mandated by the label, but it was basically costing them money to be out on the road, in part because they’d been forced to abandon the day jobs they still held to make ends meet. It’s only gotten worse for artists all these many years later. Gareth David, frontman of the band Los Campesinos!, makes that sad truth abundantly clear in this detailed accounting of their most recent North American tour. This piece was first published in the band’s newsletter and then reshared by Stereogum, which is where I came across it.

As U.S. Debt Hits a Worrying Milestone, Washington Barely Notices by Tony Romm

Reporting for The New York Times, Tony Romm covers the problematic threshold crossed this week when the U.S. national debt grew to be larger than the nation’s economy. The last two times that happened were a global pandemic and a world war. The real key to this story is that Republicans, who fulminate furiously about the debt any time a Democrat is in the White House, don’t care in the slightest now that the longstanding problem is being drastically exacerbated by a dimwit president of their own party with his vanity projects, impulsive war-making, and tax giveaways to individuals who already have obscene amounts of money in their sheltered bank accounts. The GOP’s calls for responsible fiscal stewardship should never be taken seriously again.