Before it burned, Charlie Springer’s house contained 18,000 vinyl LPs, 12,000 CDs, 10,000 45s, 4,000 cassettes, 600 78s, 150 8-tracks, hundreds of signed musical posters, and about 100 gold records. The albums alone occupied an entire wall of shelves in the family room, and another in the garage. On his desk were a set of drumsticks from Nirvana and an old RCA microphone that Prince had given to him at a recording session for Prince. A neon Beach Boys sign—as far as he knows, one of only eight remaining in the world—hung above the dining table. In his laundry room was a Gibson guitar signed by the Everly Brothers; near his fireplace, a white Stratocaster signed to him by Eric Clapton.

Last month, the night the Eaton Fire broke out, Charlie evacuated to his girlfriend’s house. And when he came back, the remnants of his home had been bleached by the fire. The spot in the family room where the record collection had been was dark ash.

I’ve known Charlie for as long as I can remember. He and my father met because of records. In the late 1980s, Charlie was at a crowded party in the Hollywood Hills when he heard someone greet my father by his full name. Charlie whipped around: “You’re Fred Walecki? I’ve been seeing your name on records.” Dad owned a rock-and-roll-instrument shop, and musicians thanked him on their albums for the gear (and emotional support) he provided during recording sessions. Charlie was a national sales manager at Warner Bros. Records and could rattle off the B-side of any record, so of course he’d clocked Walecki appearing over and over again. Growing up, I thought every song I’d ever heard could also be found on Charlie’s shelves; his friend Jim Wagner, who once ran sales, merchandising, and advertising for Warner Bros. Records, called it the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame West.

Charlie’s collection started when he was 6. He had asked his mother to get him the record “about the dog,” and she’d brought back Patti Page’s “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” No, not that one—he wanted a 45 of Elvis’s recently released single, “Hound Dog.” He’d cart it around with him for the next seven decades, across several states, before placing it on his shelf in Altadena. At age 8, he mowed lawns and shoveled snow in his hometown outside Chicago to afford “Sweet Little Sixteen,” by Chuck Berry, and “Tequila,” by the Champs; when he was 9, he got Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” And when he was 10, he walked into his local record shop and found its owner, Lenny, sitting on the floor, frazzled, surrounded by piles of records. Every week, Lenny had to rearrange the records on his wall to reflect the order of the Top 40 chart made by the local radio station WLS. Charlie offered to help.

“What will it cost me?” Lenny asked.

“Two singles a week.” Charlie held on to all of those singles, and the paper surveys from WLS, too.

When he was 12, he bought his first full albums: Surfin’ Safari, by the Beach Boys; Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut; and Green Onions, by Booker T. and the M.G.s. He entered a Wisconsin seminary two years later, hoping to become a priest. There, he and his friends found a list of addresses for members of Milwaukee’s Knights of Columbus chapter, and sent out letters asking for donations—a hi-fi stereo console, a jukebox—to the poor seminarians, who went without so much. Radios were contraband, but Charlie taped one underneath the chair next to his bed, and at night, while 75 other students slept around him, he would use an earbud to listen to WLS. “And I would hear records, and I would go, Oh my God, I gotta get this record. I have to. ” Seminarians could go into town only if it was strictly necessary, so he’d break his glasses, and run between the optometrist and the five-and-dime. That’s how he got a couple of other Beach Boys records, the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You,” and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.”

Charlie dropped out of seminary in 1967, at the end of his junior year. All of those five-and-dime records had been in his prefect’s room, but when he left, the prefect was nowhere to be found. So, Charlie got a ladder, wriggled through a transom, and got his collection, stored in two crates which had previously contained oranges. (“Orange crates held albums perfectly,” he told me.) Then he hitchhiked to San Francisco and grew his hair out just in time for the Summer of Love. He moved into a commune of sorts, a 16-unit apartment building with the walls between apartments broken down, and got a job hanging posters for the Fillmore on telephone poles around the Bay Area. He’d staple up psychedelic artwork advertising Jefferson Airplane, Sons of Champlin, the Grateful Dead, or Sly and the Family Stone. (He still had about 75 of those posters.) He worked at Tower Records on the side but would hand his paycheck back to his boss: The money all went to records. Anytime one of his favorites—Morrison, Mitchell, Dylan, the Beach Boys—released a new album, he’d host a listening party for friends. When he moved back to Chicago, his music collection took up most of the car. The record store he managed there, Hear Here, would receive about 20 new albums every day to play over the loudspeakers. When Charlie heard Bruce Springsteen’s first album (two before Born to Run), he thought it was such a hit, he locked the shop door. “Until I sell five of these records,” he announced, “nobody is getting out of this store.”

Next, Charlie worked his way up at a music-distribution company, starting from a gig in the warehouse (picker No. 9). Later, at Warner Bros. Records, he’d work with stores and radio stations to help artists sell enough music to get, and then sustain, their big break. To sell Takin’ It to the Streets, he drove with the Doobie Brothers so they could sign albums at a Kansas City record shop; to help Dire Straits get their start, he lobbied radio stations to play their first single for about a year until it caught on. He was also on the shortlist of people who would listen to test pressings of a new album for any pops or crackles, before the company shipped the final version. Charlie held on to about 1,000 of those rare pressings, including Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Prince’s Purple Rain.

He moved to Los Angeles in the ’80s to be Warner’s national sales manager, and in 1991, he bought his home on Skylane Drive, in Altadena. Nestled in the foothills, the area smelled of the hay for his neighbors’ horses. Along the fence was bougainvillea, and in his yard, a magnificent native oak that our families would sit beneath together. He started placing thousands of his albums on those shelves in the family room, overlooking that tree.

In Charlie’s house, a record was always playing. He had recently papered the walls and ceiling of his bathroom with the WLS surveys he started collecting as a child, in his first record-store job. Every record he pulled off the shelf came with a memory, he told me. And if he kept an album or a memento in his house, “it was a good story.”

A gold record from U2, on the wall next to the staircase: “All bands, when they first start off, they’re new bands, and nobody knows who they are, okay? … I went up with U2, on their first album, from Chicago to Madison, and they played a gig for about 15 people, and then we went to eat at an Italian restaurant. I went back to the restaurant a couple years later, and the same waitress waited on me, and I said, ‘Wow, I remember I was in here with U2.’ And she goes, ‘Those guys were U2?’ I was like, ‘They were U2 then and they’re U2 now.’”

In the kitchen, a poster of Jimi Hendrix striking a power chord at the Monterey Pop Festival: “Seal puts his first record out, and I have just become a vice president at Warner Bros. And I go to my very first VP lunch, and I announce, ‘Hey, this new Seal record is going to go gold.’ The senior VP of finance says, ‘You shouldn’t say that. Why would you make that kind of expectation?’ And I’m like, ‘Because I know with every corpuscle in my body it’s gonna go gold’ … So we make a $1 gentlemen’s bet. About six weeks later, it’s gold.” At the next lunch, he asked the finance executive to sign his dollar bill. Just then, Mo Ostin, the head of the label, walked in and heard about their wager. “Mo said, ‘So Charlie, is there something around the building that you always liked?’ I was like, ‘Well, that Jim Marshall poster of Hendrix.’ And he goes, ‘It’s yours.’”

*Illustration sources: RCA / Michael Ochs Archive / Getty; Stoughton Printing / Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Warner Brothers / Alamy; Sun Records / Alamy

The band are among 14 nominees, alongside Mariah Carey, New Order, Cyndi Lauper and White Stripes.

These days in Washington, D.C., among a class of Extremely Beltway types—the name droppers, the strivers, the media gossips—Donald Trump’s threats to exact revenge on his enemies have turned into a highly specific (and highly absurd) status competition.

Olivia Troye has heard the joke so many times that she already has a well-worn comeback prepared. When nervous journalists and teasing D.C. types crack to Troye—a lifelong Republican who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s homeland-security adviser before becoming an outspoken Trump critic—that they might end up in adjoining Guantánamo Bay cells, she responds: “I had the Gitmo portfolio, so I can give you some tips.”

In a moment of deep uncertainty in the nation’s capital, where Trump took office promising vengeance but where the scope of his intentions remains nebulous, many of Trump’s known critics have unofficially divided into two adjacent camps: those, like Troye, who have real reason to be alarmed by the president’s threats and are quietly taking steps to protect themselves and their family, and those who are loudly—and often facetiously—chattering about how Trump and his posse might throw them in a gulag. (There are also those in Trump’s orbit who are joking, one hopes, about whom they might throw in the hypothetical gulag.)

Whereas many of those branded most prominently with the scarlet R of Resistance are now eager to stay out of Trump’s sight line, other figures in Washington are actively self-identifying as could-be Trump targets, in a very D.C. show of importance. And often the people talking openly about getting thrown in a gulag likely aren’t even important enough for the gulag.

At one of the many swanky parties in the run-up to Trump’s second inauguration, a White House reporter confessed to me that during a recent meeting in outgoing White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients’s office, the reporter had—mainly in jest—asked to get on the list for a preemptive pardon. In his final The Late Show episode during the Biden administration, Stephen Colbert also played with the gag, telling his audience, “The next time you all see me, Donald Trump will be president. And you may not see me! Next four years—next four years, we’re taking this one day at a time.”

If the classic “D.C. read” is scanning a book’s index for one’s own name and frantically flipping to the listed pages, then even a mention in Appendix B (“Executive Branch Deep State”) of Government Gangsters, written by Trump’s pick for FBI chief, Kash Patel, can serve as a status symbol in certain circles.

[Read: The sound of fear on air]

“For a lot of people, it’s a joke that is a thinly disguised flex—it’s joking about how important you are,” Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America who has been on the receiving end of such jokes many times, told me. “It’s sort of become a standard greeting in a lot of circles: ‘See you in the gulags.’ ‘I hope we get the nice gulag.’”

“Then every once in a while,” he added, “someone makes that joke to someone who is actually scared or has hired a lawyer, and it’s not so funny.”

Tim Miller, a former Republican turned ardent Trump critic who writes for The Bulwark, told me that he not only regularly hears the joke but also sometimes finds himself “reflexively making it,” the way remarking on the weather is an almost involuntary conversational crutch. “And then after I do, just clarifying that I don’t actually think I’m going to the gulag and that there are people who are at real risk from this administration, and we should probably focus on that,” he said.

On Inauguration Day, President Joe Biden issued a handful of preemptive pardons that included five members of his family, lawmakers on the January 6 House committee, and people Trump had threatened, including Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top public-health expert during the coronavirus pandemic, and retired General Mark Milley, whom Trump floated the idea of executing after The Atlantic published a profile of him. Others who have attracted Trump’s ire have both publicly and privately lamented that they were not on Biden’s pardon list.

Rachel Vindman, the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman—who testified before Congress about a 2019 call between Trump and the Ukrainian president during which Trump asked him to investigate Biden’s son Hunter—posted on social media after Biden’s pardons emerged, “Whatever happens to my family, know this: No pardons were offered or discussed. I cannot begin to describe the level of betrayal and hurt I feel.” Her husband appears in Patel’s appendix.

[Read: In praise of mercy]

In the early weeks of his second presidency, Trump has spoken ambiguously about plans to punish his perceived enemies, though he has already taken steps to root out those in the government he believes are part of the anti-Trump “deep state.” In some ways, the list in Patel’s book is instructive. The appendix mentions prominent figures whom Trump has already put on notice or begun targeting: Biden (“the funny thing—maybe the sad thing,” Trump noted in his first post-inauguration interview, with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, is that Biden failed to pardon himself); Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton (within hours of taking office, Trump pulled U.S. Secret Service protection from Bolton, who faces threats on his life from Iran); and Fauci (last week Trump also terminated Fauci’s security detail). Yet the list also mentions people such as Elizabeth Dibble and Nellie Ohr, alleged deep staters who are hardly household names and whose alleged offenses are too complicated and obscure to quickly explain.

Patel also previously shared on social media a meme that featured him wielding a chainsaw and buzzing off chunks of a log emblazoned with images of alleged enemies, ranging from “Fake News,” CNN, and MSNBC to people such as Biden, the former Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker.

Just before Election Day, the longtime Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren shared an X post from an Arizona reporter, writing, “He should be the first journalist sent to the gulag.” She later said she was joking. Mike Davis, one of Trump’s most vocal outside legal defenders, has led the unofficial social-media brigade threatening to toss reporters and other perceived enemies into the “gulag,” statements he described to The Washington Post as a “troll” to nettle the left.

But now that Trump, back in the Oval Office, continues to display a willingness to punish those who have crossed him, this sort of declaration from Trump allies can take on a more menacing edge. On Inauguration Day, Davis unleashed more than a dozen posts on X that, depending on the perspective, could be read as trolls or threats. “Dear Congress: We need a supplemental to feed the Vindmans in federal prison,” he wrote in one. “Dear Tony Fauci: Roll the dice. Decline the pardon. And see what happens,” read another. And in a third, using a format he repeated for many of Trump’s enemies, he addressed Biden’s former Homeland Security secretary by name, writing, “Dear Alejandro Mayorkas: No pardons for you and your staff?”

“Nobody is above the law,” Davis said, when I called to ask him about his public posts. “If they’ve done nothing wrong, they have nothing to worry about, and if they’ve done nothing wrong, why did they need a pardon?”

Some of those squarely in the sights of Trump and his allies have begun taking steps to protect themselves. Troye, for instance, has retained a lawyer, and recently made sure that she and her family members had up-to-date passports. Rachel Vindman, meanwhile, told me that she and her family moved from Virginia to Florida two years ago—uprooting their daughter in the middle of sixth grade—in part because they “wanted to live somewhere a little bit more anonymous.” (She was also, she added, ready to leave the D.C. bubble and eager for a “fresh start.”)

[Read: Trump’s first shot in his war on the ‘deep state’]

In many ways, the fear that the mere prospect of retribution has struck in Trump’s opponents—prompting them to hire personal security or nervously bluster about the gulags—could be victory enough for MAGA world. After winning reelection, Trump posted on social media a list of out-of-favor individuals and groups—including “Americans for No Prosperity,” “Dumb as a Rock” John Bolton, and Pence, his former vice president—and said that prospective administration hires should not bother applying if they had worked with or were endorsed by anyone on the list.

“That’s the financial gulag,” one person told me, speaking anonymously because he has worked for three of the people or entities on Trump’s list, and doesn’t want his business to be blackballed. “It’s not quite a gulag, but it does have a chilling effect.”

Similarly, those who did not receive pardons from Biden worry about the financially daunting task of protecting themselves. “Did you not think of the people who are about to get destroyed, who defend themselves, who have no congressional coverage, who are not politicians, who are not millionaires, who don’t have dozens of PACs that are protecting them?” Troye asked. “There are people who worked on government salaries.” (A Biden spokesperson declined to comment on Biden’s relatively selective set of pardons.)

Vindman, who lived in Russia for several years, said that although no one knows exactly what to expect in Trump’s second term, her experience in Moscow might offer a glimpse: Colleagues policed themselves, and other Russians proactively took actions they believed would please Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It was never a direct ask,” she told me. “It was a more tacit thing.”

[Read: Trump targets his own government]

Vindman, who has friends who regularly check in on her, said she spent Election Night wide awake. Her husband was in Virginia with his twin brother, Eugene Vindman, a Democrat the state’s suburban voters elected to the House, and the task of telling her daughter that Trump had won fell to her. “The hardest part of that was laying in bed awake, worrying,” she said. “She’s in eighth grade, and maybe the last four years of her with us will be marred by that, by this harassment.”

When, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump’s close ally Elon Musk accused Alexander Vindman of “treason,” warning that “he will pay the appropriate penalty,” Rachel Vindman told me that her immediate concern was for her in-laws and her 98-year-old grandmother, who heard the comment and worried on her family’s behalf.

But personally, Vindman said she is working to find daily joy and maintain a sense of normalcy for herself and her family. Her husband recently turned his masters thesis into a book, The Folly of Realism, coming out at the end of February. When I asked her if she ever considered urging him not to publish, because it would thrust their family back into public view, she was emphatic: “Do you just say no to it because it might anger them or put you in the spotlight?” she asked. “It’s that kind of quiet defiance of living your life.”

“It could be a mistake. I guess we’ll never know.” She paused, then added, “Well, I guess we will know.”

Folly Wildlife Rescue in Tunbridge Wells benefits from more than £125,000 raised in the auction.

The mood of a Donald Trump rally typically follows a downhill trajectory, beginning with hot pretzels and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and concluding with grievances aired and retribution promised. But last night at Capital One Arena, the mood was jubilant all the way through.

This was Trump’s final rally before his triumphant return to the White House, and like high schoolers facing the promise of a lightly supervised all-night lock-in, attendees were giddy with anticipation. Fans dressed in Uncle Sam hats and scarlet peacoats crammed into the arena, which was lit up in shades of red and royal blue. Each rally-goer I spoke with was looking forward to something different from the next Trump presidency. “They’re doing a nice big raid up in Chicago, and I’m excited about that,” Will Matthews, from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, told me, referring to yet-unconfirmed rumors about where Trump’s promised mass deportations will begin. Jenny Heinl, who wore a PROUD J6ER sweatshirt, told me that she was eager “to hear about the pardons.”

The message across MAGA world was clear: The next four years are going to be big. “Everyone in our country will prosper; every family will thrive,” Trump promised last night. Speaking before him, Stephen Miller, the incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, predicted that America is “now at the dawn of our greatest victory.” Earlier in the day, Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and the host of the War Room podcast, had hosted a brunch on Capitol Hill. He’d dubbed the event “The Beginning of History,” and, for better or worse, it is.

Throughout yesterday’s rain and snow in Washington, D.C., Trump’s supporters held tight to their joy. “I can’t believe we’re in!” I heard a woman shout to a friend as they dashed through the arena doors. The preceding few days had been bewildering. Citing the low temperatures, the Trump transition team announced on Friday that the inauguration would be moved indoors, to the Capitol Rotunda. A mad scramble ensued for the very limited supply of new tickets. In the end, a few fans will still get to watch in person. Most of them, though, will be right back at Capital One for an inauguration watch party.

One group of Trump fans had carpooled together from Canada to attend the inauguration, and wore matching red sweatshirts reading MAPLE SYRUP MAGA. They were disappointed about the venue change—14 degrees is not cold, the Canadians insisted—but they were still happy they’d made the trip. “If Trump hadn’t been elected,” Mary, who had come from St. Catharines, Ontario, and asked to use only her first name, told me, there would be more and more “woke bullshit.” For Mary and her friends, Trump’s reelection means that there will instead be an end to the fentanyl crisis, tighter border security, and a stronger example for other Western countries.

Sharon Stevenson, from Cartersville, Georgia, had joined a caravan of dozens of Georgians traveling to the rally, and had waited in line for more than seven hours to get inside the arena. The effort, she assured me, was “100 percent worth it.” Stevenson and her friends were eager to lay out their expectations for Trump. “The biggest thing for me is to investigate all the fraud,” she said. The “stolen election,” the January 6 “massacre”—“it’s going to come out under this administration.” Her friend, Anita Stewart from Suwanee, Georgia, told me that her priority was health, and that she was particularly excited about the prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. “I’m looking forward to hopefully no more commercials for drugs!” Plus affordable groceries, she said—and cheap gas.

With a wishlist so long, and expectations so immense, one wonders how Trump’s supporters will respond if the about-to-be president doesn’t meet them all. When I asked Stevenson that question, she smiled and shook her head. “Promises made, promises kept,” she said. “If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump.”

[Read: What Trump did to law enforcement]

During the roughly three hours before the headliner took the stage, his supporters ate chicken fingers and posed for the Jumbotron camera as it swung around the arena. They bowed their heads when the hosts of the MAGA favorite Girls Gone Bible podcast asked God to bless Trump, and sang along as the musician Kid Rock performed a mini-concert, including his 2022 single “We the People,” featuring a brand-new lyric in honor of the inauguration: “Straighten up, sucker, cause Daddy’s home.”

The political pronouncements really got going at about 4 p.m., starting with Miller, who received a hero’s welcome from the crowd and said that Trump’s win represented “the triumph of the everyday citizen over a corrupt system.” (As he spoke, the incoming first lady, Melania Trump, was on X announcing the launch of a meme coin to match her husband’s new one, a development that turned the family into crypto-billionaires over the weekend.) Later, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host turned MAGA podcaster, hailed “the goodness that is about to rain down” under Trump’s leadership. And Donald Trump Jr., fresh from his recent mission to Greenland, affirmed that the next four years will be his father’s “pièce de résistance.”

When at last Trump arrived onstage, he was greeted ecstatically as the embodiment of his allies’ declarations and his followers’ dreams. He teased his plans to sign nearly 100 executive orders today, including what he has described as a “joint venture” with the parent company of TikTok and a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. “You’re gonna have a lot of fun watching television,” he predicted. Before welcoming the Village People to join him onstage for an exuberant rendition of “YMCA,” Trump ran through a list of additional priorities to come: the largest deportation operation in American history, lower taxes, higher wages, and an end to overseas wars. “The American people have given us their trust,” Trump declared, “and in return we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.”

That history begins at noon.

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Last week, I pronounced unequivocal judgment—as I tend to do regarding many things—on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I think it’s a contrived and embarrassing idea driven by nostalgia and capitalism, and antithetical to the youthful rebelliousness that drives rock-and-roll music.

Usually, I make these pronouncements and then let the chips fall. This time, however, we asked The Daily’s readers for their views. And I was surprised: Many of you, far more than I expected, agreed with me. But your responses—and I regret that I could not include more of them here—also raised some good points of disagreement.

First, of course, a fist bump to the folks who agreed with my basic argument that the idea of the Rock Hall, not the building itself, is the problem. One reader, Brian, thought the degree to which the whole thing was “over-hyped” was “really quite sad and pathetic, actually.” Pamela wrote that the Rock Hall reminded her of the participation trophies given to her children years ago: “They, too, were unnecessary, and in my mind are a very similar notion as inducting random old rockers for random attributes into the random concept of a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.”

Right on, Pamela, and I want you to know I made devil horns with my fingers and bobbed my head while reading your comment.

Ahem. Moving on. Some of you volunteered your ages, and many of you chided me for being churlish about nostalgia. Angie, 67, said that she looks back on her youth “fondly” and has no issue with reminders of some of “the best days of my life.” And many readers took offense at the fact that I have never actually been to the Rock Hall or to Cleveland: They thought I was attacking the museum and the city. M Anderson didn’t pull any punches: “Ah, Tom, to have such a low opinion of a place that you admit you have never visited—the deeply entertaining Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—is just wrong. Do yourself a favor and visit the place … Your narrow and uninformed opinion comes off as beneath you, and that is [a] sad fact of too many opinion pieces today.”

And a good day to you, sir or madam. Look, I’m sure I’d find the exhibits in Cleveland fascinating. I love pop-culture museums. I’ve been to the Louvre and seen the Mona Lisa, but it wasn’t nearly the thrill of gawking at Archie Bunker’s chair or at a costume the late Christopher Reeve once wore as the greatest movie Superman. I’m the guy, after all, who loves Las Vegas, and I read the plaques and labels on almost every bit of memorabilia plastered on the walls of its casinos and restaurants. But I don’t need a committee of music pooh-bahs to tell me that the Beatles were great while they also tell me that Mary J. Blige or Donovan are legendary “rock” stars. It’s not about Cleveland or the Hall itself, I promise.

As Anders, a reader from Minnesota, rightly notes, the word rock is now thrown around so loosely “that it doesn’t seem to have much real meaning in regard to the actual Hall of Fame these days. And while I’m sure any band would mostly be honored to be recognized by the Hall, I don’t begrudge those like Iron Maiden who laugh in its face.” Exactly. Although Iron Maiden isn’t my cup of grain alcohol, I get why they and other bands likely wouldn’t give a hoot about getting an attaboy from the suits in the music industry.

A Canadian reader, Laura, spoke for many of you when she suggested just having a general rock museum, especially if it could ensure that lesser-known works “don’t get lost among the big names.” But that’s the problem with a “hall of fame”: The museum aspect is lost in the spectacle of voting and the sometimes wince-inducing performances of the inductees.

Lee pointed out that the Rock Hall “is organized primarily around how much curatable material has been donated,” which means that the origins of rock in the Deep South and the Mississippi Delta are ignored, while there is an “abundance of space dedicated to midwestern bands that nobody has heard of that were inconsequential.” Lee is right that “when Elvis is celebrated as a bedrock of rock and roll, and the people he imitated [are] ignored[,] the whole thing is disingenuous.”

Jay from Washington State was also pretty blunt: “The problem for the hall is that rock is in fact essentially a dead art form. Trying to be really good at it today is a bit like trying to be an impressionist painter in the 1960s—it might be nice to look at or hear, but it’s been done (to death) by now.” I’m not sure rock is dead, but Jay is right that the period we normally associate with the rise of rock as a music form, a 20-year span that begins in the mid-’50s, was a cultural moment in time, not an ongoing revolution.

Let’s end on a more positive note. One thing the Rock Hall can do is keep reintroducing music to younger listeners. Sandra, 82, wrote: “I can attest the museum is an enjoyable visit to the past. However after going to a recent Billy Joel concert I realized nothing can replace youth or innocence.” True enough, but each generation can offer the music of its youth to the next generation. As Gael MacGregor, a recording artist who once sang backup for the legendary Dick Dale, warned us in her note: “Ageism in the arts has always been an issue—whether the claim is ‘You’re too young to know anything,’ or ‘You’re too old to be singing/playing this music.’”

So let’s celebrate the one thing the Rock Hall does well: start arguments about music. That’s a good thing, because then we all have to be aware of the acts we’re talking about. Ralph, a 77-year old reader, recently lost his wife of 52 years. (Our condolences, Ralph.) “The songs of lost love I listened to in my teens,” he wrote, “have a painful new resonance now.” But Ralph also saw these older songs as a bridge: “Maybe the Hall of Fame will inspire some new listeners to experience these old artists,” he said, “but will it light their fire”?

Perhaps the Rock Hall isn’t a great idea, but if it gets us to listen to the music, then long may it stand on the shores of Lake Erie.

Related:

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should not exist. The secret joys of geriatric rock

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s sentencing made no one happy. Trump is right that Pax Americana is over, Charles A. Kupchan argues. These bizarre theories about the L.A. wildfires endanger everyone.

Today’s News

President-Elect Donald Trump was sentenced to unconditional discharge in his New York criminal hush-money case. He will avoid jail time, fines, and probation for his conviction, but he became the first president to be sentenced as a felon. The Supreme Court heard arguments in the TikTok case. The justices seem likely to uphold the law that could ban the app. Meta is ending major DEI programs at the company, including for “hiring, development and procurement practices,” according to Axios.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Scientists have collected troves of DNA and microscopic imaging data from human cells—and now they have a tool that might make sense of all that information, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka explains why The Atlantic’s Books department likes to make an extra toast on January 1 for a concurrent holiday: Public Domain Day.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Credit: Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Yamil Lage / AFP via Getty.

The Return of Havana Syndrome

By Shane Harris

Two years ago, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded, in unusually emphatic language, that a mysterious and debilitating ailment known as “Havana syndrome” was not the handiwork of a foreign adversary wielding some kind of energy weapon. That long-awaited finding shattered an alternative theory embraced by American diplomats and intelligence officers, who said they had been victims of a deliberate, clandestine campaign by a U.S. adversary, probably Russia, that left them disabled, struggling with chronic pain, and drowning in medical bills. The intelligence report, written chiefly by the CIA, appeared to close the book on Havana syndrome.

Turns out, it didn’t.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Stars such as The Rock and John Cena make a return as the flagship Raw show launches on Netflix.

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On New Year’s Day, while looking for something to watch, I came across a channel with a loud, gray-haired British guy in a nice suit and a scarf bellowing about something or other. I assumed that I had turned to CNN and was watching its ebullient, occasionally shouty business and aviation correspondent, Richard Quest. I wasn’t even close: It was Roger Daltrey of the Who, and he was excitedly introducing the new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Peter Frampton in a condensed version of the October ceremony.

Frampton’s music was, for a moment in the 1970s, the soundtrack to my misspent teenage nights; on the broadcast, Keith Urban joined him to perform his megahit “Do You Feel Like We Do,” and I remembered every word. And Frampton seems like a man who is genuinely loved by his peers. It was a nice moment. But when 80-year-old Daltrey—who, at 21, famously sang, “Hope I die before I get old”—is introducing a man whose biggest hits were produced nearly 50 years ago, it’s a reminder that the entire Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concept is utterly wrongheaded.

As the saying goes, good writers borrow, and great writers steal. I was once a professor, however, and professors give attribution, so let me rely on John Strausbaugh, who wrote a wonderful 2001 jeremiad against Boomer music nostalgia, Rock ’Til You Drop, to explain why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame shouldn’t exist: Because it’s “as true to the spirit of rock’n’roll as a Hard Rock Cafe—one in which there are way too many children and you can’t get a drink.”

The Hall of Fame is about old and dead people; rock’n’roll is about the young and living. The Hall of Fame tries to reform rock’n’roll, tame it, reduce it to bland, middle-American family entertainment; it drains all the sexiness and danger and rebelliousness out of it …

Strasbaugh winces especially hard at the Rock Hall tradition of “honoring” classic acts by “dragging their old butts out onto a stage” and then making them “go through the motions one more time” as they pretend to feel the music the same way they did when they were kids. Writing almost 25 years ago, he said that the Rolling Stones were way past their retirement clock, and that Cher in her late-1990s performances “was so stiff in her makeup and outfits, that she looked like a wax effigy of herself.”

Last year, the Rolling Stones went on tour again and were sponsored by—I am serious—the AARP.

And Cher was also just inducted into the Rock Hall in October, at 78 years old. When you’re asking Cher to suit up so that she can be lauded by the young-enough-to-be-her-granddaughter Dua Lipa, you may be trying to honor the artist, but you’re mostly just reminding everyone about the brutal march of time.

I am sometimes blistered on social media for my bad music takes, and I will confess that with some exceptions, I didn’t really develop much of a taste in music beyond the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Top 40 ear candy until I was in college. (My musical soul was saved, or at least improved, by the old WBCN in Boston and by my freshman-dorm neighbor at Boston University, who introduced me to Steely Dan.) But you don’t need a refined taste in music to cringe when a bunch of worthies from the music industry assemble each year to make often nonsensical choices about what constitutes “rock and roll” and who did it well enough to be lionized for the ages. Look, I sort of like some of those old Cher hits from the ’70s—“Train of Thought” is an underrated little pop gem, in my view—but Cher as an inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? If she, and Bobby Darin, and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Woody Guthrie, and Willie Nelson are all “rock,” what isn’t?

This is where I must also admit that I’ve never been to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, or even to Cleveland, for that matter. But I’d argue that seeing it all up close—as Strausbaugh notes in his book, it’s full of this rock artist once wore this shirt and that rock artist once touched this mic stand—isn’t the point. Trying to trap the energy and spirit of youthful greatness behind the ice in some sort of Fortress of Rock Solitude is nothing more than a monument to nostalgia. Worse, it’s an ongoing tribute not to music, but to capitalism. Perhaps the music business was always a business, but most rock and roll was about opposing the establishment, not asking for a nice table at its Chamber of Commerce ceremonies.

Don’t get me wrong: I love both rock music and capitalism. I am also prone to a fair amount of my own nostalgia, and I will pay to see some of my favorite elderly stars get up onstage, wink at the audience, and pull out a few of their famous moves—as long as they do it with the kind of self-awareness that makes it more like a visit with an old friend than a soul-crushing pastiche of days gone by.

But even when a return to the stage is done with taste, age can still take its toll on both the performer and the audience: I’m now in my 60s, and as much as I liked seeing Peter Frampton get a big round of applause, I didn’t feel warm or happy; I just felt old, because he was obviously old. (Frampton has an autoimmune disease that causes muscle weakness, so he had to sit to perform his arena anthem.) And when Keith Urban is playing along as the representative of the younger generation at 56 years old, it makes me feel a certain kind of pity for people who gave me the musical landscape of my youth.

Maybe America doesn’t need to commercialize every Boomer memory. Artists become eligible for the Rock Hall 25 years from the release date of their first commercial recording, but rock can’t be distilled in 25-year batches like some sort of rare whiskey. Rock is more like … well, sex. Each generation has to experience it for themselves; later, each generation thinks they invented it; eventually, we all realize that no generation can fully explain their feelings about it to the next one.

Speaking of sex and rebellion, one of the best arguments against the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is that Warren Zevon isn’t in it. His continuing exclusion is one of the great ongoing controversies of the selection process, but the point is not that Zevon should be in it; rather, the question is whether Zevon would ever want to be honored in such a place. The man who wrote “Play It All Night Long” and “Mr. Bad Example” simply doesn’t belong on a pedestal next to Mary J. Blige and Buffalo Springfield. And that’s reason enough that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should not exist at all.

Related:

The secret joys of geriatric rock Rock never dies—but it does get older and wiser.

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The FBI said that the attacker who killed 14 people in New Orleans on New Year’s Day appears to have acted alone. Military officials said that the driver of a Cybertruck that exploded in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas yesterday was an Army master sergeant who was on leave from active duty. Federal agents searched the home of former NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, who was accused of sexual misconduct last year. Maddrey has denied the allegations.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The poet Julia Ward Howe wrote an anthem of fervent patriotism in 1861—and it’s remained the soundtrack to American conflict ever since, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Giacomo Bagnara

We’re All in “Dark Mode” Now

By Ian Bogost

Dark mode has its touted benefits: Dimmer screens mean less eye strain, some assert; and on certain displays (including most smartphones), showing more black pixels prolongs battery life. Dark mode also has its drawbacks: Reading lots of text is more difficult to do in white-on-black. But even if these tradeoffs might be used to justify the use of inverted-color settings, they offer little insight into those settings’ true appeal. They don’t tell us why so many people suddenly want their screens, which had glowed bright for years, to go dark. And they’re tangential to the story of how, in a fairly short period of time, we all became creatures of the night mode.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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