It's been five years (to the day!) since *Wired* killed off "Beyond the Beyond," Bruce Sterling's excellent blog, a wanton act of vandalism that, among other things, made it much harder to figure out what was on Bruce's mind, a subject I find endlessly fascinating:

pluralistic.net/2020/05/17/che…

Sterling's got a Medium that he almost never updates. I follow it through RSS, the best way to keep up with both things that update frequently and also hardly ever:

pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/kee…

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This week, he posted a long, thoughtful, and seriously intriguing review of *Cafe Europa Revisited,* Slavenka Drakulic's followup to her 1996 international blockbuster *Cafe Europa*:

bruces.medium.com/cafe-europa-…

I confess that I had never heard of Drakulic, though, as I read Sterling's review, it became clear why he dotes on the acerbic Croatian essayist, a keen observer of the material world and theorizer of political upheaval:

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/6…

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“Cafe Europa Revisited” (2025) - Bruce Sterling - Medium

Once upon a time, Slavenka Drakulic was quite a far-out and exotic personage to me. I tended to think of her as “Madame Drakulic.” A cafe-society, Balkan literary figure with a strange name from a…

^{Bruce Sterling (Medium)}

Drakulic is well-known for an essay collection called "How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed," and the subtitle of this volume is "How to Survive Post-Communism," which just about says it all. Sterling characterizes it as the start of a new hot genre, "Old books directly written for old people by old people."

"The West" (whatever that is) is getting old. For more than a decade, Bruce Sterling's been predicting a future of "old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky."

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*Original Sin,* a new heavily reported book on the 2024 election makes a good case that Biden was indeed in a state of advanced senescence through much of his presidency and the entire election campaign, and had no business occupying the White House, much less running for another four years:

nytimes.com/2025/05/13/books/r…

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Biden's unwillingness to confront his age and frailty, along with Trump's obvious mental and physical decline, has many terrified American political thinkers talking about the gerontocracy that's running the country:

pluralistic.net/2023/07/01/des…

Corey Robin got in some good licks on this one, in a piece called "We really are the oldest democracy in the world":

coreyrobin.com/2025/05/15/we-r…

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We really are the oldest democracy in the world

A new book about Biden’s decline and the 2024 campaign has tons of damning quotes from Democratic Party insiders. Apparently, Biden’s inner circle did a lot of covering just how far gone he was during the campaign.

^{coreyrobin.com}

"Oldest democracy" as in, "the democracy with the oldest leaders." The Democrats are gearing up for the midterms with such repeat offenders as Maxine Waters (86), Rosa DeLauro (82), John Garamendi (80), Doris Matsui (80) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (80). Also running: David Scott (79) who had to step down as ranking House Ag Committee member over health concerns. And: Dwight Evans (70), who missed most of last year's votes after suffering a stroke.

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Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi (85), Steny Hoyer (85), Danny Davis (83), Frederica Wilson (82), Emanuel Cleaver (80) and Alma Adams (78) won't say whether they're running in 2026:

axios.com/2025/05/15/house-dem…

At 53, I can tell that I've lost a step. Sure, I have the benefits of wisdom, but man, I am *so* tired.

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