How Much Is That A-Bomb in the Window?

Plus some of the best albums of the year (including Mavis and Van the Man) and our usual cartoons

Greg Mitchell has authored more than a dozen books (see most of them here) and directed four recent PBS films. Subscribing to this newsletter is still FREE—so if you want to help fund, maybe purchase one of my books, thanks. Or recommend this Substack to a friend!

Every family should have one. Original model of first Atomic Bomb for training in 1945 up for auction now.

Four days to go and now at $25,000. From major auction house, Heritage:

“Little Boy” Atomic Bomb Training Model (509th Composite Group), 1945. An extraordinarily rare and historically important aeronautical training device representing the “Little Boy” atomic bomb, the first nuclear weapon used in warfare, dropped by the Enola Gay of the 509th Composite Group over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 The striking example is a ground training model, produced for the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1945 to train flight and ordnance crews in handling, release, and loading procedures for the Little Boy unit and related delivery systems.

Official document released quietly last night, made top of NY Times site. and paving way for more Russia friendly policies:

Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy

President Trump’s new National Security Strategy describes a country that is focused on doing business and reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians.

Heather Cox Richardson responded:

Late last night, the Trump administration released the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America….The Trump administration’s NSS announces a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II.

After a brief introduction touting what it claims are the administration’s great successes, the document begins by announcing the U.S. will back away from the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II Allies put in place after that war to prevent another world war. The authors of the document claim that the system of institutions like the United Nations, alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and free trade between nations that established a series of rules for foreign engagement and a web of shared interests around the globe has been bad for the U.S. because it undermined “the character of our nation.”

To achieve their white supremacist country, the document’s authors insist they will not permit “transnational and international organizations [or] foreign powers or entities” to undermine U.S. sovereignty. To that end, they reject immigration as well as “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threatened the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”

And in possibly cataclysmic entertainment news:

Angst Turns to Anger in Hollywood as Netflix Hooks Warner Bros.

Much of the entertainment capital fears that Netflix’s deal will lead to more job losses and theater closings and fewer boundary-pushing movies.

At this time of year we are flooded with “best of year” album or song lists, and to judge by most of them no one over the age of 40 created anything great in the past 12 months. This, of course, is highly unlikely. At least at the New York Times when my old Crawdaddy colleague Jon Pareles was still there we’d get at least a sane balance.

So it’s refreshing that the good folks at MoJo magazine actually took care to listen a bit to some older (even old) folks, so their top 100 list includes the likes of: Van Morrison, Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Salif Keita, Mavis Staples, Robert Plant with Suzi Dean, Jeff Tweedy, Lemonheads, Sharon Van Etten, David Byrne, Jonathan Richman, Paul Weller, and Pulp, among others. So here a few of their choices…..

Whatever you may think of Van Morrison’s Covid tantrum a few years back, his new “Remember Now” album turned the page on that and also somehow returned him to form from decades ago. The title cut is quite astounding:

I first tried to interview Jonathan Richman exactly 50 years ago for Crawdaddy after his classic “Roadrunner” had re-emerged. He’s hung on since then as an often lightweight cult favorite but this song “But We May Try Weird Stuff” offers much more musically:

Mavis Staples still has it, vocally—and politically. Simply one of best songs of the year:

From Tunes to Toons

Wuerker:

Barry Blitt:

Davies:

Luckovich:

Goris:

And more Goris:

Bagley:

Photo Finish

Continuing our new daily feature, from my camera to you, let me know what you think. Today: “Snowy Owl at Sunset on the Hudson.”