We are pleased to announce that “Stranger Danger: How Bart Ehrman’s Latest Unmasks the History of Altruism,” Ben Bayer’s review of Bart Ehrman’s Love Thy Stranger, has been published as the cover story of the October/November 2026 issue of Free Inquiry. You can read the opening paragraph below and the full essay at Free Inquiry.

Anyone today who cites the Bible to make moral objections to homosexuality or premarital sex becomes an easy target for a certain critical question: Why follow those passages but not the Old Testament rules permitting the sale of one’s children into slavery and condemning the act of touching pigskin?

Read the full article at Free Inquiry.

CANA — New research has suggested that the famous miracle of the water turned into wine at the wedding at Cana may have been undone soon thereafter, as Jesus witnessed guests doing the Electric Slide.

GLOUCESTERSHIRE — A group of Muslim men released by authorities earlier this week were back in custody today after police received reports that the men had shared a meme online.

I can’t afford a Rolex, but I don’t accuse the watchmaker of robbing me. If I wince at a bill in a fancy restaurant, I don’t sue the owner. Similarly, if a Taylor Swift ticket is too expensive, I close the Ticketmaster tab and move on, looking for entertainment I can afford. I don’t fume at the concert organizer.

I’m shocked how many don’t share my attitude and instead demand live entertainment on a silver platter at a discount price — or else.

Many concert-goers feel “robbed” by high ticket prices and fees. They rejoiced when a Manhattan jury found Live Nation Entertainment (LNE) and its subsidiary Ticketmaster liable for monopolization under federal antitrust law (the “or else”).1 Finally, they imagine, the “greedy” corporation that “skins” music fans will get what it deserves and the fantasy of premium seats at top-tier live music tours at bar-band prices will become reality.

A fantasy, because Live Nation’s dominance did not cause prices to rise.

Especially after Covid, demand for live shows has exploded.2 An increasingly prosperous worldwide audience is willing to pay for a night out. But top-tier artists don’t grow on trees. No one has a monopoly on Bad Bunny’s performances like Bad Bunny himself. Where fans outnumber seats, prices rise.

Ticket prices also likely rose to replace the falling recorded-music revenue. Today, we stream all music for a small monthly price, but pay more to attend concerts that artists rely on. Artists and their teams set the face value of the ticket, and retain 80 to 90 percent of the final ticket price (a figure no one disputes). Concert prices went up because tours have to fund careers, not because LNE runs the industry.3

In this new music economy, Live Nation learned to put as many fans in front of as many artists as the calendar and logistics allow. Reliably managing venues, ticketing, routing, staging, security, and the rest of a modern tour’s machinery is a Herculean feat. LNE also carries the risk of the tour, often paying artists an upfront guarantee, absorbing the loss if the tour underperforms, and carrying insurance to recover costs in the event of cancellation. It’s no scandal that a firm like this ends up with more business. It is what competence looks like.

Does Ticketmaster “gouge” concertgoers? The resale market suggests otherwise. If Ticketmaster charged outrageous prices, scalpers couldn’t keep earning a windfall. Highly profitable resale is evidence that, if anything, Ticketmaster is undercharging.

What sparked popular outrage against LNE is more evidence that prices were not “too high.” In 2022, Ticketmaster buckled under the enormous opening-day demand for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. Had prices been unaffordable to many, an onslaught of fans and scalpers wouldn’t have crashed the system the moment tickets dropped.4

What about steep fees for premium seats and parking, which even some Live Nation employees privately said were “robbing them blind baby”?5 Such language helped plaintiffs inflame the jury. But it proves only that a few employees — like many of LNE’s critics who object to ticket prices — tragically misunderstand the value of premium services to fans. It’s not robbery; it’s high-value trade.

What about Live Nation’s exclusive long-term contracts with major concert venues, or their allegedly “monopolistic” business model?6 The scary “flywheel” is actually the strategy that keeps prices from rising further (though they probably should). Concert staging, logistics, advertising, and accounting earns little money, but feeds volume into highly profitable ticketing (Ticketmaster) and sponsorships (brand placement and vendors). Without exclusive contracts ensuring that the staging and promotion business is supported by ticketing and ad revenue, the business might not be sustainable. If LNE were broken up, prices at separated concert promotion venture would likely have to rise, or artists’ share would have to fall.

In short, Live Nation built a good business in a complex and changing economic reality. Antitrust prosecutors are trying to scapegoat them for high prices.

State plaintiffs had to display mental gymnastics to concoct “evidence” against LNE. The best they could muster was to compare LNE’s average price to that of AXS, the closest rival. But AXS itself acknowledged its services were not comparable in value to LNE’s.7 Even so, the price gap was a mere $1.72. Using this cooked-up pocket change, the government is hounding a company that brings you the shows you value. As LNE is asking in its latest motions, the judge should toss the groundless verdict.8

What to do about rising concert prices? The answer is plain: don’t buy the ticket.9 Whenever I skip a show I find too expensive, I remember that no one has a right to luxury entertainment and turn to my essentially free library of unlimited music in my pocket. Neither fans who pay for a night out nor those who cannot afford to are victims.

In 1964, a young University of Michigan anthropologist went to live with a tribe untouched by modernity.

What he found destroyed the noble savage myth.

Then his own discipline spent the next four decades trying to destroy him for publishing it.

The field was long dominated by a myth.

Postwar anthropology, inspired by Rousseau and Marx, held that "savages" were peaceful and cooperative. Violence, hierarchy, and inequality were supposed to be diseases of civilisation, invented by property, colonisation, and markets. Abolish those, and the natural harmony of man would supposedly return.

Then a kid from rural Michigan went to check.

In 1964, Napoleon Chagnon, one of twelve children from a poor family in Port Austin, traveled to the Venezuela–Brazil border. He went to live with the Yanomamö, roughly 20,000 people scattered across the Amazon rainforest, largely untouched by the state, by markets, or by modernity. 

He would return nearly thirty times over the next three decades. His 1968 book, Yanomamö: The Fierce People, sold nearly a million copies and was translated into fifteen languages.

But this is what he actually found: Raids between villages were routine. Infanticide was common. Women were regularly abducted and traded after violent conflict. Headmen, as a rule, were killers. Chagnon mapped Yanomamö genealogies using early computer methods, learned the language, and lived inside the villages for months at a stretch. The data was not hearsay.

A particular finding broke the field. In a 1988 paper in Science, Chagnon documented that the unokais, men who had killed in raids, had on average more wives and more surviving offspring than non-violent men of the same age. In a state of nature, violence was being reproductively selected for. The Rousseauian premise ran backwards.

If violence, hierarchy, and inequality were what civilisation produces, they should be rare where civilisation is absent. Chagnon found the opposite. Where the state, the market, and modern institutions had never arrived, up to 30% of adult male deaths were violent. The men who killed were the men whose lineages survived. In the modern United States that figure is under 1%. [In today's New Zealand, the figure is 0.3%.]

The reaction was immediate. Marshall Sahlins, one of Chagnon's former graduate teachers at Michigan, turned on him. Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel circulated a warning to the American Anthropological Association (AAA) describing "an anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Joseph Conrad, though not, perhaps, a Joseph Mengele." Salesian missionaries in the region joined the coalition. What Chagnon had found could not be answered on its merits, so the man who found it became the target instead.

Then came the book that ended him. In 2000, journalist Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado. He accused Chagnon of triggering a measles epidemic through vaccine experimentation, arming rival factions to stage conflicts on film, cooking his data, and behaving as "a war criminal or even a genocidaire." The New Yorker ran Tierney's companion article the same month. Chagnon's career effectively ended before any serious investigation reached a verdict.

But every serious charge eventually collapsed. The vaccine complied with WHO protocols. The measles epidemic predated Chagnon's arrival. Venezuelan physicians, the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Michigan, the American Society of Human Genetics, and the U.S. Department of Health each investigated. Each reached the same verdict: no crime, no cover-up, no fraud. Jane Hill, who chaired the AAA's own inquiry, wrote privately that Tierney's book was "a piece of sleaze, that's all there is to it." [Alice Dreger, a historian of medicine and science, concluded after a year's research that Tierney's claims were false and the Association was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods and not protecting "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges." The controversy is covered in the 2005 book Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It by anthropologist Robert Borofsky, and Dreger's 2015 book, Galileo's Middle Finger. Chagnon himself revisited the topic in his later book, 2013 Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes: the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists.]

The AAA task force issued its own report in 2002 anyway, condemning Chagnon for prioritising his research over the Yanomamö. Raymond Hames had already resigned from the panel mid-inquiry, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a National Academy of Sciences member, quit the AAA in protest. Three years later, the AAA membership voted to rescind the report. In 2012, Chagnon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The following year, Sahlins resigned from the Academy over it. 

The noble savage myth itself outlived the twentieth century's political movements. Today it powers the decolonial framework that dominates the humanities and much of political discourse. The claim is unchanged: violence, hierarchy, and inequality are artefacts of property, civilisation, and colonisation, and would vanish once those were abolished. Three decades of Chagnon's evidence showed the claim was wrong. The re-tribalisers ignored the evidence.

In the absence of the institutions the utopians wanted to destroy, human beings behaved more violently than within them. The discipline that could not answer his data answered his character instead. That is what an intellectual monoculture does when evidence contradicts its premises. It goes after whoever brought the evidence.

Aaron Sorkin doesn’t hide his political leanings on screen.

The veteran scribe lets his liberalism influence his art. That has led to some powerful results.

Even some conservatives praised “The West Wing,” Sorkin’s idealized version of a competent Democratic administration. The ending of 1995’s “The American President” stirred serious pride in our First Amendment.

He’s not as predictable as Adam McKay, the “Anchorman” director who doubles as a DNC propaganda machine.

• “Vice”
• “Don’t Look Up”
• “The Big Short”

Sorkin still leads with his politics at times. Case in point: “The Social Reckoning.” It’s the sequel, of sorts, to 2010’s “The Social Network.” Except Mark Zuckerberg now looks like Jeremy Strong, not Jesse Eisenberg.

Sorkin takes over for David Fincher as the saga’s director, too. He’s still penning the dialogue, his undeniable strength over the decades.

He helped bring the phrase “walk and talk” into TV vernacular.

The new film, out Oct. 9, is all about blaming Facebook for societal ills. And, to be fair, social media giants worship algorithms at all costs.

It’s a problem.

It’s also a First Amendment issue, something a recent clip from the film suggests bothers Sorkin. Except he has something bigger on his mind.

Jan. 6.

Early reports showed the production recreating the riots that Democrats have effectively weaponized for more than five years. They obsess over the subject, eager to paint all Trump supporters with that garish brush.

Now, Jan. 6 has a movie all its own. An early report says “The Social Reckoning” weighs in on that ugly riot.

World of Reel shares a pointed reaction to the film and its subject matter:

January 6th eventually comes up, the entire film builds toward it. The film’s arc leads naturally to the suggestion that January 6th was, in part, a product of Facebook itself. 

Sorkin has literally said the same thing on the record regarding Facebook and Jan. 6.

The problem?

Who will actually see the movie? Box office projections have “The Social Reckoning” opening to a very soft $6-$10 million on its opening weekend. The competition won’t be stiff.

The only other major new release is “Other Mommy,” a horror film starring Jessica Chastain.

Audiences may not want a lecture on Facebook’s alleged ills. They also won’t rally around a Jan. 6 movie, an issue that likely has exhausted Americans at this point in the culture.

That may explain why “The Social Reckoning” trailers leave out that fateful day.

Even if “The Social Reckoning” flops with audiences, its Jan. 6 messaging could still fuel a successful Oscar campaign. Oscar voters may choose to support the film given its anti-Trump message.

Politics matter to awards season voters, too.

The Climate Change screed “Don’t Look Up,” which earned plenty of negative reviews, earned four Oscar nominations in 2021, including Best Picture.

The post Jan. 6 Themed ‘Social Reckoning’ Expected to Bomb at Box Office appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.