The Monday Media Diet with Charles McFarlane
On Sean Naylor, The Gods of New York, and Musée de l’Armée
Charles McFarlane has been writing on the very interesting intersection between pop culture and the military. He’s on Substack writing Combat Threads. Pleased to have him with us today. -Colin (CJN)
Tell us about yourself.
I’m a researcher, fashion historian, and freelance journalist. My work mostly revolves around the intersection of popular culture and the military broadly. This can mean writing about the aesthetic of US Special Forces and how it changed over the course of the Global War on Terror or writing about companies like Americana Pipedream and how they are selling military surplus to a younger audience. My academic research is mostly in the same vein, but a tad more historical in its scope. In that capacity, I was fortunate enough to consult on the latest season of Articles of Interest and appear throughout.
Most of my writing can be found over on my Substack, Combat Threads. I think of Substack as my notebook, where I can develop new ideas and work through potential pitches that may end up elsewhere. I like to think of my work as essentially reporting on a subculture. With the military-civilian divide in the US what it is, military culture increasingly exists apart from broader American culture. I want to translate some of that military culture to a more general audience so they understand what they are looking at, for example, when federal agents dress more and more like soldiers: What are they referencing? Where did this come from? And what does it say about culture? etc. People think we live in a militarized society, but really, I think we need a better understanding of what is going on in our military so we can better understand the people who make it up. Ok, off my soapbox.
Describe your media diet.
My first job out of college was as an editorial researcher at Monocle’s New York Bureau. Part of that job was compiling a handful of stories from around the country that were not in any of the major outlets (e.g., The New York Times, WSJ, The Atlantic) every morning to send to the editors in London. This wasn’t just an empty task either, I got feedback — mostly when my roundup wasn’t up to snuff. I still don’t do that, of course, but it definitely shaped how I trawl the internet looking for potential story ideas. So when I open my computer in the morning for the first half hour or so, I try to really cast a wide net and gather up as many open tabs from as many different places as possible. It could be as varied as a story from Soldier Systems Daily, an item in Dezeen, and a piece from Hell Gate. I am also a big fan of Google Alerts which I set up constantly to track my beat and potential story ideas.
Regardless of how fast I am rushing to get out the door, I always turn on the radio first thing when I wake up. We have an internet radio that is set to our local NPR station, WNYC. When I am working on busy work, I sometimes change the radio over to BBC World Service, which I really enjoy in the middle of the day when shows like Assignment or Outlook come on. I also just crush podcasts to an unhealthy degree, including some that I actively don’t like, haha, but feel compelled to listen to potential story ideas or just to see where a certain slice of the culture is on something. But much of what I listen to, I love. I never miss an episode of Know Your Enemy, Ones and Tooze, The Watch, and, of course, Articles of Interest while I try to check in on Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll, American Prestige, and Angry Planet when an episode catches my eye.
I do still like to read print, and we subscribe to a decent number of publications, which means I am chronically behind on The New Yorker, usually skim New York magazine, and get at least one or two pieces from the New York Review of Books done before the next issue is at my door. Like every good man of the Left, I love reading The Financial Times and try to get most of the way through the weekend edition before Monday morning, with varying degrees of success.
What’s the last great book you read?
This is kind of cheating cause I am not done yet, but I have been tearing through Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s. I had seen a few reviews and had suggested it to a friend who devoured it and kept texting me how much they loved it the whole time, so I bumped it up on my list. It really is no surprise; it is totally my bag. I have long had a fascination with the 1970s European terrorism, the Lebanese Civil War, and characters like Carlos the Jackal. It also paired very well with a book that I was just revisiting for a story I was writing, Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command, as it picks up in a way when The Revolutionists stops, but from the other side. While reading The Revolutionists, you could be shocked by how flat-footed nations were caught by the terrorism of the 1970s, with Relentless Strike, you see what came next as the US invested in Special Operations Forces to deal with these kinds of threats.
What are you reading now?
Because I kind of cheated on the other question, I am going to tweak this to what I am reading next. I am about to head off to Washington state for some hiking and camping, so I was looking for something light (in both senses) to stow in my pack. Whenever I am a bit burned out on reading (which seems to be happening more often), I like to pick up what I call an “out breath” book, usually a detective or spy novel. I find that they help limber up my reading muscle and get my brain firing. For this trip, I grabbed Smiley’s People from the John Le Carré box set I have on my shelf. But when I get back home, I am probably going to pick up The Gods of New York by Jonathan Mahler again after starting it a few months back.
What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?
The reason I still like reading physical publications is the act of stumbling upon a story you would never choose to read if you saw it online. So when I open up a magazine, I like to go to the table of contents, find a story that I really want to read, and instead of just flipping right to it, turn every page until I get there, with the challenge to try to read at least one other story before I get there.
Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?
Peter York. I think about him a lot when I am writing, and he was a real inspiration during my graduate studies in costume studies. Quickly, Peter York is a British writer in the new journalism mold who covered a variety of subcultures throughout the 1970s and 80s. Famously, he wrote the Sloane Ranger Handbook (kind of like the British version of the Preppy Handbook), but that isn’t what I mean when I say you should read him. He has a collection of his pieces called Style Wars that is just brilliant. You can see how he was able to identify nascent trends, come up with an evocative name for them, and write a really incisive column that really unpacks not just what this subculture is but what it is responding to. The Sloane Ranger essay is great, but I am also a fan of Little Magazines and Post Punk Mortem. Again, back to my project, I think of my work as trying to apply this approach to military culture. And some honorable mentions: Michael Lange’s Substack is a must for any politically engaged New Yorker, Thomas Gibbons-Neff’s reporting on American gun culture in The New York Times is unique and always must-read, Prof. Andrew Grove’s Menswear, Archives, Systems is a great place for men’s style-related academic writing.
What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?
Going to be real, I thought about this for a long time and flipped through my phone and came up totally empty. I am on my phone too much, but it is all the usual suspects I fear.
Plane or train?
Can I say car? I know, very American, but as I said up top, I love listening to podcasts and enjoy an audiobook, and driving is the absolute best time for either.
What is one place everyone should visit?
Having a hard time with this one, but I think I would say the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. It is a wonderful, massive museum. I have been there twice in my life, and each time the object that always sticks in my mind is a French soldier’s blue overcoat preserved from the trenches of WWI, still caked with mud. There is something very profound for me, someone who studies military uniforms, to see this over a hundred-year-old coat still covered with the debris of war and being able to see the wear patterns, where the dirt accumulated, to not just see how the coat was designed for military use but how it was worn. It is a striking piece.
Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.
I feel like my whole career is just one rabbit hole after another. For well over a year, I was combing through photos and videos from ongoing conflicts for any sign of a “Pornhub” logo patch on a combatant’s kit. This was kicked off when a photo was retweeted into my feed showing a young anti-junta soldier in Myanmar with a logo patch fixed to his plate carrier, and then I began to see them everywhere I looked in the Russian-Ukrainian War. Eventually, I found examples that really stretched across the world, including some strange ones in the militia/2A movement in the US. I ended up writing about it for Combat Threads, but it really captured that the military aesthetics and culture have become increasingly homogenized and global.