‘Praise.’ Panda Bear is back with a new album of sunny melodies and a familiar twenty-first-century-Beach-Boys tone. And yes, some sounds of his main band, Animal Collective, too. On this track, we get a duet with Rivka Ravede, the lead singer of the Philadelphia band The Spirit of the Beehive—and his wife.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Introducing Altered States. Corruption is everywhere. Or so you might think—because narratives of corruption are everywhere.

In the United States, Democrats and Republicans talk chronically of their opponents as being defined by it—Democrats seeing corporate influence, dark money, and foreign interference; Republicans, deep-state conspiracies, voter fraud, and graft in federal agencies. When either looks into the possibility that one or another of these things might be happening, the other claims the investigation is politically motivated. Which is to say, corrupt.

Neither is this tendency entirely new. From colonial-era anti-monarchists to contemporary conspiracy theorists, time and again, Americans have understood corruption as an existential threat to their republic—sometimes perceiving elaborate plots in sparse arrays of evidence. The country’s founders established the checks and balances characteristic of their constitution partly to limit what they saw as the corrupting influence of concentrated power.

Nor is the tendency unique to the U.S. In the United Kingdom, it’s common for Labour supporters to see the Tories as enmeshed with wealthy donors, tax-avoidance schemes, and privileged access for corporate interests—and for Tories to see Labour as corrupting Britain through union influence, local-council mismanagement, and left-wing bias in public institutions. You can find similar themes from Canada to Australia and throughout the democratic world. You can trace them back to the republican city-states of the Italian Renaissance, or back from there to ancient Athens.

And there are at least grains of truth to a lot of them.

If anything’s fundamentally different today, it’s that media is now everywhere; its dominant business model is based on engagement—the time you give to it; nothing drives engagement like fear, anger, and hate; and nothing drives fear, anger, and hate like narratives about internal enemies corrupting your country. People are freaking out about corruption all the time. It’s a lot for a democratic society to bear.

Unfortunately, there’s another problem with narratives of corruption being everywhere—which is that it can create a kind of interpretive smog, making it harder for us to see the worst forms of corruption right in front of our noses: Around the world, literal dictators and the autocratic governments they run are appropriating their countries’ wealth and using it to buy power and influence in democratic countries.

It’s been happening for years. It’s been getting worse. And now, it’s getting worse still. As we go to press with this, The Signal’s second print extra, new leadership in the U.S. Department of Justice is significantly scaling back anti-corruption enforcement—dropping high-profile corruption cases, firing anti-corruption prosecutors, and disbanding efforts to enforce sanctions against Russian oligarchs. An executive order from the president is meanwhile formally suspending the application of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the landmark 1977 law that prohibits Americans from bribing foreign officials.

Corruption may be everywhere, because human beings are everywhere. But if we want to see it in real proportions, not just as our political biases want us to see it, we have to be able to follow real clues—not least, the money. And in 2025, that’s only getting tougher and more urgent.

—John Jamesen Gould

Lukashenka strikes back. This January, the president of Belarus, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, secured his seventh term with 87 percent of the vote. A big win, if true. But even if it isn’t, something has changed since the last election in 2020, when about 300,000 people took to the streets to protest falsified election results. Back then, when Lukashenka visited the Minsk Wheels Tractor Plant, the workers heckled him, telling him to resign. The European Union and the United Kingdom refused to recognize the result and the EU imposed sanctions.

During this election campaign, he visited the Minsk Automobile Plant, where a BBC reporter said he was greeted with “rapturous applause.” That may not be representative of wider sentiment in Belarus, but still, it is telling: The opposition seems resigned, at least for the moment. Why?

In this week’s member’s despatch, we explore this question with a look at Paul Hansbury’s Belarus in Crisis: From Domestic Unrest to the Russia-Ukraine War—a primer on Belarusian history and society, as well as an in-depth analysis of Belarus’s current affairs. It’s a murky subject, shot through with official obfuscation, but Hansbury sifts through the evidence like a detective …

—Gustav Jönsson

‘Daydream.’ If Liam Dutton’s name isn’t instantly recognizable to you, you must not live in U.K., where he’s a broadcast meteorologist for Channel 4 News. But in his spare time, Dutton is a musician, and luckily for us, he’s started releasing his compositions on YouTube. This is an ambient track, which might make you look forward to springtime even more than you already are.

—Brendan Hasenstab

The European question. As the U.S. pulls back its support for Ukraine, Europe is clearly saying that it wants to pick up the slack. But can Europe pull it off?

European countries have increased defense spending by about 30 percent since 2021—but as John R. Deni says here in The Signal, they’re now running into serious budget problems that could thwart their desire to send more aid to Ukraine.

German law prevents the government from running a deficit larger than 0.35 percent of GDP, though the incoming cabinet has said it wants to revisit the limit. The U.K. and France—the next two largest economies in Europe—are already facing severe fiscal shortfalls; the new British budget cuts government spending, while France just passed a budget with a deficit amounting to 5.4 percent of GDP, violating the EU limit of 3 percent—for the sixth year in a row.

—Michael Bluhm

From this week’s member’s despatch …

111MHz: ‘Takoba (Injustice Version).’ Last May, the Nigerian guitarist and singer Mdou Moctar released Funeral for Justice, but never one to rest, he and his power trio have reworked all the songs on that record for acoustic and traditional instruments, which they’ve titled Tears of Injustice. It’s like “Mdou Moctar Unplugged,” and it’s a joy—not least if you like the Tuareg-style theatrics they’re known for.

—Brendan Hasenstab

111MHz: ‘O, Dark Mother.’ Masma Dream World is an artist from Milwaukee who specializes in a choral sort of drone music hovering at the midpoint between dream and nightmare. Experimental stuff—but refreshing to hear an artist blending Gregorian chanting with modern concerns and computerized editing.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Monarchs of the sea. On February 26, Beijing’s navy conducted live-fire exercises about 45 miles from Taiwan’s largest port, Kaohsiung. As part of the drill, more than 30 aircraft from the Chinese army also flew near the island.

The site overlaps several shipping lanes in the Taiwan Strait that connect East Asia to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. For some reason, Beijing didn’t offer the usual advance notification for shipping and air traffic in the area.

Just a few days earlier, Chinese naval vessels had undertaken two days of live-fire drills in the waters between Australia and New Zealand. Those drills forced commercial flights between the countries to divert around the exercises. New Zealand’s defense minister, Judith Collins, says Beijing had never sent a force armed with such “extremely capable” weapons to conduct a drill like that: “It’s certainly a change.”

Those exercises came a week after a Chinese fighter jet fired flares in front of an Australian surveillance plane over the South China Sea. Australia lodged a complaint with Beijing over it.

What is China doing?

In this week’s member’s dispatch, we connect the dots to our conversation with Isaac B. Kardon on China’s preparations for a potential invasion of Taiwan and even bigger ambitions in the region …

—Michael Bluhm

111MHz: ‘Puddle (of Me).’ This is Saya Gray, an up-and-coming singer-songwriter-producer from Toronto. Here on her new record, Saya, in certain moments she blends lyrical uncertainty with upbeat guitar-driven pop, in this track singing, “You know how obsessed I can get/With your needle and thread pulling in and out of me.”

—Brendan Hasenstab