111 MHz: ‘Come to Me.’ From the official motion-picture soundtrack to Nosferatu—the British-Irish composer Robin Carolin brings symphonic vigor and more than a little menace to Robert Eggers’s upcoming remake of the 1922 silent German Expressionist vampire film, scheduled for release on December 25.

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: The Fundamentals of Campaign Finance in the U.S. In 15 weeks of the American presidential race, the Kamala Harris campaign spent some US$1.5 billion. Since the election, the campaign has continued to solicit money, which it’s directing to the Democratic Party’s principal executive-leadership board, the Democratic National Committee. The DNC, however, is laying off most of its staff, several hundred in total. The union representing DNC workers has been quick to criticize the DNC, not only for the scale of its post-election turnover but for laying off permanent employees with one day’s notice and no severance. And Democratic Party insiders have begun leveling recriminations at their leadership: What was all that money spent on, anyway?

The Harris campaign spent roughly $600 million on television and digital advertising, $70 million on mail, $28 million to produce merchandise, $50 million on paid canvassers, and some $111 million on online ads soliciting further donations. It also spent lavishly on consultants and celebrities—including the talk-show host Oprah Winfrey’s production company, close to $2.5 million.

Local party branches got their share, too. The Harris campaign sent at least $100 million to branches in battleground states. Which is emblematic of the role American presidents and presidential candidates now play in their parties. In The Fundamentals of Campaign Finance in the U.S.: Why We Have the System We Have, Diana Dwyre and Robin Kolodny explore how presidents and presidential candidates have become “fundraisers in chief.” They’ll travel to cities across America to collect money for their party’s local organizations. Over time, as the country’s political parties have become more and more hollowed out, they’ve also become more and more reliant on the president’s or candidate’s personal appeal—limiting the ability of local party heads to oppose their national leader.

In August, here at The Signal, Kolodny looked at the changing dynamics of political fundraising in America—and how new sources of money were shaping the coming U.S. election.

—Gustav Jönsson

‘These groups are mystical creations.’ Donald Trump won the recent U.S. presidential election with a greater share of non-white voters than in the previous two. Back in 2012, the last presidential contest Trump wasn’t competing in, Latinos voted for the Democratic candidate by 44 points; this election, it was by four. Soon after, American media outlets—including those that had condemned Trump for racism, even fascism, began speaking of his new “multiracial coalition.” Is that real?

Today, Adolph Reed explores what to make of the surge in non-white voters in America casting their ballots for Trump.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘Sunbeat.’ Cahill Costello is a guitar-and-drums duo with jazz and classical backgrounds out of Glasgow. From their new album, Cahill//Costello II, a track that’s majestic and warm—in a way you mightn’t expect, if you didn’t know better, from a rainy city on the banks of the River Clyde.

—Brendan Hasenstab

The madman theory. On November 17, the U.S. and the U.K. gave Ukraine permission to use their missiles to strike inside Russia. Kyiv had long been asking for this permission, but Washington and London had refused for fear of escalation. The U.S. administration said it changed its mind after Russia deployed North Korean troops in the conflict.

Two days after the U.S. announcement, Vladimir Putin signed off on a revision of Russia’s nuclear doctrine. What the revised doctrine says is that Moscow will treat an attack by a non-nuclear country backed by a nuclear country as if both countries had jointly attacked Russia—meaning that the Kremlin could respond to Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons with Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

The Kremlin had proposed this revision in September; but the day after Putin signed it, Russia launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile—one that could carry multiple nuclear warheads—at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. How serious is this?

In June—shortly after the last time Moscow threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine—Sergey Radchenko explored how the Kremlin sees its nuclear arsenal and uses rhetoric about it. It’s a key, Radchenko says, to understanding the entire trajectory and pace of the war—its offensives, counter-offensives, and stalemates: They’re all driven by Russian threats and Western responses—anxiously calculated to keep both Russia from winning and Europe from catastrophe.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘Frekm, Pt 1.’ London’s Felix Manuel, who records as DjRUM, is back with a typically jazz-influenced, flute-led bop that blossoms into a colorful arrangement of keyboards and percussion. The track twists through a circular melody that bends and warps thanks to filters and time-stretching.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Way off. In 2015’s Paris Agreement, nearly all the world’s countries pledged to try to limit global warming to an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. That is not going well—at all. Last year, global emissions of greenhouse gases hit a record high—and this year, they’re on pace to break the record again. If these trends continue, temperatures will be up by 3.1 degrees by the end of the century. So why aren’t any of these countries reining in their emissions?

Today, Rachel Cleetus explores the factors driving the ongoing rise in fossil-fuels usage: new and unexpected sources of demand for electricity, old and familiar interests pushing for more coal and oil, and, above all, the emerging dynamics shaping the power sector—which Cleetus sees as the key to decarbonizing the economy everywhere.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘The Fatberg Which Weighed as Much as Three Elephants.’ Rubbish Music is, as you might expect, a U.K. duo—who on their new album play (as you might less expect) tubing, packaging, and some electronics, in a squishy-spooky ode to the slithering fatbergs that befoul the sewers of modern cities.

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: The Tribe. Days after the U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump commented that his former secretary of state Mike Pompeo wouldn’t serve in the new administration. This followed Donald Trump Jr. remarking that he opposed not only Pompeo but all “neocons and warhawks” who favor the U.S. being more combative with its rivals—and its allies’ rivals. Now, however, the president-elect has chosen Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio as his nominee for the next secretary of state—and Marco Rubio is known as something of a hawk.

While it may not yet be clear how much influence either Trump Jr.’s stated views or Rubio’s established tendencies will have in the new administration, there’s one country where those tendencies may hold sway: Cuba. Not least because Trump Sr. shares Rubio’s view of Cuba policy: In his first term, Trump reversed Barack Obama’s steps toward normalizing economic and diplomatic relations with the country.

Rubio comes from the world of conservative Miami politics, where fierce opposition to Cuba’s autocratic government is virtually a way of life. In the Cuban writer Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s 2022 book The Tribe, he offers a view into how Cubans—those who’ve left and those who’ve stayed—think of that government. Very few feel sympathetic toward the regime, Álvarez says, though there’s less unanimity on what to do about it—including on Rubio’s view in favor of strenuous economic sanctions. Still, in Cuba itself, The Tribe follows how people of virtually every political persuasion have recently come together in the San Isidro Movement to oppose the Cuban government’s regime of censorship.

—Gustav Jönsson