‘Is there a name for the period between a person’s fatal diagnosis and their death? There should be. This time by its nature cannot possess the qualities that constitute “ordinary” time’ Peter Catapano on editing Oliver Sacks in his last days pghrev.com/the-afterliv...

“THE EXPERIENCED HEAD OF A CRITICAL OFFICE that helps organize important technical research and disburse billions of dollars in funding for the U.S. Navy is being replaced by a 33-year-old former DOGE employee with no apparent naval experience” www.thebulwark.com/p/scoop-trum...

From my book: "Grant was forced to arbitrate the Constitution—to choose between its two sources of civilian oversight of the military. He followed the law: In peacetime, Congress’s authority is supreme in matters of military policy. The commander in chief’s authority is supreme only in wartime.”

“I didn’t think the inner life was everything, but I saw its power.” TOMORROW I’m in conversation with the great Joan Silber about the craft of writing and about her phenomenal new novel MERCY. events.fairfield.edu/event/inspir...

‘Unfortunately, the preoccupation with destruction as a proxy for victory has not remained a matter of history. “Lethality” has long been a buzzword at the Pentagon, but the second Trump administration has elevated it to an obsession’

Vanity of vanities! All is vanity! Especially podcasting. New episode! Jake and I discuss Philip Roth's 1961 essay "Writing American Fiction" and the Qohelet, also known as the Book of Ecclesiastes podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

“Shrinking the addiction economy will require Americans to upend decades of conventional political and economic wisdom. For some time now, we have imagined that robust moral judgments should be relegated to the private sphere…” Ian Corbin and Gov. Spencer Cox www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

The Leahy law is being killed off. "The US State Department has removed an online portal for reporting alleged human rights violations by foreign military units supplied with American weapons." www.bbc.com/news/article...

Today I learned that the “A time to cast stones” line from Ecclesiastes is about ejaculation

“The daily newspapers then fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise…” —Philip Roth, 1961

Once again, if the administration had a good story to tell on the law or the facts, it would be telling it—including to Congress. But it doesn’t. These lawless premeditated killings are exactly what they look like.

Does calling them “the Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere” mean that we’ll pursue wasteful, destructive and stupid policies going after them?

NEW: The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. We found more than 170 such incidents since the start of the second Trump administration. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes nearly 20 children, two of whom have cancer.

Wow—has a president ever explicitly confirmed a presidential finding authorizing an ongoing covert action before? Let alone a brand new one?

“The new authority would allow the C.I.A. to carry out lethal operations in Venezuela…The agency would be able to take covert action against Mr. Maduro or his government either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation.” Regime change is back. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/u...

The great @garthgreenwell.bsky.social on St. Augustine open.substack.com/pub/garthgre...

Whenever there’s a completely absurd claim about how well Israel has treated civilians (as in this Noah Rothman National Review article), it’s always laundered through John Spencer, the urban warfare expert who told Ukrainians they should fight Russian tanks with paintball guns.

“that light, yes, it's most often connected to something bad, to pain, and suffering, I might say, if that's not too big a word…and the person who buys the painting is also given some of the light, and the suffering too, the despair, the pain that's in the light, I think” Fosse, Septology

“ICE has set up checkpoints outside my street most mornings – pulling people out of cars usually around 7am. They have repeatedly showed up to a Catholic elementary school and another school down the block from me…” www.newstatesman.com/internationa...

At Chuck E. Cheese, explaining to my kids that when I was young, before American children’s entertainment went soft, Chuck wasn’t a friendly mouse, he was a cigar smoking rat from New Jersey.

"The public has a right to know how the government and the military are operating."

And so concludes yet another week w/ no routine news briefing at the Pentagon. Previously: March 17: Sean Parnell & Lt. Gen. Grynkewich June 22: SECDEF Hegseth, Gen. Caine June 26: Hegseth, Caine July 2: Parnell Aug 7: Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson Aug 14: Wilson

Apparently providing aid to foreign countries benefits America. Now, if only we had an agency for that sort of thing…

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island told us in a statement that “every American should be alarmed that their President has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he calls an enemy.” www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

Hahahahaha…nice try, AI

‘I’m haunted by what a former senior IDF official told me after I left government: “Our initial plans for Gaza were to fight for three months and then stop. We assumed you—the Americans—would make us stop. But you never did.”’ @ilangoldenberg.bsky.social jstreetdotorg.substack.com/p/peace?r=yq...

This @yalereview.bsky.social Krasznahorkai short story is a nice entry point for anyone curious about the new Nobel Laureate yalereview.org/article/kras...

“You stand with me and I stand with you, and the church will continue to accompany and stand with migrants.” www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

Donald Trump’s deployments of the National Guard to American cities “are best understood as an effort to erode the nation’s sense that such use of the military is unacceptable,” Quinta Jurecic argues.

eventually politicians need to start advocating for criminal and civil penalties for people involved in fabricating stories to get citizens incarcerated. or, put another way: a society that would like to keep functioning has to discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

The Books I Have Not Read, by Shel Silverstein

“As he sets about demonstrating that our apparent irrationalities are in fact the work of our inner game theorists, the reader wonders if he has ever read a novel or interacted with another person.” —Becca Rothfeld on Pinker www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/1...

If you are a skeptic of war powers reform, I would invite you to check out the commander in chief's social media posting.

Kori Schake: “Yesterday morning, Trump and Hegseth behaved reprehensibly. Their speeches…were tantamount to incitement—a genuinely dangerous effort to suborn the military’s oath and condition them for using violence against their fellow Americans.” foreignpolicy.com/2025/10/01/t...

One other thing about this whole dumb affair. In what universe did Hegseth think inviting comparisons to Patton would work to his benefit? I’d rather have George C Scott as SecDef

“The Marines I fought alongside knew a thing or two about warrior culture. Watching Hegseth’s speech, I was struck by the glaring absence of two traits those Marines embodied that he does not: competence and humility.” Elliot Ackerman in @thefp.com www.thefp.com/p/pete-hegse...

‘The appeal to the mystical image of the “warfighter” is that it avoids having to discuss war in concrete terms. It sells the attractive myth that by doing more of the parts of war that look cool and really make you feel like a man, you can actually win wars.‘ www.deadcarl.com/p/clausewitz...

The Secretary of Defense was lecturing military leaders about the warrior ethos when he should have been ensuring military pay was exempted from the government shutdown.

“[Hegseth] was ridiculous…it was the kind of thing that a battalion commander might say to some scruffy lieutenants and sergeants. His dream world is the world of Ranger school (from which he never graduated), not the actual world of complex military operations.” www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing Trump chose a SecDef whose character, knowledge and comportment could only fill a genuine military professional with contempt and loathing.

It's easy to see this speech as just weirdly performative, but there's a lot more—and a lot worse—going on here. The meeting & speeches are part of a larger project aimed at promoting the military leadership’s partisan alignment with the administration. How? 1/

One early morning in Feb ‘04 outside of Fallujah I was next to a then MAJ who called in AC-130 fires so close to our position that we were pelted with debris from the target building. That now 4⭐️ had to fly in from Europe to listen to Pete talk about Lethality™️ and standards.

“[That’s] an insane insult to his senior officers, who all made their bones fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Elliot Ackerman, who led Marines in the second battle of Falluja...“Those guys have got a lot more dust on their boots than he does.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/u...

TONIGHT! At Fairfield University I’ll be in conversation with Thomas Chatterton Williams bout the cultural and political convulsions that led up to our current, fractured politics, and what we can do about it.

At the Howl obscenity trial, the deputy district attorney cross-examined the literary critic Mark Schorer:  “What are ‘angelheaded hipsters’?” Then he asked him to paraphrase, “With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls.”  podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

Yum

Good interview between @ezraklein.bsky.social and Ta-Nehisi Coates podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

“this unbelievable story, this foolishness that there's really no way to believe, and I think what I really believe in is the force of this foolishness, the power of thinking this way,” Jon Fosse, Septology

Hell yeah. Superb book