‘The professor surveys the classroom. He squints. “I think our students are getting arrested,” he says. And it so happens that they are.’ Superb essay by Santiago Ramos for @plough.bsky.social on literature under dictatorship. www.plough.com/en/topics/cu...

This whole thing is weird for me, because I’m referenced in the article (as the last white millennial man to win the NBA, in 2014), but left out is that the success of my book is tied in with my identity as a vet. And of course Vance’s rise to fame was as the Appalachia explainer t.co/fMiIfvz0qz

“There was dissent in the operations room over whether the survivors were viable targets after the first strike, according to two people” www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

‘Pentagon officials largely kept State Department counterparts in the dark about strike operations, then scrambled to try to enlist diplomats to help deal with survivors, whom military officials referred to by specific terms that included “distressed mariners.”’ www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/u...

My assessment of the Trump national security strategy: "it sees the United States’ adversaries as partners in that war, but it does not see how much U.S. power relies on the voluntary assistance of other countries."

At an open house for a DOE middle school in NYC I asked what options there were for parents who wanted to minimize their kids’ time on electronic devices, and was told there weren’t any. Almost every class does work on devices. Deeply frustrating.

“I can’t remember the first time I encountered the great indie rock band the Mountain Goats, perhaps because to know them at all feels like having known them forever.” Becca Rothfeld on @themountaingoats.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/1...

"You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father.' For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones” Matthew 3: 7-9

“Is it wise or prudent to wish to glory in the breadth and magnitude of an empire when you cannot show that the men whose empire it is are happy?… The joy of such men may be compared to the fragile splendor of glass: they are horribly afraid lest it be suddenly shattered.” City of God, 4.3

“For a nation devoted to the lust for domination, a president needs to foster a citizenry that thrills in displays of dominance and cruelty.“ @philklay.bsky.social today in the @nytimes.com

Revelers in moral depravity: “I suspect the question the (Trump) administration cares about is not “is this legal,” “is this a war crime,” “is this murder” or even “is this good for America,” but rather, “isn’t this violence delightful?” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/o... @philklay.bsky.social

“I suspect the question the administration cares about is not “is this legal,” “is this a war crime,” “is this murder” or even “is this good for America,” but rather, “isn’t this violence delightful?” Great essay by @philklay.bsky.social. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/o...

“The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American” I wrote about the Trump administration, the boat strikes, and St. Augustine. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/o...

‘Why allege to me the mere names and words of "glory" and "victory?" Tear off the disguise of wild delusion, and look at the naked deeds: weigh them naked, judge them naked.’ —Augustine’s City of God feels relevant today.

This is straight-up murder

Well, this was one of the most extraordinary reading experiences of my life.

Rand Paul just posted this letter from the Coast Guard confirming that 1/4 of the boats they stop carry no contraband. The likelihood that Hegseth & Bradley ordered the murder of innocent civilians is very high.

Seven Stories is a GREAT source for holiday shopping! So many good and right on books. Take advantage of this sale

“…because pictures have a spirit painting can be compared to praying, that a picture is a prayer, I think, that the pictures I paint are prayer and confession and penance all at once, the way good poems are too, yes, you could say all good art is like that in the end…” —Fosse

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.” RIP Tom Stoppard

Eventually that visionary gleam faded and, as Fanny Howe says,“the self replace[d] the soul as the fist of survival.” But I remember, and she does, too. For a few years that little golden girl was seeing “into the life of things,” as Wordsworth put it, and it was not rare harpers.org/archive/2025...

Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk offered a pithy summary: “We know this is not about peace. It’s about business.” www.wsj.com/world/russia...

Exclusive: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody” in the first strike on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean. After two men survived, the mission commander ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, according to two sources.

“Some will say this means the U.S. should never admit such refugees, but the alternative is abandoning allies who assist Americans in war to the retribution of our enemies. The fate of Afghans, men and women, who worked with the U.S. has often been brutal.” www.wsj.com/opinion/the-...

“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father”

“Beyond the human toll—more than 80 individuals have been killed without due process over three months—and the risk that the strikes are a prelude to a direct U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, they signal a broader threat to security at home and abroad.“

AC-130 gunships lasing targets. Griffin missiles captured fractions of a second before impact. RQ-4 Global Hawk drones filming it all. Seeing beyond the redactions in the Pentagon’s attack videos w/ @docubrent @carolrosenberg @cjchivers www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...

“I write for my country,    which no longer resembles itself –  except in the horizontal drawing of its name and its position on the map.  … I do not recognize this strange monster where poems are prosecuted, and poets are imprisoned.” @penamerica.bsky.social pen.org/freedom-forb...

There seems to be this persistent and deeply incorrect sense that social media (which has made obfuscation and disinformation exponentially easier to pull off) has somehow slaked the collective thirst for factual information -- that news is obsolete

Something deeply moving about Lincoln making Thanksgiving a national holiday in the midst of the Civil War because we may “expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom” and “God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”

First Secretary of Defense you could defeat by painting a tunnel on the side of a boulder.

“Here’s a wonderful thing for kids. Let’s attack it to get accolades from the biggest morons in our base.” www.npr.org/2025/11/25/n...

In which @philipchristman.bsky.social makes a compelling aesthetic objection to libertarianism

This is another Section 111 case: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

On one side of my family we have zero knowledge of our lineage before my grandpa. There was just nobody left to ask. He wasn’t even sure if his last name was real or made up. And there’s a story like this in almost every Ukrainian household. Today is Holodomor Remembrance Day

The Moscow Times: „The very emergence of such a U.S. initiative signals, in Putin’s view, that Washington is capitulating. And capitulating not because it has suffered losses — it has lost neither tanks nor aircraft nor soldiers — but because it is tired,frightened and eager to avoid involvement.“

this could mean several different things, none of which are reassuring

On “modern so-called incomprehensible poetry”: “it's like it's something you have to understand with something other than intelligence, or your mind,”

“…all religions and faith say, or try to say, something about that, and they all do say it but in different ways, they're like languages, I say, and actually they all say only the tiniest little bit about realities, yes, as I've so often said myself, just think if all the colours had names…”

“By summer, the NSC’s entire full-time legal staff of about half a dozen was gone… including the shop’s top lawyer, former Pentagon general counsel Paul Ney …Ney had been among the lawyers who had raised concerns about the legality of lethal strikes.” www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

“The 28-point proposal from the White House — which Kyiv has said was drafted without its involvement — would give Russia most of what it has asked for, including the surrender of Ukrainian territory and sharp limits on Ukraine’s military” www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/w...

Profiles in courage

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow.“

Jake and I are joined by Aaron Gwyn to discuss Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

I met my translator. He didn't know a single word of Czech. "How did you translate it?" I asked. "With my heart," he said. —Kundera’s adventures in translation

Graham Greene to Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses: "Rush-die! Come and sit here and tell me how you managed to make so much trouble! I never made nearly as much trouble as that!'"

Pope John Paul II: "You always make one step forward and one step back." Milosz: "Can one write religious poetry in any other way today?"

"I don't have any desire to live on a planet that has no heroes, and no angels, and no saints, and no art.” —Patti Smith to William S Burroughs