Agreed! There will never been enough illustrated editions of Moby-Dick!

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

Dudes rock

What a photo. ( @staceywescott.bsky.social )

“DoW information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.” Horrible. The past decades of military policy show we need more transparency, not less.

“Patriots, there is danger! Listen to the nature of the menace!” I feel like I’ve been hearing versions of this speech (from Robert Stone’s great Hall of Mirrors) recently.

Robert Stone on a bad review of (the great novel) Dog Soldiers in the New Yorker: “Either she’s paying me back [for his panning of a book she liked] or else she’s got her head up her ass.” www.commonwealmagazine.org/remembering-...

Deeply grateful to receive from the Clemente Course in the Humanities their inaugural Public Humanities Prize, during which they gave me this incredible vase made by veteran and artist Jesse Albrecht. I have such tremendous respect for the work the Clemente Course does. www.clementecourse.org

I've put this as required reading for two different cohorts of students within ten minutes of reading it.

An incredible lineup for this season’s @FairfieldUMFA Inspired Writers Series. I’ll be in conversation with: Thomas Chatterton Williams Sept 30 Joan Silber Oct 28 Paul Elie Nov. 17 events.fairfield.edu/department/c...

Notable from @hrw.org www.hrw.org/news/2025/09...

“How did I find dignity in a book that seems so determined to strip dignity away from its characters, especially its gay characters? Where did I find affirmation in a book so enamored of the abyss?” @garthgreenwell.bsky.social on affirmation in art harpers.org/archive/2025...

Authorities - what a lot of people don't appreciate (mostly because until recently it was taken for granted) is that there is (or at least is supposed to be) direct traceability between any order for military action involving the use of force and the authority authorizing that action

My brother Byrne should do an illustrated Moby Dick

A military spouse made a video lecturing me about the UCMJ

this is, hands down, the best video I've seen on men's influencer content and it's not close either

“.. I can’t remember anyone ever telling me we can’t say anything critical about a civilian like this. He was not in our chain of command or anything,” the officer said. @nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...

“Judge Hoffman…unaccountably ordered the reference to William Blake stricken from the record.” (On Allen Ginsberg at the Chicago Conspiracy trial)

Awful: Sen Tim Kaine reached out to numerous GOP Senators to ask them to join his letter laying out basic questions for Trump about drug boat bombing, Senate staffer tells me. Zero Rs agreed. On the pod we discuss this & deeper legal issues w/ @sranderson.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/2003...

Queens folks out here asking for respect and political dialogue

“The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk — and his family — just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything, too.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/o...

Grateful to @breakingdefense.com for running an excerpt from my book. Thank you, @aaronmehta.bsky.social 🙂

“The danger is not in the multiplication of machines, but in the ever-increasing number of men accustomed from their childhood to desire only what machines can give.” —Bernanos, “La révolution de la liberté” (1944)

This is real, somehow

A reminder that the US military has a terrible record curbing drug production. The Taliban, on the other hand…

The Mask of Sorrow is a monument located on a hill above Magadan, Russia, commemorating the many prisoners who suffered and died in the Gulag prison camps in the Kolyma region of the Soviet Union during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

As expected the War Powers report justifies the attack in the Caribbean solely on the basis of the President's authority under Article II of the Constitution as "Commander in Chief and Chief Executive." 2/n

Wore my St. Thomas Aquinas socks for this discussion about our new Pope with Timothy Cardinal Dolan and Father Paul Rourke at Fairfield University last night.

It’s not the Department of War. It was named the Department of Defense via congressional law. You can’t change the name with an EO. That’s not a thing.

We’ve actually played this game many times before

“Labeling an atrocity“genocide” or equating it explicitly to the Holocaust does not induce the public to become significantly more supportive of intervention, nor does it significantly alter moral judgments about the victims or the perpetrators.” —Valentino and Weinberg

I have two poems coming out in this collection of poems on the end of the so-called Forever Wars. It is available for preorder today, purchase tomorrow. Be on the look out for: - “Salty” - “Five-Star Google Reviews of the Green Beans Cafe at Kandahar Airfield” www.amazon.com/So-Long-Anth...

“Honoring Babbitt …blurs the line between lawful sacrifice and unlawful violence. It tells those who gave their lives in defense of the Constitution that their oath was no more meaningful than the motivations of the mob that attacked the Constitution.” www.thebulwark.com/p/honoring-a...

“Honoring Babbitt …blurs the line between lawful sacrifice and unlawful violence. It tells those who gave their lives in defense of the Constitution that their oath was no more meaningful than the motivations of the mob that attacked the Constitution.” www.thebulwark.com/p/honoring-a...

Well done helping the rest of us appreciate why the decision to honor an insurrectionist is damaging both to our military and our society, @markhertling.bsky.social.

Kari Lake, the Trump administration official tasked with dismantling the Voice of America, sent termination notices to more than 500 employees at the broadcaster and its parent agency Friday night.

“You have to build the apparatus for change, even if no one else shows up. If you don’t build the movement, it won’t be there when the day for action comes. It’s thankless. People live their entire lives building something they may never see succeed. And you do it anyway.”

“By introducing materialism into the heart of fear and fantasy, HPL created a new genre. It is no longer a question of believing or not believing…there is no possible reinterpretation, there is no escape. There exists no horror less psychological, less debatable.” —Houellebecq

New episode! Jake and I are joined by Roy Scranton , author of Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, to discuss the Dark Mountain Manifesto by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine and The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...

“As they see colleagues fired, reassigned or stripped of their clearances, those who remain will be less willing to report intelligence that contains unpalatable truths or contradicts Trump’s views” www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Heckuva way to manage an intelligence community. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

So let me get this straight. Trump fired close to 25% of the National Park Service's workforce, whose job it is to maintain DC's public landscape. And in their place we are using the National Guard, who have been yanked away from their own jobs and careers. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

I love the photo — it’s 1943, FDR in Morocco enroute to the Casablanca conference, being saluted by soldiers whose shadow you see, generals (including Patton and Devers) arrayed saluting both the president and soldiers, FDR’s hat and hand over his heart.

Here’s a clip of marines refusing to shoot at Taliban using women and children as human shields if you think it’s really difficult to follow LOAC (which Lew seems to be implying)

Just learned from USAFA speaker's series donor that my talk was canceled because the supervisor searched my social media accounts & discovered I said critical things about Trump. I have many things to say & I'll be writing them. For now, here's this sadly evergreen poem: poets.org/poem/epitaph...

Do not have the caloric fortitude to type this up in stages, so here's the post I wrote about an event of mine now being canceled due to politics:

Pathetic behavior from the US Air Force Academy.

Shared my thoughts with @charliesavage.bsky.social on the legal implications of potential US military action in or around Venezuela. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/u...

Authoritarian regimes frequently struggle to govern effectively because accurate information doesn't reach the leadership. Trump is basically designing a system to create this problem.

‘The firing of Kruse follows a preliminary assessment from the DIA…That preliminary report assessed that Iran’s nuclear capabilities had been set back only a matter of months, in contrast to Hegseth’s and President Donald Trump’s statements that the capabilities had been “obliterated.”’