Don’t sleep on Claude Chabrol’s retelling of the story — “A Girl Cut in Two” — either.

I never thought Blueskyism was a real thing, until I encountered a mass of users today who dogpiled on me, for the unforgivable sin of…wanting to be in the same political coalition as them, I think, in order to defeat MAGA?

This administration and its supporters have spent years trying to spread disinformation about the security of our elections, culminating in Trump's nonsensical rant last week. The least we could do was spend a weekend writing a rebuttal.

A guy sat down next to me wearing this shirt. I said to him, “Were you happy in the haze of a drunken hour, or were you looking for a job and then you found a job?” He looked at me like I was crazy.

I still haven’t forgiven @annabower.bsky.social and @qjurecic.bsky.social for urging me to try watching this movie. I made it through about twenty-five minutes before turning it off.

The fact that I have two decades of experience (rather than three months), speak the language, and spent most of my career trying to protect the PRC’s political dissidents and ethnic minorities, rather than getting my information from YouTube videos, is kind of my point.

You’re typing from a Ministry of Public Security troll farm or a United Front Work Department affiliate, aren’t you?

I can’t claim to follow all the thoughts here, but if you think that China does not have inequality, or that its economy doesn’t have *very* serious negative externalities, I’d humbly suggest that you know nothing about China.

@tatabug.bsky.social hits the nail on the head here and in her subsequent comments.

In light of the administration's overhaul of student visas, I’m re-upping this piece.

My favorite live album of all time is “Live Seeds,” the concert album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds tour behind “Henry’s Dream.” Portishead’s “Roseland, Live NY” is a close second.

Are you an utter lunatic? That’s not even the best live album by the Stones, let alone writ large.

This morning, @benjaminwittes.lawfaremedia.org, @michael-feinberg.bsky.social, @mollyroberts.bsky.social, and @noupside.bsky.social discussed President Trump's address on elections and alleged foreign interference and unpacked the implications for U.S. democracy. youtu.be/YUqXLlyha5E?...

I spent last night analyzing fiction for the first time since I audited a Balzac seminar in law school. I’m reluctant to even engage with this claptrap, but if you want a former intel type’s reasoning as to why we should ignore Trump’s document dump, here it is.

If only Buckley were alive to see how justified he was to prefer to be governed by random names out of the Boston phone book rather than the Harvard faculty.

We are a creedal nation, not an ethnic one. If you’re born here, you are one of us. The poorest he that is in America has a life to live as the greatest.

This story, by @carolleonnig.bsky.social, has brought me the sort of joy that I thought was the monopoly of waifs and orphans, surprised by an unexpected bounty — and perhaps a warm embrace — on a Victorian era Christmas morn.

A gentle reminder that the FBI’s Evidence Response Teams are finite resources — only some agents and analysts are members — and if they’re doing this, they’re not responding to crime scenes, training on extant or new techniques, or working their cases.

I guarantee he had to look up who Wim Wenders is before he posted this.

Let’s talk when you’ve seen the final episode…

"What the federal government has been doing to people assumed to be immigrants is different from normal police brutality. It is a targeted campaign. We are witnessing, for the first time since Jim Crow, American death squads."

And he’s very much not alone. I would sooner crawl through cut glass than support the DSA’s positions, but if holding hands with them and singing “The International” is how I can help stop MAGA, I’ll break out some Billy Bragg records and start practicing.

I’ll be on MS NOW at 1:00 to talk about the most recent spate of ICE shootings.

There are arguments against court packing, but despite this article’s title, the piece is functionally just an ad hominem attack on @andycraig.bsky.social. Craig had legitimate points about the court’s expansion of executive power; you would’ve expected a libertarian think tank to engage with them.

Wait until they get wind of the moral complexity in T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King.”

I would humbly suggest that it is not a good idea to run a leak investigation out of the very place that contains a substantial portion of your subject pool. I’d also note that it is similarly unwise to put somebody with zero investigative experience in charge of the case. But that’s just me.

MS NOW National Security Analyst @michael-feinberg.bsky.social and Wired Senior Politics Correspondent @hugolowell.bsky.social join Alex Witt to discuss the growing scrutiny surrounding FBI Director Kash Patel, the renewed Georgia election investigation, and more. www.ms.now/weekends-wit...

No. To assume that all billionaire or millionaire fortunes are evil is, well, wrong. The world is immeasurably a better place, for example, because of the family fortunes that created the Ford and Annenberg Foundations. Non-profits you support are inevitably funded by the very class you deride.

This is part of the larger problem with populism, regardless of whether it sits on the right or left: It depends entirely on the creation of in and out groups, and gives followers permission to demonize the latter.

I think it’s time to rewatch the entirety of “Brideshead Revisited.” It’s been a few decades, and our populist nightmare is making me long for some refinement and to-the-manor-born nostalgia.

If somehow a machine were invented that could generate and foster empathy and intellect, imagination and culture, I would not opt for a limited or lower power version of the device. So I will decline to cull my book collection.

Lawfare is hiring! 📝 Associate Editor: Join our editorial team shaping national security and legal coverage 📊 Data Journalism Fellow: Help build out our AI research platform for primary-source legal and government records 🎓 Fall 2026 Intern View details & how to apply:

If I’m limiting myself to fiction, the ones that first come to mind are Karl Ove Knausgaard, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, James Ellroy, and I’m going leave the fourth spot blank for two authors I hope will soon write more.

I love that the best Mancunian band put out a video that looks like it was directed by Fassbinder, the best German director of the seventies; it’s like every industrial nightmare and muse worked together to make a thing of beauty.

Come for the discussion of ODNI and the politicization of intelligence, and stay for my fanboy musings on Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon."

Felony car stops are inherently risky for everyone in the vicinity; there’s a reason many departments require special permissions to make them part of ops plans. That this is now a standard technique for ICE — which receives less training than other agencies in general — is horrifying.

It is difficult to articulate how boring and inconvenient it is to staff an overnight surveillance post, particularly if it is in a vehicle. People should thank God that an empty laundry detergent bottle is not a part of the standard equipment they have to keep in their cars.

If only some thinker had articulated a few of the reasons that we might want to hesitate before immediately embracing political outsiders as ersatz saviors, or provided some reasons to think of governing as a craft that requires a certain skill set.

In fairness, the second half of “The Dead Zone” revolved around an insurgent political campaign in Maine.

Making generalizations about entire classes of people, based solely on personal experience, is just as intellectually lazy as using AI to do your writing, which is the very behavior you were criticizing.

We’re hiring!

Here’s the problem: we can no longer believe the government when it makes these kinds of statements after its agents kill someone. That’s a very dangerous place for a democracy to be. Read the full analysis here: open.substack.com/pub/joycevan...

I wrote this piece hoping that the events it analyzed would not become a regular occurrence; I was horribly wrong.

If Kubrick had actually staged the moon landing, it would not have happened on schedule.

Deutsche Bank, living up to its name and using Teutonic tropes and turns of phrase. I’m amazed that “steel and fire” was used instead of “blood and iron.”

This was a fun conversation about the once and future troubles of ODNI. (It’s audio only, though, because two of us were exiled to our children’s bedrooms while recording it; I was comfortably ensconced in my son’s play tent, surrounded by a menagerie of Jellycat stuffed animals.)

ODNI collapsed in the same manner as one of Hemingway’s characters went bankrupt: gradually, and the suddenly. @juliacurlee.bsky.social and I explain how and why.

Once could do considerably worse than re-reading “The Leopard” in thinking about how principled conservatives should face our moment. (And the Visconti adaptation, with a young Alain Delon, is also very much worth watching.)

No matter how hard I look through John Trumbull’s works, I can’t find any paintings of the founding fathers — or the revolutionary soldiers — wearing masks. But then again, they weren’t cowards.