I’m willing to bet that no one associated with that crowd can give you a bare bones summary of “Bleak House.” I’m certain none of them have read it.

For anyone interested in the milieu of 1970s terrorism, I cannot recommend @jasonburke2.bsky.social's “The Revolutionists” enough, and the fact that he’s a fan of the only band that matters is an added plus.

Former FBI Special Agent Mike Feinberg shares a Quantico rule for Justice Connection's Substack: “Don’t embarrass the Bureau.” When the FBI Director turns into an unserious spectacle, it costs agents something they can’t do their job without – respect. justiceconnection.substack.com/p/kash-patel...

I put together some thoughts on the behavior of the individual currently occupying the director’s office at FBI headquarters.

“Vulgarity and gaucheness” FBI Director Patel celebrated in Italy with the U.S. men’s hockey team after their gold medal win as authorities at home handled the Secret Service shooting of an armed man outside Mar-a-Lago. @michael-feinberg.bsky.social joins The Weeknight to respond.

And another institution is tested, and another institution fails.

One of the first things we were taught at Quantico was that there is never a moment in which you are not representing the Bureau; but, then again, we earned our place there, and weren’t granted its directorship as a sinecure for partisan malfeasance and a willingness to disregard the constitution.

Even Buckley and Krauthammer nod.

The world would be a better place — to say nothing of intellectually richer — if Josh Blackman didn’t just stay offline on Fridays and Saturdays, but on every other day of the week, too.

Next week: Did Germany really lose the Great War? Or did someone stab them in the back? 60 Minutes investigates

I just threw Monk’s “Genius of Modern Music, Volume Two” on the turntable, and the little guy instantly started giggling and squealing in delight. We’re doing something right.

But something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

They do have a discreet charm, I hear.

Come for the discussion of national security, and stay for a lesson about which Robert Frost poems one should not read to children.

The start of Lenten has me thinking: Two-thirds of Handel’s “Messiah” deals with events around the Passion and resurrection; how did it become a Christmas tradition, rather than an Easter one?

Because I do not hope to turn again…

And like Silicon Valley, one of them was willing to shed allegiances to the country that made her career possible in order to compromise with a nakedly totalitarian state for the sake of increased profits.

I really wish that a magazine renowned for fact checking would stop posting an article about “The Magnificent Ambersons” with a still from “The Third Man,” which was not even directed by Welles.

One of the joys of coming to social media late in life is when you get reposted by someone whose work you enjoyed in a totally different context — in this case, a book on Reformation-era international relations.

I generally agree with @andycraig.bsky.social’s thoughts here, but I’m not quite so ready to dismiss the threat of ICE agents at the poles for a couple of reasons.

In a very different context, I was once taught that there is no such thing as advanced tactics, but simply the basics done faster and with more accuracy. As I get older, I’m realizing that the idea applies to a lot more than the situations in which we were learning the lesson.

I think we should also get rid of moveable type. Illuminated manuscripts are just fine.

Seeing “Titicut Follies” at a relatively youthful age was probably not a great idea in terms of emotional fallout, but as a budding cinephile it was revelatory. Rest in peace.

I’m looking for suggestions about memoirs dealing with the rise of authoritarianism, but not in the mid-century German context; I’ve already read Reck and Klemperer multiple times. If you have recommendations, I’d greatly appreciate them.

My wife won’t let me display a trick, self-propelled Ouija board I had made around the little guy. Little does she know that I’m getting around the stricture by reading James Merrill’s “The Changing Light at Sandover” aloud to him.

Come Work With Lawfare—As Our New Development Manager! The development manager will support the planning, coordination, execution, and development of donor relationships. Apply today:

The other day I said to my better half, “Stick with me, babe, and I’ll make you a repo wife.” She — like I suspect most people seeing that sentence — hadn’t the slightest idea what I was talking about. Tonight, that changes.

Tim Cook has been more than willing to leverage authoritarianism in the PRC when it benefits his company; we should not be surprised that he is doing so here, too.

It depends on the type of evidence, but oftentimes, yes. If it was something tactile and taken from a civilian, it’s obviously returned, but digital evidence is an odd beast.

It’s impossible to overstate how much I adore this film; I first saw it in high school, and cannot even imagine how many times I’ve rewatched it since. If you want to sing out, sing out.

“A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life. Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can.”

Ummm…I quite like the L.A. Review of Books, but it’s less than fifteen years old; that hardly makes it a legacy outlet.

Post a banger that isn’t in English? *This* is the only correct answer.

I spent the better part of my adult life as an FBI agent, and never met a colleague or a prosecutor whose presentation to a grand jury did not result in an indictment. The incompetence of this DOJ is one of the best bulwarks we have against its corruption.

All of us in the DC area should be supporting the Washington National Opera in its defiance of this administration’s unique mix of stupidity and malevolence. I’ll be buying tickets to see their post-Kennedy Center productions, and urge others to do the same.

Who’s going to tell him?

A tale of two billionaires. Jeff Bezos was at fashion week in Europe while he pulled a let-them-eat-cake firing of 30% of Washington Post journalists. Jimmy Lai stood by his newsroom and he will now likely die in a Hong Kong prison. Tell everyone you know about Jimmy Lai.

In fairness, I think this cuts both ways. The left never aimed for the sort of fusionism that gave Reagan the sheer scale of his electoral wins; had they, the world might look like a much different place. There was a real opportunity to do so in the years after the Patriot Act’s passage.

No, they didn’t. Reason Magazine itself often underplayed the threat to authoritarianism posed by right wing populism, and Randy “presumption of liberty” Barnett, along with much of the Volokh Conspiracy, have been outright cheerleaders for Trump.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

I’m having flashbacks to Ted Turner’s execrable colorized version of “Casablanca."

Getting my wife to see the director’s cut of “Possession” in 35mm at the American Film Institute on Valentine’s Day is going to be an uphill battle, but the resulting resentment will pretty much set the right mood for that particular movie.

This is going to be a pretty niche post, but I never thought I’d live in a world where the most prescient Le Carré novel turned out to be “The Looking Glass War.”

A weekend timeline cleanse in the form of four minutes of cinematic perfection.

ICE doesn’t even do many of the things for which DeLauro thinks they are needed; she’s confusing them with HSI, which is also under DHS, but has a different mission, training, requirements, etc.

This is a good story, but I don’t know why they used a photo of a still from “The Third Man,” especially as Welles doesn’t appear onscreen in “The Magnificent Ambersons.”

The Washington Post—for which I wrote editorials for nearly a decade—has closed its Kyiv bureau. @lawfaremedia.org has not—and we will not. We now employ more people in Kyiv than the Washington Post. Let me tell you about what we have done in Ukraine over the past year and why we are not leaving

A recent SNL skit, reposted on this site ad nauseam, dealt with the difficulties of seeing someone try to overcome their political priors. This book was written decades ago, and still remains, I think, the most humane and incisive treatment of the topic in literary history.

In a recent podcast, I spoke of my love for going over back issues of New York’s old “little magazines”: The Public Interest, Commentary (which has transformed into a very different beast), and, above all, Partisan Review. They had an outsized influence on my intellectual development.

No, it’s not. And the framing device is much more riveting than the various contretemps between Catherine and Heathcliff.