Rightttttt. . . with one them fancy AI-type missiles that stop just short of obliterating someone and ask, "Do you want to make a deal?" With Tech all things are possible.

The " you can never have too many adminstrators" approach to strangling actual higher learning.

Her memoir BORROWED FINERY is one of the best books of its kind I've ever read, and it deserves to be recognized as the masterpiece it is.

As a writer (of nonfiction, that is), brilliant. As a human being, not someone you'd care to know. As has been amply testified to and documented.

I mean, everybody knew Trump's big fuck-up this time would be a sure thing and a foregone conclusion. But now we are in the sorry middle of it, and there is no Winston Wolfe anywhere is sight to clean it up. It is only going to get worse and worse, shudder.

It would be . . . indelicate to translate her gesture on the bottom into precise New Yorkese, but she's saying she will do something of a sexual nature to him in the orifice he uses for respiration.

Raccoon dicks and and dead bears and brain worms, oh my!

Police car on the Arts Quad? Was there some sort of threat on campus? Well, a small, calm student group convened for 1 hr, which is all that Cornell's recent regs. allow. +3 alumni from the late 60s/early 70s spoke about their student activism So oppressive! www.cornellsun.com/article/2026...

Or a post-1980 essay by Joan Didion.

Would you care to adopt me?

Be there or be square! Seriously, this will be a deep and revelatory dive into the mechanisms of literary prestige and how literary agents can help talented writers achieve their goals in that arena.

Chef Boyardee ravioli in a can.

Voted most likely in his high school class to succeed. Which he did, just in a fashion no one else could possibly have predicted.

"There was altogether too much candour in married life; it was an indelicate modern idea, and frequently led to upsets in a household, if not divorce . . . ." Muriel Spark, MEMENTO MORI.

As a side note to this eloquent and infuriating piece: How long before George Scialabba finally get his due as our most important and genuinely independent intellectual voice?

The very wealthy/rich simply believe that they are unique and not human at all. In case you need a reminder, this is a good one. The only possible consequence could be doled out by their own peer group, not by any force on earth.

Looking forward to my egg salad sadwiches day after day after day . . . . Of all the cluless tools servilely serving this administration, this pudding-faced pudding brain takes the eggy cake.

If I were still a working editor, I would commission a novel on this very subject. Katherine Anne Porter, eat your heart out! Title: A REALLY UNFUN THING I WILL NEVER DO AGAIN.

The first twelve years of my education were spent in Catholic Indoctrination Centers, formerly known as "Schools."

Trump claims that Pope Leo is soft on crime.So was Jesus. Remember he told the penitent "good" thief who was being crucified to his right that "today you will be with me in paradise." But Trump hasn't read the Gospel of Luke lately, I'm guessing. (Note that Christ's head inclines to the right.)

What a gal. Stefanik gets singled out by Trump for very special and serial humiliations and she just keeps coming back for more and more of it. She'll be working out of a law office in an upstate strip mall in a few years, doing closings and DUIs.

I thought he was fading, but in fact Richard Hell is a real survivor, and he is having a very fine late act by way of having always been true to his particular style and vision.

Sucks to be a Hachette editor or copyeditor for sure. " Of course we value your work . . ." as the pink slip arrives.

Oh, for Christ's sake, Donnie, you grew up in fucking QUEENS! This is like saying you never heard of a deli or a dry cleaners or a candy store.

Ragtime and Libra.

I'm reading Muriel Spark's bleakly hilarious MEMENTO MORI. At my age it really puts you in . . . a mood. Oldies looking at all the other oldies, thinking, you really do look old. Heh.

More relevant than ever.

I'm thinking that the best rejection of my editorial career was when I turned down HILLBILLY ELEGY in manuscript. Me so proud! ( It wasn't badly written at all, I just didn't like how he portrayed his mother and other family members. An early taste of his momumental assholery.)

Of all the things I am looking forward to not reading or listenting to, the inevitable podcast interview of J. D. Vance by Ross Douthat about his book about being Catholic is the most not looking forward-est to. Guys until you learn the altar boy responses to the Latin mass, STFU please.

"As clueless and dumb as a foundation executive" is a phrase I'll be using very soon.

Colson Whitehead, the last sane man on earth, and also the most delighful.

I need to get that set of gills I bought out from the garage.

The bitter irony or fact, most likely, is that few Hampshire graduates ended up in the big-bucks field of finance and investment, so the alumni writ large were not flush enough to contribute the sums needed to keep it going. The world will break your heart every time.

I was a Penguin editor. This is the 29th printing, the one with the missprint on page 342. Very rare!

Fixed for accuracy.

There is nothing beautiful that he does not want to shit on.

But then they decided that the Gulf of Trump was much better suited to the huge vacancy between his ears, so that is what it says now on the maps, with the Latin phrase "Hic nihil est."

I give it a year before the chimpanzees start studying us.

Meathead. As it were. . . .

I wish Arthur Miller hadn't totally deracinated the Loman family in DEATH OF A SALESMAN by way of "universalizing" it. Anyone who knows anything knows that it should be a Jewish family. Even in my Irish/Italian part of Brooklyn nobody was ever nicknamed "Biff." Please.

"Dominic Khoo exuded wealth and success. "He lived in a colonial bungalow in Singapore, cycled through luxury cars and hobnobbed with people like Dennis Rodman." Po-faced lead from today's Times. Why, I'll bet he even hung out with Kid Rock and Brett Favre.

I watched Howdy Doody with its host Buffalo Bob Smith on a 12-inch black and white RCA television set.

Sorry. but as usual Marc Maron was exactly right.

That expression is on loan from Rachel Cusk, who holds the IP rights to it. It says that everything has failed me, especially men and the novel.

After that huge taco we were served last night, tonight I think we''ll order out Chinese.

After that huge taco we were served last night, tonight I think we''ll order out Chinese.

This is exactly how all of Dan Brown's books come out into the great wide world in umpteen languages at the very same time. I worked for his publisher, his editor told me all about it. Quite a feat of logistics.

"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." Read that in my Eng lit survey course and thought, huh, he may have something there.