Apparently the Self-Parody Alert System at the New York Times has been short-circuited by the heat.

A new career beckons?

We went to see DISCLOSURE DAY at the Orpheum Theater in Chatham, MA last night. Terrific movie, smart fun all the way through. We'd forgotten how great a pleasure going out to see a genuine movie movie can be. Must do more of this!

What a douchebag. Rap music -- which I don't really like, but -- is so unstoppable a force that Eskimo kids rap. Black American music is up there with, I dunno, representative government as one of this country's greatest gifts to the world.

F'rinstance, you can do this, right?

I was an editor -- an operative -- in the Literary-Industrial Complex. I know almost everything about the machinery that "moves the merch." But after all that I still think the answer is simple: Find and develop better writers and publish better books. It all follows from that.

Caulk is visibly oozing from the columns of the false "Arc de Trump" on display at the Great American State Fair

Just as, as we learned in HILLBILY ELEGY, that he is averse to "low wage white people" with substance issues, even if they are his family. He is NOT, however, averse to "high value plutocrats" like Peter Thiel, especially if they can help him in the great race for boodle. It's all about faith.

my god

This man must never be allowed within the borders of NYC's five boroughs.

You are right! I googled four names and I never got anything like a verifiable hit on any of them in the towns "they" say they live in. Dumbfucks don't even know how easily a search engine will bust them.

Maybe "Claude" should be renamed "Fred"? Yabbadabbado!

On MSN this morning I heard a conservative columnist praise Marco Rubio for "eloquence" and say that he is the likely 2028 Republican nominee for the presidency for the good job he is doing. By this logic Dean Rusk should have been the Democratic candidate for president in 1968.

So these "fake people" -- let me see if I have this right -- signed up for Obamacare, pay premiums that are required to be on the rolls, and then never use the plan. Well, thank you so very much, fake people!

People are showing up by the ones to President Punchline's U.S. birthday extravaganza.

"[Herman Melville] came as a lamb to the slaughter, with no suspicion that the city of New York was a literary butcher shop." -- Perry Miller on the reception of his first book, TYPEE, in THE RAVEN AND THE WHALE.

"Despite"? Maybe "because of" better, Mr. President? (Do you think it is possible that Trump's aides may be showing him totally fabricated polls and that is why he believes this? That he may be living in a cognitive Potemkin Village?)

Am hate watching I WILL FIND YOU by prolific hack Harlan Coben. An impacted,AI-ish, synthetic mess of plot contrivances, hackneyed dialogue, thriller cliches, and just plain dumbness (a Boston mob boss named Fisher?) Netflix at its most algorithmic and underimagined. Here comes the future.

Interesting that "thousands" has been redefined as a three-integer number.

Found this in my "liberated" copy of MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO. Poignancy of a long-gone bookstore and a price of ninety-five cents plus tax for a truly great book. Sigh.

Picked this up on a whim in Bryant Park. Simply fantastic. Mailer overshoots the mark intellectually, metaphorically, syntactically over and over again, he's vainglorious and self-important, but none of it matters. Blazingly eloquent and far seeing and brave. God, how it made me miss him.

You know things are not going well when Vanilla Ice cancels on your "gala" USA birthday concert. Maybe they can have a Maga Open Mike Night?

The proto-rap cut "Trouble Every Day" is dismayingly always right on the money year after year. It never gets old. Unfortunately.

Seven people in this picture, and a combine IQ of under 500. It's like they assembled a team for the Stupidity Olympics.

I think the best turndown of my editorial career was when I had HILLBILLY ELEGY on submission in manuscript, well before Vance's rise. I just did not like the way the people in his family and town were portrayed. And as a cradle Catholic I resent his hitching a ride on my religion in this bogus way.

Let the Harry Mathews Revival begin here!

If Tracy Kidder were alive today, the book he would need to write would be titled THE SOULLESS NEW MACHINE.

Boy, I hope this doesn't interrupt the flow of stolen oil. But I'm sure the country can count on the Trump administration for all the aid it requires in its time of dire need. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/06...

As they say so pungently in Ireland, shut yer gob. It's like fucking Old Timers Day 365 days a year with this guy.

I have a dream. More than a couple actually. But somehow Jack Schlossberg and a "renewed Camelot" (a brilliant whole-cloth public relations fiction devised by Jacqueline Kennedy) do not figure in any of them. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/n...

Seems to me that telling off your most consistent party members for voting the "wrong" way is not much of a political strategy for Democrats. It also says, quite loudly, that your support for the ghastly entity that is the Israeli government now is more important than your own country

This makes me want to gobble down some Flaming Hot Cheetos while listening to the Flaming Lips.

Woodstock for Assholes. What a concert film it is going to make. www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/l...

It seems to me that the arc of Ben Lerner's fiction demonstrates that you can disappear into yourself as an artist and potentially never emerge again. He's the incredible shrinking novelist.

Except, you know, Japan had no military capability whatsoever and they were a fully occupied country. So maybe kinda unlike? And what do you think are the odds that Iran will evolve into our ally in the next few decades?

Either a word has been dropped here or not.

What would you bet me that Donald Trump failed algaebra?

Viv Albertine did it.

It was also one of the first important novels published by the Vking Press, which opened for business that year.

As one does . . . .

As if Waugh and Powell, just to name two of many Brits, didn't repurpose their personal lived experience for novelistic use.

Someone has been projecting images all over D.C. “It’s swampier than ever.” The Kennedy Center one is pretty hilarious. 😂😂😂

every two words is an entire Dickens novel

I've just learned of the existence of therapy ferretts. If I were starting a band, that would be be the right name for it. Or a comedy troupe, even better.

The presence of Jill Biden's memoir at the top of the bestseller lists tells me -- as if I did not already know -- that Democrats are more interested in relitigating their defeats and savoring the bitterness than learning from them and winning. Up ahead in 2028: Kamala Harris.

I'm sure the Gulf States and Exxon and BP et al. would have no problem with that.

The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles? www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/u...