September 25, 2025
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Where is former president Bush in this, or Mitt Romney? Do they really think silence is honorable? It’s astonishing that decent men, clearly choking back their own anger, can bring themselves to say nothing in the face of Trump’s demented clown act. Mitt’s dad, the most traditional and least glamorous Republican imaginable, his picture next to square in the dictionary, is rolling in his grave; as for Bush père, I can’t even imagine his grief, to see a life’s work, the postwar Atlantic pact, squandered.​​​
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The Drowned Kingdom
September 19, 2025
The volcano that erupted underneath Santorini in the Bronze Age produced tidal waves, and enough ash to darken the sun. The earthquake that came afterwards destroyed the labyrinth of Crete. There’s a long-held race memory, for that matter, that the entire Mediterranean basin was once a fertile lowland, that flooded catastrophically when the Atlantic burst through the Pillars of Hercules. The tectonics of the Aegean and the Anatolian plateau are a petri dish for disturbances in the continental crust, and the Greeks gave the god Poseidon both a bull as his symbol, and the name Earth-Shaker.
Nick Anderson/Hearst Papers
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Charlie Kirk was a racist, misogynist, Fascist-adjacent oinker who leveraged his platform with a message of retributive violence and tribal hatreds, and took up too much air in the room. He is, in fact, a Horst Wessel for our time. An empty windbag the MAGA faithful can fill with the milk of vitriol. It says everything that they clutch him tearfully to their breasts. The brand is venom. It’s toxic slush, and Charlie Kirk is a clickbait whore, dead by his own hand.
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March 17, 2025
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Now, remember, this was wartime. And as crazy as it sounds, those two guys walking up that snowy road in rural seacoast Maine were, cross my heart, actual Nazi spies, dropped off by a U-boat that had snuck in from the North Atlantic, and threaded through the islands and the shoals to a landing spot on the rocky shoreline, the same rocky ledges I knew from picnics, where we picked mussels at low tide, and lobstermen hauled pots. The water in the inlet is no deeper than twenty-five feet. You’d feel your way up that shallow, unfamiliar channel, with the boat submerged at periscope depth, and touch bottom once or twice. If you were that German skipper, you had balls of steel.
Photo courtesy of David Edgerley Gates
September 29, 2024
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Every family keeps secrets. Often they're benign, or not even what most of us would even call secrets, in the sense that they're simply common knowledge: all the grownups know the story, and it doesn't occur to them, to explain it to the youngsters; this creates an air of mystery around something easily remedied.
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My grandmother's house was haunted. Exaggeration for effect, I can hear you saying, but I mean it literally. I was little, four or five years old, and it made me deeply uneasy to spend the night there. It was dark, and full of heavy furniture, and even the paintings were left over from the turn of the century. And it was chilly - not physically, but a kind of emotional chill, the nursery empty of children's laughter.
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Midnight in Europe
July 9, 2025
NOTE 1
“I want to find whoever invented sex and ask them what they’re working on now.” James Ellroy
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NOTE 2
Tony Lane piece in The New Yorker, firewalled, about "Dutch" Leonard, the occasion being a new biography, Cooler Than Cool, published by Mariner, and a three-volume set from the Library of America. Cheap at twice the price.
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The Louve Pyramid, I.M.Pei
Lawrence of Arabia changed my life. I’m not exaggerating. I’d seen pictures before that affected me deeply, and quite a few I’d gone back to see more than once. I knew vaguely about the auteur theory. I realized movies were made, they didn’t somehow spring from the brow of Zeus. But on the most basic level, I didn’t actually understand that a movie was intentional, that it was calculated and specific.
​L'Art du Crime
26 March 2025
The Art of Crime is another show I’ve discovered, streaming on MHz, and I like it, but…
It’s funny what pulls you in, and what waves you off.
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Very often, you find a book series, or TV, to be an acquired taste. I wasn’t drawn in right away, for example, by Jackie Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books. I loved her memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, but it took me a couple of books to warm up to Maisie. (Once I was sold, I was sold.)
