Brain Dead
July 13, 2025
I think we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Not of America; America is still an ideal, ambitious and aspirational, and an avatar of hope. It is, however, grotesque and embarrassing to be branded by this goldbrick, promoting himself alongside the Tupperware.
There are, it turns out, some 90 million non-voters in American elections. 64% of eligible voters, 155 million, voted in the last one. 77 million voted for Trump. Do the math. It adds up to about one-third of the eligibles, and just under a quarter of the U.S. population. This is somewhat shy, shall we say, of overwhelming support. But the number that sticks in my mind is that 90 million. 36% of 242 million voters. It means a third of the vote went to Trump, and about a third for Harris, but the other third couldn’t be bothered. What gives?
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
July 30, 2025
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Tulsi Gabbard is lying to the president, and he’s lapping it up. Trump is a fool, delusional, easily flattered, and ignorant of even the most basic facts, but the consequences for national security are more immediate. Gabbard is damaging our fundamental understanding of the relationship.​​​
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Nick Anderson/Hearst Papers
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Gordievsky managed a pretty influential and profitable exile. He wrote books, he was a respected interview subject in print media and on TV, he got honorary degrees, he made the queen’s birthday list. He prospered. The fatwa was still in force, but it didn’t seem as if he were in anybody’s crosshairs. And then, things changed. The Soviet Union collapsed, Russia had a brief flirtation with democracy, and then a former Leningrad KGB hood came to power in the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin had a different perspective on the Russian émigré population, and on past KGB defectors in particular. He took the same attitude Stalin had taken toward Trotsky. These were enemies of the state, and a personal injury to be avenged.
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.)
