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Ab hoedis me sequestra
I like to describe my politics as anarchist by belief and conservative by temperament. I’m the product of a close, multigenerational family, and most of us still live within twenty miles of where my...
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Inferior Musicians Giving Great Pleasure to Themselves
HBO’s charming mid-aughts cosplay porno, Rome, habitually botched the broad canvas of history, but it did manage some excellent brush strokes, many of them dabbed around the series’ real star, Ian...
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Is this Your Homework Larry?
Among a certain class of Americans, those of us who go to “good” colleges and take, sometime during our freshman and sophomore years, some sort of introduction to sociology course, there is the...
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The Crimean Snore
“I’m not sure how many schools prepare students for this kind of love.” -David Brooks Again this morning news out of Ukraine, revanchist Russia shoots down helicopters and NATO loads its fearsome...
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A Sulz on Women
A few brief thoughts on the New York Times-Sulzberger-Abramson affair. It’s awfully difficult to feel badly for income discrepancies where people are making hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of...
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De Rerum Natura
Reihan Salam and John McCain have scored a six-pack and a fix of krokodil; the war is over; both men need to feel the war is never over. They are bored. The decadent world they hate is drifting toward...
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The Responsibility to Protect
I am a poem, he says; he sets out to destroy a country merely made of prose, the words all justified in even rows, inelegant and literally true, doing merely what they’re meant to do,...
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The 18th Brumaire of Samuel Alito, et al.
As usual, the problem in the broadest possible view is the existence of men. Since I haven’t got a quick fix for that, a few thoughts on the Hobby Lobby, the ACA, (the) God(s), and the Supreme Court,...
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Bossa Nova
I’m only a casual soccer fan—hardly even a fan at all—but I do love hockey, a sport that’s in many regards soccer’s bruising inverse, a sort of deranged, wintry fraternal twin to the beautiful game....
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A Prophet of HaShem Whose Name Was Oded
One character in my current novel-in-progress remarks at a point that God’s non-existence is a joke that proves He is a Jew, a sentiment that’s guided my own non-relationship with the Old Man since...
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If Obedience Is a Condition of Existence, Then We Must Resist by Disappearing
Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you....
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A Red Line
“Obviously I think that’s a red line for everybody here: no boots on the ground,” Mr. Kerry said. War’s past and bootworn decades wore them out. The Romans, though, wore socks and sandals and conquered...
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The Law
As a general rule I’m not the sort of man who thinks our world’s best served by putting other men into jail. This one Jewish brother who got famous later on, he said, I stand with the least of you, the...
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Horror Values
Although a large portion of the American media—including “liberal” outlets like NPR—continues to abjure the word torture, the release of the Senate’s summary (the report, of course, is classified)...
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A Spate of Unions
That which wasn’t is becoming by best estimations something we’ll achieve within what I’m assured’s a reasonable time— as soon as now, if I can be believed. The past is past. The future is to come....
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Sicko Fancy
He was a monarch in an age when we believe in billion-dollar plebiscitary elections that are like the lottery: grin-stuffed adverts: “Seniors will receive the bulk of ticket proceeds.” Honey, please....
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Homer? Samson.
“People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition.” -David Brooks A writer for the Times...
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A Prayer for the Tsar
“Despite all of this, we will not witness a mass exodus anytime soon.” -Jeffrey Goldberg The author didn’t find much evidence with which to support his deeply dire thesis. Journalism’s artless...
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Thee, N-Word
I’m as skeptical of safe spaces and trigger warnings as the next asshole, and I’m on the record comparing them to “the crystal vibrations of homeopathy and hypnotherapy,” but in that same post, and by...
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Intimations of Immorality
“Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.” -John R. Bolton Tucked in the Times, admonishments to war. A general misquoted Clausewitz and departed for a speaking gig at RAND. A football...
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