A friend of mine a few months back was taking me on a FaceTime tour of his room. He showed me all the library books piled up on a shelf that he had not returned in years.
"If you add up all those late fees," I said, "it must be in the thousands of dollars!"
My friend explained that San Francisco had abolished overdue penalties at libraries.
The Guardian published a new list of the 100 greatest novels of all time this week.
What immediately strikes one about the entries is how familiar they all are. How predictable the list is. How much it consists of all the obvious works still in print that you can find in any "classics" row at a standard bookstore.
Back during Trump's first term, a Republican friend of mine would often say: "Look, I'm not defending Trump, but..." and there would follow in the rest of that sentence a litany of things that sounded a great deal like defenses of Trump.
One of the items my friend would always adduce was: "Well, at least Trump got serious about China."
A lot of my recent posts on this blog have been frenzied efforts to impose some sort of meaning and narrative coherence on my dad's ordeal of dying from brain cancer.
Along the way, he has had lucid moments when he told me he loves me and is proud of me, and that he trusts our family will be okay when he's gone.
I'm afraid I spoke too soon the other day when I wrote that Dad's version of cancer fortunately comes without much pain, and that therefore we would probably never have to touch the morphine supply in the refrigerator.
Yesterday, he started rubbing his scalp more frequently in the spot where the tumor is located. We asked if it hurt, and while—in his current mental state—he does not reply to any question with something so simple as a "yes," that appeared to be the gist of his response.
Well, the day we all feared has come. The Democratic Party officially has its equivalent to a Marjorie Taylor Greene—as in, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist with a host of loony beliefs. I am referring to Maureen Galindo, who was unfortunately suddenly all over the news yesterday as a contender in the Democratic primaries for a congressional seat in Texas.
She truly sounds like MTG from the worst point of the latter's QAnon period—except that Galindo is if anything even more overtly antisemitic than MTG ever was. She has reportedly railed against what she calls "the Jews who own Hollywood." She has implied that Jewish people constitute the "Church of Satan" and the "synagogue of Satan." And so on.
The recent hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship has been dominating the news all week—and doubtless it is prompting many Americans to question whether it was really such a wise choice for us to dismantle our world-class public health system and appoint in its place a bunch of ideological hacks who appear not to even believe in the germ theory of disease.
In particular—an opinion piece in the New York Times notes yesterday—Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana may be regretting his choice to vote in favor of Kennedy's nomination—seeing that public health was, for a time, the one issue most dear to him.
