The Force-Fed Bird

 The gifts of the 2026 midterm elections just keep coming. Sure, it was great to win senate seats in Texas, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina—and maybe even Mississippi and Alaska, if current leads in the vote count hold. But even the lesser-known ballot measures turn out to be full of positive surprises. 

True, to win Mississippi, Democrats may have had to go all-in on being the pro-beef party. But there was some consolation for the vegetarian (or pescatarian) voter in Washington, D.C.—namely, in the fact that the district finally banned foie gras—a traditional delicacy made through the forced-feeding of birds. 

Anti-Zionism vs. Liberal Zionism

 Of the many good things coming out of the sweeping, historic Democratic victories in the midterms last week, one of the minor but still significant ones is that they took people's minds—if only for a moment—off of the intra-party deadlock over Israel-Palestine issues that had consumed Democratic voters during the primary season (particularly in Michigan). 

I say this redirection of attention is a positive thing, not because I think Israel and Palestine are not morally important issues—they are. I say this because I see no realistic way in the world as it currently is to build a morally defensible coalition on either side of the issue that I could stand to be a part of. Therefore, I have no idea who to root for, whenever the Democratic Party is devouring itself over this issue. 

Ressentiment, or Metaphysical Rebellion?

I was reading about the role of mercenaries in Haiti's ongoing gang war the other day, and A.E. Housman's "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries" came to mind. One line specifically echoed through my brain: "What God abandoned, these defended." 

I've always thought this one line, more than any other, is what elevates Housman's short poem from the realm of jingoistic special pleading to universal literature. 

Dark Oblivion

 There are only so many memoirs written specifically about the experience of losing a father. Philip Roth's Patrimony is one. Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude is another. 

Since my own father was diagnosed with brain cancer at the start of the year (he died on Memorial Day weekend in May), I've read them both. 

Gallows Humor

 The New York Times was reporting yesterday on the conversations inside the Trump team in the days leading up to Democrats' blowout electoral success in the midterm elections. Reportedly, one of Trump's top pollsters—someone who also worked on his various presidential campaigns—was joking that they could all be on trial soon, and that they might have to flee the country. 

Someone pointed out that at least Netanyahu had (sort of) won his recent election. Perhaps he would take them in.  "Maybe we could get asylum in Israel," Trump's pollster apparently said. 

The Next Bill Barr

 A recurring pattern in the first Trump administration was that, periodically, even some of the most ideologically extreme conservatives in government—people like Jeff Sessions or Bill Barr, say—would lose their jobs because even they retained some baseline adherence to the rule of law or the independence of their offices that Trump could not tolerate. 

Sessions, for instance, was fired for not wanting to directly involve himself in a legal matter that affected the administration. Barr, likewise, fell afoul of Trump in the final months of the administration by refusing to back up Trump's bogus claims of election fraud, or to conjure phantom evidence of electoral malfeasance out of nothing. 

The Latest Religious Schools Case

 So it wasn't exactly the biggest news story of the day, but earlier this week on Tuesday (election day), the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in yet another case involving religious schools and the free exercise clause. I think it's worth dwelling for a moment on just how extreme and unsympathetic the religious right's position in these cases has become. 

Those who still mentally inhabit a sane world where there is an Establishment clause that courts respect—and who therefore haven't quite internally caught up with recent developments in First Amendment jurisprudence from the Roberts Court—might be forgiven for presuming that it must be unconstitutional for state governments to fund the teaching of religion.