Some enchanted evening, Donald Trump saw a stranger across a crowded room.
It is likely that there is hardly anyone living who knows exactly under what glowing lights Donald Trump met Jeffrey Epstein, except perhaps Trump himself and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who is serving a 20-year prison term for helping to procure minors for sexual abuse. Trump said in an interview in 2002, when his Epstein relationship was still tight, that it had been a 15-year mutual admiration society. Epstein was “a terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with,” and “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”. Epstein described himself as “Donald’s closest friend for 10 years”. https://www.theguardian.com/
In May, I reoriented my algorithms to flood me with Canadian content, turned on push notifications from The Globe and Mail, and temporarily moved my family north of the border.
Stephen Miller was livid. It was a couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and Mr. Miller, a senior White House adviser, believed that the federal government was not doing nearly enough to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the United States. In a relentless round of meetings, phone calls and emails, he reached deep into the federal bureaucracy and, according to a former Department of Homeland Security official, berated mid- and low-level bureaucrats inside the department. To keep their jobs, he told the officials, they needed to enforce a new policy that punished the families of undocumented immigrants by forcibly separating parents from their children.
Parts of Easthampton, an old mill town in western Massachusetts, look like relics of industrial New England — the old workers’ rowhouses, for instance. In other parts, it seems like a place in renaissance, with converted factory buildings spruced up and reinhabited by art galleries, restaurants, shops. Pedestrians fill the sidewalks on Friday and Saturday nights, especially during monthly art walk evenings.
The audacity is breathtaking.
We’re watching the total annihilation of climate policy, already laughably weak, spiral into something far worse: a deliberate torching of the very knowledge that proves climate change exists. Forget about mitigation. This is scorched earth on the intellectual battlefield.
He had planned to return to Ireland in December, but was briefly unable to fly due to a health issue, his medical records show. He was only three days overdue to leave the US when an encounter with police landed him in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody.
Over the past squalid decade, many of us have let go of the hope that Donald Trump could do or say anything to shake the faith of his ardent supporters. They’ve been largely unfazed by boasts of sexual assault and porn star payoffs, an attempted coup and obscenely self-enriching crypto schemes. They cheered wildly at his promises to build a wall paid for by Mexico, then shrugged when it didn’t happen. The BBC reported on a 39-year-old Iranian immigrant whose devotion to Trump endured even after she was put in ICE detention. “I will support him until the day I die,” she said from lockup. “He’s making America great again.”
If it’s any consolation, those headphones you left in the seat-back pocket did not just vanish into some unknowable void of lost things. Most likely, they made their way to Unclaimed Baggage, a store that occupies a full city block in Scottsboro, Alabama, where six days a week, 7,000 items, salvaged almost entirely from lost luggage, are set out for sale. The result is a democratic and dissonant array of merchandise: everything from used underwear (size XS to XXXXXL) for 99 cents to a gallon-size Ziploc of loose Band-Aids ($13) to a $28,000 Rolex flashing with enough diamonds to pose a seizure risk.
Now wait just a second. There’s a flood in Texas and over a hundred people die and it was an unforeseen act of God, but fire destroys homes in California and the fault lies with the mayor and the fire department and…
I’m not saying I don’t care about the people who lost their lives and their loved ones, but I am saying America has devolved to the point where if it’s not good for me, screw you!
Yes, it used to be different. As evidenced by the Youngbloods hit “Get Together”:
“Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now”
That ethos is long gone. Then again, the people who experienced it are so busy protecting their nest eggs that they’re not worried about selling youngsters’ futures down the river. It’s mine for me.
As for Mamdani…
Are you catching this? The Democratic brass, Silicon Valley and the major news outlets are FREAKING OUT! Instead of evaluating why Mamdani won, they want to take away his ability to change a city whose government is deeply flawed, where it’s too expensive for the average punter to live in Manhattan, and even Williamsburg! https://lefsetz.com/
Fifteen years ago, when Arizona enacted a notorious anti-immigrant “show me your papers” law, I wrote an essay in The Times that began: “I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon. Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.”
The essay provoked a variety of reactions, most supportive but some vituperatively negative. One angry reader, noting that the newspaper identified me as teaching at Yale Law School, wrote to the school’s dean to demand that he fire me. The dean and I had a good laugh over that letter. But rather than dismiss it as the product of an eccentric crank, I realize now that I should have understood the letter as a window on the toxic brew of anti-immigrant sentiment that led a state to pass such a law. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/
This is an utterly astounding book that should be read by everybody.
I must admit, I am not a huge Joan Didion fan. I loved “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” but found “Play It As It Lays” flat. As for the vaunted books thereafter, I found them dense and mannered and thought I was the only one until I found out my college buddy John agreed, he couldn’t read them either.
Then I got hooked on the books about Eve Babitz, wherein Didion was excoriated. Seen as someone at remove, who was so quiet she made you talk and then used your words against you. Furthermore, it was stated that Joan used her short stature to portray innocence when this was far from accurate.
I was surprised that “Notes to John” doubles down on this. Didion reveals all these character flaws. She’s SO F*CKED UP!
Then again, maybe you are too.
AN IRISHMAN'S FIRST DRINK WITH HIS SONWhile reading an article last night about fathers and sons, memories came flooding back to the time I took my son out for his first pint.Off we went to our local pub only two blocks from our house.I got him a Guinness. He didn't like it, so I drank it.Then I got him a Kilkenny's, he didn't like that either, so I drank it.Finally, I thought he might like some Harp Lager? He didn't. So I drank it.I thought maybe he'd like whiskey better than beer, so we tried a Jameson's, nope!In desperation, I had him try that rare Redbreast, Ireland's finest. He wouldn't even smell it. What could I do but drinkit!By the time I realized he just didn't like to drink, I was so fookin' shit-faced I could hardly push his stroller back home.
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