FBI Director Kash Patel sues The Atlantic claiming false reporting about drinking, absences FBI Director Kash Patel filed a defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and its ​reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick following the publication of an article on Friday alleging the director had a drinking probl...

If I represented the Atlantic, I’d lock in the earliest deposition date on the calendar. Call Patel’s bluff. He has zero interest in putting any of this under oath.

Don’t give in to them.

Have I gone too far?

Perhaps we could sustain ourselves in these difficult times with Adam Smith’s comforting observation that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”

Just a little piece of advice, a helpful hint.

No one says it better than @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social

The United States Senate, decorative but ineffective, conducts its pointless sessions, much as the Roman Senate did under its Caligula.

Kathleen and I marked Easter with a dinner of lamb chops at the Helmand. One of the best dinners in Baltimore.

Whose history were you taught? Perhaps your introduction to American history through high school was like mine: the discovery by white people from Europe of a vast land t...

O beautiful for specious lies

No. Or of much anyone else.

Television is turned off and I’m reading Volker Ullrich’s history of the collapse of the Weimar Republic.

It's April Fools' Day because, particularly in the Republic, we have more than one fool.

This feels like August of 1914, but dumber

Some of us are still pissed over Tilden.

Our national birthday parties have not always been the happiest occasions.

Saw a mallard on my walk down to the creek this afternoon.

Zen West day drinkers doing our part for the Republic.

I'm looking forward to the day Bari Weiss is removed from her position at CBS so she can become the new leader of Moms for Liberty. 🥳

Three warm days in a row, and the star magnolias at the back of the house are blooming. The Sun is still shining, but the barometer is falling. March, that inconstant and unreliable month, is about to subject us to two more weeks of chill, dammit.

I said it before, and I say it again.

Did I mention that I have stories?

It has come to this.

Things You Absolutely Have to Get Right, No Discussion

Howards End
Finnegans Wake
Katharine Hepburn
Barbra Streisand
Edgar Allan Poe

and of course

Florodora

Think editing is a waste of time? Think again In the fast-changing world of news, editors at the copy desk continue to be gatekeepers of quality and accuracy.

Quoted in a post on the importance of editing.

Your mileage may vary.

A National Grammar Day idyll.

This is a supposedly edited book, and I’m sitting here—I’M SITTING HERE—reading about a character arriving at “4:00 p.m. in the afternoon.” Blessed Henry Watson Fowler, is there no one out there paying any attention?

A small personal matter: Yesterday a surgeon removed my cancerous prostate in what he described as a clean excision with “nothing funky.” I expect to be released from the hospital sometime this afternoon to return home for a leisurely convalescence.

A loss chronicled.

He himself has said it ...