This is, indeed, a mask off moment. Here a tenured academic declares without a hint of self doubt that a proposition obvious to almost everyone—that not all professors have the same contemporary capacity for self-awareness to realize the natural endpoint of their arguments—is unjustified.

If this is going to be stuck in my head for days on end, you all deserve the same fate.

“I will not let a political party tell me how to live, when to die or what to believe in.” — Ma Jian, “Red Dust: A Path through China"

I purchased the toy car for the kiddo, but decided to keep it for myself.

A very idiosyncratic summer reading syllabus has been set.

There’s a Jarvis Cocker lyric that’s apropos to this White House posting.

Let’s see if these are as helpful for ex-government types as they were for Bowie and Eno.

I try and read the children’s classics to the little guy, but when we get to this page, I can’t help but deliver a disquisition on Samuel Fuller’s filmography and the controversy over his late career movie “White Dog.”

Given the rhetoric of so many of its supporters, I think AI falls more into the category of a graven image.

I know that this photo is filling everyone with hope and wonder and feelings of the sublime, but — if I’m being honest — I primarily see the final sequence of Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia.”

I, for one, am very excited about our new DHS Secretary, and welcome our new mutant overlords.

One of the first things we were taught at Quantico was that there is never a moment in which you are not representing the Bureau; but, then again, we earned our place there, and weren’t granted its directorship as a sinecure for partisan malfeasance and a willingness to disregard the constitution.

Good morning. Wake up and fight.

"All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain/Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority/Whose buildings grope the sky ...no one exists alone/Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police/We must love one another or die.” Auden was rarely wrong.

This is a good article, but I think the byline is mistaken; I’m pretty sure it was first authored by John Roberts.

It’s like he’s on a one-man mission to make a theater even more uncomfortable than the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth.

But for a bit of a deeper cut, I’d go with this…

This is the first one that came to mind with of flood of memories.

My personal favorite book — an odd way to phrase it, I know — about the experience of authoritarianism. Now more than ever, this deserves a larger audience.

My first thought upon being assigned to the Los Angeles Field Office was “Well, if it was good enough for Warren Zevon and James Ellroy, it’ll be good enough for me.”

Zweig was the best chronicler — outside of Miklós Bánffy, perhaps — of a world we are poorer for no longer inhabiting.

The book that made me want to devote my life to counterintelligence, this is still the best — and most realistic — novelistic account of a mole hunt ever put to paper.

A bitingly funny account of a demon with which I’ve also had to wrestle, myself, I’m also plugging this because it was written by my closest friend.

If another individual from the world of intelligence — aside from Snowden — has done more to help the forces of totalitarianism and chaos against liberal governments, I’m not aware of it.

It may be sacrilege, and it’s not a particularly strongly held opinion, but I think I prefer the Jacobean revenge dramas to their more famous Elizabethan counterparts.

I once dated a woman whose effect on my life was entirely deleterious, save for that she once expressed horror at the fact I had never read Philip Roth. I finally, after we broke up, remedied the deficiency. It pains me to admit how right she was.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” This novel is a thing of beauty: there is no better phrase, in that the book contains some of the most mellifluous prose ever set down, is constructed with a near geometric precision, and is utterly emotionally devastating.

I’m a fanatic for uncanny fiction, and @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social had done yeoman’s work in bringing some lesser known titles to light. This is one of the best.

As I pack up my library, I want to post some brief notes and comments about certain volumes. Upon learning that we were going to have a baby, this was the first work on child rearing that I purchased.

I cannot explain why, but each picture reminds me of the other.