Olivia had written a tabloid-style news story about how “sources in Washington, D.C. and Charleston have been buzzing recently about an unexpected romance: Mark Sanford and Olivia Nuzzi,” who was described as “one of the most famous political reporters in America,” a “blonde beauty” who “gained critical acclaim as a skilled profile writer, gaining access to the powerful and the mysterious and turning it into pure journalistic gold.”
Olivia told me she wrote the fake article as an exercise to think through what might be the worst that could be said publicly if the affair became known, though that didn’t really make sense to me given the piece’s tone.
But hey, after all this, Lizza still forgave Olivia, planned to marry her, and of course, got cheated on again and again.
If true, this is beyond a massive fuck up on the part of both Rubio and Witkoff, allowing this plan – which they claim is not and never was the policy of the Trump Administration – to circulate as long as it did, has likely caused permanent harm to any further negotiations to end… https://t.co/2y7wM6lxKx
Fuckup or not, it has once again saved Zelensky’s career from a huge corruption scandal. Just as the scandal was heating up… this “28-point plan” was leaked, and nobody cares about the corruption scandal any more.
I’m not saying anybody did this on purpose. I’m saying exactly what I did this morning about the Trump-Mamdani meeting.
Every couple of months something like this happens:
26-y-old Bethany MaGee is fighting for her life in hospital after she was doused in petrol & set on fire by Lawrence Reed while travelling on the L train in Chicago.
The convicted felon Reed has been arrested 72 times
Before that, it was Iryna Zarutska. A few months previously, it was Emily Carlson:
COVERUP: The drive-by media suppressed coverage of this Chicago murder back in April. 25-year-old Emily Carlson was murdered after career criminal Willie Holmes spat on her and then plunged a knife into her back, severing her aorta, while she sat on the train station steps dying… pic.twitter.com/xJBbqmwkCR
In Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose, the marriages of three different generations fail. The marriage of the Western pioneer geologist and his writer-illustrator wife fail because, if the wife contributes both the children and the income and the husband doesn’t provide, then what is his role? The husband and the wife are both good people but they run into the unanswerable question of what makes a husband if he can’t provide, organize, protect, and shelter.
The youngest generation of the early 1970s fails for a diametrically opposite reason. Here, it’s the women who can’t find a role for themselves. Once a woman contributes nothing womanly—no children, no comfort, no gentleness—what happens? The young woman in the novel gets passed around sexually by her husband like a bothersome receptacle with no purpose. She consents because she can’t find any other role for herself.
I’m holding the ice-cream for Klara. She trusts me with it because I most definitely won’t have any
The generation in the middle is that of the narrator. His relationship fails, too, but since he’s part of his own story, he can’t understand why. It’s only by the end of the novel that the narrator and the readers start figuring it out.
Thank you for the support for the book reviews! I sometimes think that there are too many of them and it can get boring for people, so encouraging words about the reviews matter a lot.
As for Trump and Mamdani, I don’t think it’s a deliberate, thought-out strategy. I think it’s completely instinctive. But. Didn’t Trump hit on the very best way to discredit Mamdani? Calling him a Muslim Communist cost him zero supporters. But having him smile subserviently while Trump says, “yeah, I’m a fascist, haha” and slaps Mamdani playfully on the back?
Again, I don’t think Trump is playing 4D chess or any of that groupie rubbish. But I do believe he has incredibly good instincts for what works.
Why did Mamdani agree? Because he’s a very immature, very sheltered man. Consider that he never had to pay his bills, never had to wonder how to make a living, never had to clean his room. A 35-year-old (or whatever his age, I can’t be bothered to Google it) man who has always lived the life of a very spoiled little princess. His meeting with Trump is for Mamdani an encounter with a celebrity. And the celebrity was nice to him. So he acted like a little boy who has his baseball signed by a famous player.
Mamdani is not an adult person like you and I are adult people. Imagine if all the strength and growth and strategizing and self-control you have been exercising your whole life to make ends meet, pay the bills, stretch the paycheck, plan for larger purchases, etc never had to be used at all. You’d be a completely different person. I started doing paid translations at 14, and since then I always had to think about making money and covering my needs. I can’t even imagine who I’d be if I had my parents always there to provide everything as if by magic. Honestly, I wouldn’t even want that.
N loves the cabañas. He doesn’t want to travel anywhere that is devoid of the cabañas. But here at our favorite place, they are only available between mid-November and April. In summer, there are only beach chairs with umbrellas, and those are uncomfortable and provide barely any shade.
Does anybody know why there’s a summertime absence of cabañas?
There’s an announcement up saying that the cabañas don’t appear outside of the winter months, so I’m not inventing it. I want to ask the rental guy but I’m not managing to coincide with him.
Why does the idea exist that you can mix together people from different cultures and get great results? Why was the belief that “diversity is our strength” advanced when it’s clearly not true?
Multiculturalism was invented by people who live in a monoculture they mistake for diversity. These are wealthy, hyper educated people who are members of the intellectual and financial elite. They don’t have culture in the either good or bad sense in which regular people have culture. They are completely deracinated, severed from any roots. They have a supporting cast of shrinks, coaches, and shamans to offset the costs of the deracination. It’s a nice life. But it breeds terrible cluelessness as to what happens to the brains and the souls of people who are torn away from their culture, language, food, community, familiar air, etc. Of course, it’s also profitable not to notice.
As the sexual revolution is crashing around him, a crippled middle-aged professor of history Lyman Ward is grappling with the casual abandonment of his freshly liberated wife by researching the life of his talented grandmother.
In the 19th century, Susan Ward, a gifted writer and illustrator, sacrifices her dream of living the life of an East Coast intellectual in order to follow her husband Oliver on his geological ventures in the American West. Oliver has neither Susan’s gifts nor her connections. He’s perennially unlucky and creates endless trouble for Susan and their three children.
As Lyman researches his grandmother, he wonders how Susan’s life, with its self-discipline and sacrifice, compares to that of the liberated women not only of his but of the younger generations. Angle of Repose is truly a great novel, which means that it provides no easy answers.
This is one of the best reading experiences I’ve had all year. Stegner is probably the most important American novelist of the second half of the twentieth century, and this is one of his greatest novels.
In positive news, we are in Florida. I’m seeing a strikingly large number of people, including children, reading paper books by the pool and on the beach. So far, I’ve seen a grand total of two kids with a device. Everybody else either plays or has paper books.
The people of this country are so much better than its politicians, it’s almost funny.
OK, what needs to happen for Trump to drop this talking point? It’s horrible, it’s losing him support, yet he persists with the intensity of an alcoholic reaching for a bottle.
Speaking in favor of H-1B Visas at today’s U.S-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, President Donald J. Trump said: “You can't come in, open a massive computer chip factory for billions and billions of dollars like is being done in Arizona, and think you're gonna hire people off… pic.twitter.com/KEjKQI3pgd
Read the room, dude. Your base hates this endless drumbeat of how America’s greatest problem is Americans.
Is there anybody on any side of the political spectrum who doesn’t subscribe to the Magic Dirt theory? Is there anybody who realizes that a country is its people and not a landscape, populated by whoever is more convenient to drag over to save a buck?
I’m growing increasingly desperate to find any political representation for my views.
As a said earlier, moving to New Jersey was the best thing to happen to my family. My parents’ families…
This is why I like to say that the best thing my parents ever did was move to the New…
Actually assimilation is not complete until they intermarry, there was considerable resistance amongst many ethnic groups in western Canada until…
True. People who have assimilated will not prefer to hire from their immigrant group. At an office party, they will…
Arg. CCP=PRC
The Viet Kieu I have known all my life assimilated remarkably well. 1st gen are obviously not Americans, but tend…
There’s a common idea even on the more “racist” right that east Asian immigrants assimilate unusually well. They seem to…
Exactly. There’s some sort of weird parental anxiety involved. Like if the child steps out of the hustle for a…
Free, unstructured time when kids loiter around aimlessly is the most developmentally crucial and useful. People want to turn kids…
Bykov is extremely talented as a poet. But in what concerns his prose, he’s nowhere near Veller.
Shoot, not just resume padding. I’ve watched way too many parents regard any lacunae in their little kids’ time as……
“perception is that you can’t be a just a good student who otherwise enjoys his friends, free time” They’re not…
“nobody has to be intentionally diverted every second of the day” I am soooo glad I finished school before the…
only writer of value writing in Russian today” What about Bykov?
There’s this panic among parents (and it causes a lot of stress to the kids) that you have to have…
He is also the only writer of value writing in Russian today. Meaning serious literature. There is good entertainment lit…
And then they wonder why people no longer trust MSM.
“Since then the share of foreign born population has gone up and up, even while crime fell and fell.” I…
No, I guessed because he’s the only Russian speaking “famous writer” who would make such a comment. I mean, I’m…
Like: I don’t think people– adults OR kids– understand that nobody has to be intentionally diverted every second of the…
So much of the deliberate parenting strategy (it’s mostly accidental, but you know, the part where we actually have a…
I get it. He is very funny. But in my misspent youth the libertarian stuff sounded a lot better than…
What gets me most here is the absolute total mindblowing stupidity of the “guns baaaaad” “criminals… meh whatever: just give…
Or perhaps Kipling’s prophetic reference to the growing ideology of feminism: “On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the…
This chart https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-foreign-born-share-of-the-u-s-population-1850-2024/ shows that the percent of us population that was foreign born was at its lowest ever in…
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with…
Even the leftist media openly state that well over a half of ICE detentions are of people with criminal records.…
I think it’s waning a lot. It was mostly a boomer thing, and they are gradually shuffling offstage.
How many murders by foreign criminals is acceptable? And why are guns a problem when murder rates are drastically down?…
Here is a chart, compiled in this article https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/us/murder-rate-drop-report.html, of US murder rates going back to 1900. It shows that…
The Reagan worship on the Right seems ridiculously unjustified. Dude really went all crazy with bringing in mass migration. He…
Please don’t tell me he mentioned my peasant face elsewhere.
Thank you, my friend, I really appreciate it. Some days are harder than others.
Was it Veller?
https://peterhalligan.substack.com/p/sweden-shootings-down-80-and-no-shootings So apparently, just like in the US, Sweden deported a bunch of foreign gangbangers and– like magic– violent crime…
Town vs. country was one of the biggest divides in SA politics. The term Boer literally means farmer but more…
“have to earn the right to vote through national service” Earning the right to vote through some kind of national…
methylethyl Some of his writing is humour; some is insight. He does both very, very well ;-D “Women and cats…
Yes. It is a bit funny to see how hypocritical the left gets when anti-racism and defending a murderess conflict,…
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