Michael Powell is what passes today for Mailer, Didion, Wills, Hardwick, et al. That's right. I'm saying it. Things that suck now used to be better.

A bad way to disprove theories about the violent basis of liberal institutions: call the riot squad.

'A reader of a QAnon-ish bent might come away from this book convinced that Alexander Hamilton founded the so-called deep state. That person would have a point.'
-- Kirkus Reviews
amazon.com/dp/0374167834?…

I'm getting the feeling people don't know what went on at Columbia in '68.

Wait, what. How can this be? Thanks for keeping us informed of these contradictions.

Sally Field's memoir is good.

Originalism: no amicis briefs were filed with SCOTUS until 1821.

peace and love marches?

If SCOTUS weren't supposedly considering the future of American politics, they could just call bullshit on Trump's basis for appeal--unlimited immunity--based on case law, not ideas about founding history, and let the trial proceed, thus aiding the future of American politics.

Ali Winston Rick Perlstein Nils Gilman Howard French Kind of makes the point: SWAT and SWAT-type gear and tactics, no longer special at all, are just a standard posture now.

'That’s not my idea of young idealists reliving the peace-and-love marches of the late 1960s' -- Bret Stephens today.

At this point I approach with great skepticism any book by an author who has a job other than writer-of-books for which they're also professionally known.

I feel I'm being set up to think that if the Court decides for Trump on immunity, there's still a victory for liberalism in there, because the majority won't invoke originalism, and the dissents--which in this case, we almost certainly would get--will cite historians.

Ali Winston Rick Perlstein Nils Gilman Howard French I think we get that riot policing and police riot are old--it's the circumstances under which a riot posture, SWAT or not, is adopted, really almost reflexively, that seems at issue here.

Claire Potter I'm still down on Hofstadter, but that's just because I can't see him meeting any moment. I like 'On Violence'--was in no way ready to receive it when it came out, but the questions it addressed were dramatic to me even then and still are.

Maybe all quickly published books about current affairs and citing studies are like White Rural Rage.

'If you continue to view the sniper on the roof of a college building as an agent of a coercive combination liberal education and state violence, the sniper will have no choice but to shoot you.'

The great thing about when I went to college is the uprisings were just over and the social rules--you probably don't know what those were--were just over too. Optimal.

'You WILL view the university as a politically neutral site of nonviolent free inquiry!'