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I just wanted to put this in writing, because the fog of war (excursion?) is too thick and swirly, the coverage too careful, to keep the actual narrative of what the fuck just happened in my head.

So. Way back when, Donald John Trump became president, by virtue of a combination of fuckery and a rotting, sclerotic body politic. In the four years of that presidency, he perpetrated all sorts of evil and moronic shit, but was prevented by institutional guardrails and a lack of imagination from actually destroying the world. Even his effort to install himself as Dotage King was foiled by a generally flaccid effort to do so.

During this dark time, Iran was a minor issue for him. Mostly, he was pissed off that a previous, decidedly non-Caucasian president signed an arms control deal curbing Iran’s capability to manufacture nuclear weapons. He didn’t invade Iran or anything, but he did unilaterally break the agreement, which had been working. But then COVID happened and everyone danced in the streets when he lost the 2020 election.

Flash forward four years: Trump is unhealthier and smellier, plus also president again. Whether Trump decided he no longer wanted advisors to tell him no ever again, or only sincerely corrupt and subservient people could bear to be in Trump’s employ, he tapped a cadre of truly broken people for Cabinet level positions, including a TV host Secretary of Defense with a White Nationalist tattoo and a deep insecurity–all aligned with Trump in his desire to do stupid shit, like promoting measles and murdering protesters.

It was murder that really caught Trump’s eye. Even before the murdered protesters, he had the TV host start murdering Central American fishermen at sea and claiming they were drug smugglers (as if murdering drug smugglers was somehow permissible, legally or morally). Anonymous boats go boom, the video plays for Trump (on TV), and no one impeached him, so that feeling he felt when people died because of his say-so–Trump decided he would like more and more.

But while he was getting off on that, he realized that he was mortal, as various parts of his body were necrotic, so he was worried about his legacy. Sure, he was obviously the most handsome, smart and popular man in human history, he told himself, but he had not refashioned the entire planet in his own image. As an extra, more murdering!

Iran was the obvious solution. Nobody liked them, plus they never got what was coming to them in his first term. So, despite the fact that the US and Iran had been negotiated arms control measures, they had a little Twelve Day War in the summer of 2025–death from above it was. Israel started it–a week’s worth of missile attacks at Iran’s nuclear development facilities and scientists, and US stuck a toe in at the end with a couple Tomahawks.

Trump declared total destruction of Iran’s nuclear program. The international community declared that the bombings had no legal basis. And Iran declared that the US was a shitty negotiating partner.

The destruction of Iran’s nuclear program was was so total that that weapons talks resumed in 2026. These talks ended up being super useful to Trump and his TV host Secretary of Defense, as they served to distract Iran from Trump’s surprise (sneak) attack of Iran, this time targeting heads of state and schoolgirls.

The start of the Big Beautiful War was (EST) a Friday night going into Saturday morning, so that Trump could not only get his murder fix but also ruin everyone’s weekend.

It was a decapitation strike, combined with a sneak attack, all very Geneva Conventions-y, and all overseen from the Winter War Room, which is basically a couch fort at a Mar-a-Lago AYCE. Death rained from the skies, said the TV host to the TV cameras, and Trump, watching TV giggled girlishly.

A bunch of Iranian leadership was killed right off. Also killed (schoolgirls notwithstanding) were the minor officials that were hoped to fill the leadership vacuum in a more pliant fashion. The US shrugged and started asking around if anyone had any missiles they weren’t using at the time.

Trump and his little Trumpies did not bother to conjure a (fake) rationalization or a (fake) end goal. One of the little fellows must have been students of history, as the strategy seemed to be to let the very serious news outlets project rationalizations/end goals and then argue about them until they got tired and forgot, which saved the trouble of having to worry about morality or Constituitionality or anything like that.

A week in, in order to please Trump with more murder and more perfidy, a US submarine sunk an Iranian frigate. The frigate was in a whole other ocean, returning from a naval exercise in India.

Trump won his little murder war so resoundingly that the global economy starting circling the drain.

Defeated Iran did what every wargamer from the past 30 years knew Iran would do if threatened: asymmetrically attack US allies in the region, and choke off shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Exactly two people alive were caught off-guard by this obvious and inevitable response: the murder President, and the TV host he hired to be bloodthirsty and sadistic.

Only a little less obvious was that the US suddenly needed an ally other than Israel to be involved–Israel was really good at indiscriminate bombing campaigns, but it didn’t so much care about all that other stuff. Trump had not consulted with or advised NATO, or the Saudis, or really anyone at all. They certainly knew about it, as Trump’s Mar-a-Lago opsec was tantamount to yelling state secrets at each other across a ballroom, but they were not asked if they thought it was a good idea, or if they would consider helping with the murder. So Trump took a brief pause from berating and alienating allies in order to cajole, beg and threaten allies into lending a hand.

They said “Fuck you” without even thinking about it, and once they did, they found more elaborate and fun was to say “Fuck you.”

This led Trump to do what Trump does best: mumble at how poorly Trump has been treated, repeatedly, disjointedly and in front of cameras. He was poorly treated in that the allies didn’t help, he was poorly treated because he never needed the allies help, he was poorly treated and please will the allies help, and he was poorly treated because he never asked please will the allies help.

And it’s been a month now, and he commanded network television time last night in which to–no one can quite tell? The NYT and the like sane-washed the speech into something resembling coherence, but that’s the lives they have chosen. What he actually did was do his tight-19, an art performance of his greatest social media posts, all while looking and sounding markedly not well.

But! He got his murder, and plenty of it! His sycophants clapped and compared him to Jesus, and the news that Boomers consume nervously tiptoed around this single fact, which is the fact that I am writing this in order to keep in my head:

Donald Trump wants to write his name in gold in the history books, and also Donald Trump wants people to be murdered because he decided that they should be murdered. He doesn’t care if he starts either or both of a global depression and World War 3.

He wants what he wants and no one in either party in a position to stop him has the courage to do so.

Maybe the surest sign that Blogs Are Back Baby! is that I feel the need to share these few sparse sentences.

In the past months I have started and deleted one or two posts a week. Each of the dearly departed were some flavor of “The world sure is miserable out there, miserable in ways that not only exceed any memory I have of the general misery of the world, but also nearly every conception I had of how miserable the world could become.”

And I am writing this on an afternoon in which employment is spiraling and brent crude is spiking while a war with no rationale continues, giving a quick lunchbreak snapshot into whole new levels of misery waiting around the corner, like the Easter Bunny, but with a scythe instead of a basket of eggs.

I have no need to write things any more than you have any need to read the things I don’t need to write, but I enjoy the process. And I use it to apprehend increasingly meaningless times, which meaninglessness interferes with the whole mechanism of apprehension, which means I go to bed each night feeling even worse.

I mean.

Take care of yourself. Be someone’s friend. Find space for novelty.

And keep your receipts.

This thing happened last night, the evening of 2/4/26, and I think its pretty important. I didn’t watch it live, but it went pretty viral pretty quickly, at least on Bluesky. It happened on live broadcast television, so there’s no one account to credit, but this is the first post that I saw RTed around:

JUSTIFIED “FUCK ICE” CHANTS #AEWDynamite

— NHATional Scissoring Day ✂️ (@nhathanielh.bsky.social) 2026-02-05T03:04:23.189Z

Some context: it’s a little bit of pro wrestling. The promotion is All-Elite Wrestling, which is the scrappy competitor to WWE, the dominant promotion for the past 40 years. The venue is the Pearl Theater at the Palms in Las Vegas. It was broadcast on TBS/HBO MAX. And the athletes are Brody King (the burly guy) and MJF (and the other guy).

The reason that a FUCK ICE is at all relevant in that context is that Mr. King is known for his personal opinion of ICE. At an event in Mexico City last June, he wore an ABOLISH ICE tee (to acclaim), and collaborated with a comic book company to raise money for those affected by the ICE invasion of Minneapolis. Immediately before the video, it had been announced to the Vegas crowd that more than $60,000 had been donated from the project.

The fact that the fans are chanting is not that unusual. The entire sport is predicated on inspiring audience response, since back before kayfabe broke and people believed it was real. In the before times, if a wrestling promotion could arrive at the point where the fans would loudly cheer the good guys and loudly boo the bad guys, that promotion was making money.

And chants have changed over the years, growing from simple “Yay!/Boo!” paradigms, to chanting the catchphrase of the good guys and phrases intended to hurt the feelings of the bad guys, to (more recently) chants that are difficult to explain out of context–ironic nonsense, in-jokes and such.

FUCK ICE is hardly an in-joke. FUCK ICE is timely and relevant to the entire nation. And it is an unequivocal message to ICE and the fascists who love it.

Keep in mind that this was not a protest or a DSA meeting. This was pro rasslin, with fans across the political spectrum. Certainly some of them are left-leaning, as sure as the fact that some of them are right-leaning. And they found a thing to agree on.

Let’s talk about the heat. “Heat” in kayfabe is when the fans hate you. When the heel takes the mic and tells Pittsburgh fans that Pittsburgh is a town full of unattractive, unintelligent people, the fans booing is heat on the heel. Well the heat last night was thermonuclear. I hope ICE violence workers and their families noticed, because the heat last night was, to paraphrase a despicable decrepit old man, the likes of which has never been seen.

Consider: It is not at all inconceivable that Trump’s ICE would be more than happy to “open a file” on every single fan chanting, to stumble in, draped in their TEMU GI Joe gear, and fill the Pearl Theater with tear gas and drag each and every one into an unmarked van to be renditioned to some concentration camp a thousand miles away so that attorneys can never find them.

That chant was courage.

If it can happen at an AEW event, can it happen at a WWE event? Can it happen at NCAA basketball games? Can it happen at the Super Bowl (Yes, yes, and why the fuck not?)

They’re losing, and we’re going to win.

Jesus, as they say, fucking Christ.

Right on cue, here are the push alerts from the 3 major newspapers lmao

— Erick Fernandez (@erickfernandez.bsky.social) 2026-01-21T14:36:52.904Z

Trump this morning gave his Davos speech which was notable for many things, one of which was not his reassurance that he won’t use force against Greenland. This was meant, as you can see above, with the full might of international news organizations sending push notifications that Trump will not use force against Greenland.

This is frustrating, because, words have no fixed meaning to Trump.

Trump thinks that “affordability” is a “fake word” coined to spite him, he thinks that numbers can be reduced by more than 100%, he is astonished and delighted by the word groceries, which is a word neither astonishing nor delightful, just an item he’s never had to buy himself his entire life.

Hence, taking Trump “at his word” is lunacy.

This is not even about his lying, which–apologies to every news organization in America–he does consistently, habitually and without a single scruple. This is above and beyond his pathological dishonesty: a playing field in which everyone, his allies, his victims, everyone but him is constrained by a mutual consensus that words mean things, and that speech is considered as binding as actions.

For example, if an individual says, “I like the color purple,” then the audience to those spoken words can rely on the fact that the speaker has given more than minimal consideration to their feelings about the color purple, and has determined that the color purple is by gosh fine by them.

When Trump says, “I like the color purple,” those are just sounds coming out of his weird little mouth that may mean that he does like the color purple, or he noticed something purple out of this corner of his eye (the back of his hand?), or just that it seemed like a funny thing for him to say.

To attribute geopolitical assurances to  damn sentence out of all the other sentences  tumbling out of him is naive, and for a journalist to do so is malpractice.

And this is above and beyond the aspect of Trump’s reign in which he talks like a gangster, where threats are always implicit and never fixed in a manner in which it could be entered as evidence. See:

Attn news commentators: Trump saying he could use force to obtain Greenland but won’t is not Trump saying he won’t use force to obtain Greenland. It is Trump using force as a threat to obtain Greenland. That is why he mentions it.

— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) 2026-01-21T14:16:18.480Z

Living through this is hard enough without be gaslighted by the grown-ups we’ve relied on to explain the events of the current day, the journalists who are being outwitted by the profundity of Trump’s mental decline.

What a year these past weeks have been.

I went to bed the night of Friday, January 2 feeling weirdly hopeful for the months to come, and then Trump started sploshing his Trump everywhere, starting in Venezuela (which was the news that confronted me seconds after waking up on the 3rd), and now not two weeks later Trump is having his brownshirts murder Americans in the street.

So here: have a little victory.

There is this wedge of cheese. A double cream brie.

I got it at Stew Leonard’s on New Year’s Day, which is a dumb but satisfying tradition we have–going to a Stew Leonard’s on a day when you know no one will be there. Because Stew Leonard’s is awesome but feels like Times Square on normal shopping day.

But back to the cheese.

It is a wedge, cut instore from a larger cheese and then packaged for individual sale, wrapped in food grade plastic cling wrap. Nothing out of the ordinary about that. The problem presented, however, by the ordinary practice of wrapping cheeses and cheese-like comestibles in cling wrap is that, once you remove the item from the cling wrap, it is impossible to rewrap the item in the cling wrap.

Why would this be a problem? The problem is the label. The label–traditionally a paper sticker with print on one side and adhesive on the other–is, also traditionally, affixed to where the ends of the cling wrap are gathered, which then seals the cling wrap to the point where there is no chance that the packaging will open itself (generally frowned upon in the grocery trade). But when you open it, tearing off the label, the label gets all messed up, and rips a bunch of the cling wrap with it.

Basically, you have your bit of cheese for a snack, and now you have a big naked slap of remaining cheese and the shredded remnants of the cling wrap, useful for nothing other than landfill.

I have also experienced this issue with some bakeries, like She Wolf, who use a sticker to seal the bag, which sticker is affixed to a clear plastic panel on the bed, which rips into little pieces upon opening, leaving a giant hunk of baguette or Pullman in a bag that is compromised beyond use, and so you have to improvise with NYT bags and rubber bands or else your delicious bread will be a doorstop/hockey puck in scant hours.

But Stew Leonard’s has solved the problem!

Check this shit out:

Perhaps not super clear from the photographs, but instead of a paper sticker, Stew’s is using a plastic sticker whose adhesive is not as muscular as a paper sticker.

Hence, you can use the plastic sticker to reseal the cheese in the event that you don’t eat the whole thing.

Possibly other outlets are doing the same. It would not surprise me. But Stew’s has always been an innovator in the space, notably with regard to animatronics. (Obligatory shout out to Jungle Jim’s, another high achiever in this regard.) So Mr. Leonard, if that is in fact your name: THANK YOU.

This is not a problem that has ever cost me a wink of sleep. However, the solution to the minor problem is welcome and worth sharing. And, I can say with some confidence, this small victory may well be the largest victory of calendar 2026 to date.

Further to the previous post: even more acts have consciously uncoupled from the Kennedy Center, which Center was perfectly fine until Donald Trump smeared Trump all over it.

The situation reminds me of this post of Hamilton Nolan’s How Things Work from earlier this month titled “If He Builds It, Tear It Down,” providing a prescient bit of advice on how to digest these news items.

As soon as Republicans leave the White House, the next president should tear it down.

Nolan is writing about the ballroom that Trump commanded to be built on top of what used to the the East Wing of the White House, but it applies universally to all such fuckery.

It should be noted that Trump’s pathological obsession with slapping his name on stuff and/or turning DC into a gilt-bomb of Mar-a-Lagocity has nothing to do with the animating forces of his current administration–to wit, Stephen Miller’s genocidal bigotry, Russell Vought’s monomanical intent to murder all non-military aspects of the federal government, and Marco Rubio’s ultimate goal of withdrawing America from any international entanglement outside of the Western Hemisphere. Building ballrooms and statue gardens and curating armrests is what Trump is spending his time on, when not leading dear-leader sessions or slurringly rambling at the press corps. It’s what he cares about, and it’s what distracts him from any care or concern over the actions of his administration.

All the evil shit, like disappearing citizens and blowing up innocent fishermen? That’s his day job. Picking out gold leaf is what he does for love.

This would be a bit charming, were not evil twisted men manipulating him into committing atrocity after atrocity. (And were he not deeply evil himself.)

Fortunately:

The pendulum is going to swing hard, motherfuckers. Hard enough to smash those walls into dust.

Subscribe to Hamilton Nolan! He’s a top-notch writer, and he occasionally allows himself to share exhortations with the reader, which I find apt and useful. You won’t regret it.

That Trump insists on refashioning institutions in his own image is largely not permitted is besides the point–refashion he will, as surely as Andrew Cuomo slapped his dad’s name on the Tappan Zee bridge. And even when he names something after himself on a legitimate basis, it is an act that bespeaks cringe and not confidence.

Obviously the political will to oppose this bloated namifying, if it exists at all, should be expended on more dire tendrils of Trump’s fascism (disappearing our neighbors, codifying racism and bigotry, conducting illegal wars, etc.). And yet.

Over the holidays, musician Chuck Redd, who has hosted a Kennedy Center Christmas Eve concert called Jazz Jam since 2006, canceled this year’s show on five days’ notice. The reason given was Trump’s decision to (awkwardly) rename The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts after himself.

In response, Trump toadies did what Trump toadies always do: issue performative statements and threaten legal action. Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi issued a statement that claimed:

Any artist cancelling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn’t courageous or principled—they are selfish, intolerant, and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people.

And the Trump-installed president of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, issued a statement in the form of a letter to Rudd.

If you are not familiar with Richard Grenell, he is a longtime consultant/GOP functionary who found his true calling when he realized that lickspittling Donald Trump was the road to success. Since then, he has been ambassador to Germany and Director of National Intelligence, and, early in the second Trump administration, integral in securing the release of the Tate brothers from Romania, where they had been held on charges of sex trafficking and rape. Grenell is truly the utility infielder of Trump sycophants.

Grenell’s “letter” to Rudd is a brief couple hundred words of character assassination with a nod to “certain elements of the left” and a threat to sue. And in case you were wondering, the Trump-led Kennedy Center is doing just great:

Our innovative KC Speakeasy—an intimate rooftop after-hours venue featuring live jazz—has consistently sold out, attracting diverse audiences and revitalizing the genre in exciting ways.

The most interesting aspect of the legal threat is its arbitrariness. The grounds for such action cited are Rudd’s “dismal ticket sales and lack of donor support, combined with [Rudd’s] last-minute cancelation,” which seem to be two valid claims forced to share a studio apartment against their will, and the amount of damages sought–“$1 million”–is entirely unsupported, although a nice round number.

Further, and I speak from experience, customarily when performing artists agree to perform at a venue on a future date, this exotic legal mechanism known as a “contract” is employed, which sets forth the terms of agreement on things like, time, place, compensation and–I’m not kidding–what happens if one side or the other cancels the show.

In any event, while consisting of more words than Trump would ever read in one sitting, the letter remains a limp attempt to look busy for Boss Trump, and an even limper swing at bullying Rudd and artists like Rudd who would just rather not.

Trump toadies claim that these are “political” acts. I think that is only vaguely true. If Rudd or any future artists cancel with stated motivations of opposition to policies (and there are a lot of rancid policies to choose from), then sure! Political act. However, opposition to Trump pathologically insisting that the entirety of American society must be Trump-branded isn’t a political decision, it’s a personal decision. Rudd (et alia) aren’t opposing anything Trump has done other than make it about Trump. They are refusing to bend the knee to the self-proclaimed emperor.

As a person who has made art in the past and intends to make art in the future, I say that the assertion that there is a “duty to perform” on behalf of a “public artist” is fucking horseshit, and any outlet that repeats such assertion without a modifier is not very good at their job. There are no obligations or duties intrinsic to the act of making art, and to claim otherwise is to tell on one’s self. The outrage of the toadies is aimed at the refusal of others to toadie, no matter what “duties” they claim.

To insist that an artist must perform for you is unabashed, late stage fascism. Only dictators insist that an artist must appear and entertain the dictator and his court, and only the most fragile dictators, afraid of what the future may hold for them, will threaten an artist with penalty for failing to do so.

And toadies notwithstanding, slapping his name on shit will not convince people that Trump is any less shitty as a president (or a person!), and will keep us all busy re-renaming things once he has shuffled off this mortal coil.

What is at stake here is not our compliance, but rather their own self-regard. Trump can seize all the power, Trump can impose his moldy will on the institutions of the government, but Trump and his stans will never get what they truly want: respect and adulation. No matter how hard they wishcast a Trump Reich, they will never be beloved. The great artists of the world will never perform at their whim, let alone treat them as anything but sad soulless uncouth motherfuckers.

Right on to the students of Saeed Jones:

Just finished office hours and when I tell you every single student started their meeting by saying how excited they are about Zohran. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them so hopeful. One student said “I needed a win.”

— Saeed Jones (@theferocity.bsky.social) 2025-11-05T18:56:49.922Z

I don’t know if it’s a win I needed as much as a sense that actual normal Americans are ready to fight. Because the slow motion, full-society gaslighting that is Donald Trump is making off with increasingly large bits of everyone’s sanity, with each passing, atrocity-filled week.

But back to Zohran Mamdani, and the qualities that made him Mayor-elect: simply, he’s a charismatic guy who made a point of campaigning for something and not against something, to represent a constituency that he actually cheerleads.

Eric Adams’ New York was a grim hopeless place in which the poorest of us had to make sacrifices for the comfort for the richest of us. (For that matter, Andrew Cuomo’s NYC was a placed he was raised in 50 years ago and avoided ever since. And Curis Sliwa’s still has “muggers” on the subway.) Mamdani’s New York is not a storybook or a fairy tale. It is the New York that all but the billionaires actually live in, and Mamdani is one of us, gleefully.

And underlying his charismatic embrace of Gotham, is an innate competence, as Frank Rich describes:

A smart, focused guy who listens to others and welcomes tough questions; who is transparent and consistent on the core political convictions that guide him; who is not an ideologue or a glib Pez dispenser of consultantspeak; and, no less important, who knows what he doesn’t know.

The significance of mayoral win is not just the W on the board. It’s the restoration of certain qualities of public figures that have been consigned to the Trumpheap of history: honesty, wisdom and hubris.

Whether “my team” wins or loses–I don’t think in such terms. In fact I think that (along with all the other ways that our society is broken) thinking of governance as some sort of tribal warfare is profoundly bad for society, a bloody zero-sum game that no one ever wins.

I think the election of Mamdani is good for me, as I like Mamdani, but good for every normal person in this city, who is animated by anything other than spite and greed. It’s good for his legion of volunteers, it’s good for his reluctant voters, and it will good for all those who embraced the bigotry of Cuomo.

Hell, it’s even good for Donald Trump.

You have been afforded the opportunity to be sick of hearing the name Zohran Mamdani. He is running for mayor, so if you live here, you have seen his signage, maybe received a door-knock. He is good at social media, so you may have shared/liked/followed. Also the establishment hates him, so you also may have seen a take or two–or even stories framed as news coverage–about the dangers of Mamdani becoming mayor of the largest city in America.

You may even have heard his name, mispronounced, on the lips of the man whose joyless demand that he be given Gracie Mansion as his birthright was interrupted by losing the primary to Mamdani. But whatever: fuck Andrew Cuomo, that soulless evil piece of drizzling shit.

Me, I voted for Mamdani this morning, and am very excited by his candidacy, not only for the future of the city I live in, but for the effect that having an elected official like Mamdani would have on the vibe, nation-wide. Here’s why:

Zohran Mamdani is running on the premise that if New York can be better, it can also be better for everyone in New York. The wealthy are taken care of in this city, and they always have been. But for decades, under Republican and Democrat administrations, the sole benefit for anyone other than the wealthy has intentionally been the satisfaction that at least the wealthy are taken care of. Public housing is a shambling mound of neglect, our school system has to fight for scraps from billionaire-led charter schools, and our infrastructure crumbles as edifices to the wealthy are built. This is not the worst city to be poor in, but it is a bad city to be poor in.

And Mamdani’s proposals to address this–which are as much FDR liberalism as they are socialist–offer solutions more than the unserious band-aids of tax credits, or reduced-fares. Mamdani gets it that the comfort of the wealthy does not rise to the level of societal problem when the middle class and lower suffer.

Can it happen? I don’t know. But what if we fucking tried?

As Mamdani eloquently (always) put it yesterday:

UNTIL IT’S DONE, Ep. 5: Vito MarcantonioThere are many who dismiss our vision for New York as impossible. To them, I say we need look only to our past for proof of how we can shape the future.Tomorrow is Election Day. And this is the final Until It's Done of our campaign.

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social) 2025-11-04T04:14:19.749Z

“Are we brave enough to believe in a city that benefits us all?”

Damn, but he is good. And I don’t mean to pretend that Mamdani has never had media training, and, if he has, that he has not benefited from it. But so many candidates (and elected officials) communicate in such a contrived manner as to appear in a constant state of disingenuity–weird polish that never traverses the Uncanny Valley. Mamdani appears to believe what he says when he is saying it.

There is also the effect that Mamdani has had so far, as a straw man. The forces aligned to stop Zohran Mamdani at any cost include not just usual suspects like Mayor Adams, the NYPD, Trump and Trump toadies like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller and pathetic nobody Bill Ackman, but also Andrew Cuomo and the entire centrist wing of the Democratic Party. At first glance, a very big tent. However, at second glance, the secret revealed is that these unlikely bedfellows are not unlikely at all, but united in what they fear. Putting a name on what they fear will be an interesting task.

But for now, we wait and see what happens. (One thing that’s happened: Results are not even in, and Establishment Dems are already publicly wringing their hands.)

Hopefully, the chance that you are tired of hearing the name of Zohran Mamdani will continue.

I have a lot of books.

They are literally all over the house, on shelves, stacks, tables. Our apartment is basically a little less than fifty percent comprised by my books. They may well be load-bearing.

This is something that has brought me great joy. The look of them, the smell of them. They have accompanied me on this long journey, always a few (“few”) more with each passing year.

We even have a storage unit, which was not primarily for the books, but once the storage unit was a possibility, some books found their way over. To make room for more books, of course. And no trip to store more stuff in the storage unit is complete without popping open a box of two of books and grabbing a handful to bring back, to be stacked, in the bedroom, or the bathroom, or in the entry way.

Mutely these books have stood witness through a whole lot of eating dinner and watching TV and sleeping and reading the other books. Beneath their silent gaze, I have grown from a young man, to a man who is not really young at all, no matter how he dresses. Through years and years of good decisions and bad decisions and all the decisions in between.

These books are my friends, of course, but now that I have attained the age in which one scans the obituaries with a keener interest than before, I am realizing that as I am childless, someday–hopefully someday so far in the distance that the urine on the president’s tombstone will itself be old enough to have little urine children of its own–all these books will be somebody else’s problem.

This concerns me, but only a little, as when such time as the books are somebody else’s problem, they will be beyond my (earthly) control.

But what does concern me, what stopped me in my tracks when the realization came crashing down on my bad haircut, is this: No matter how young or old I am, there will never be enough time to read all the books I want to read. If I were to retire tomorrow, and devote my waking moments solely to reading, when all is said and done the books in the “To Read” pile will be no smaller than when I started. This was true 25 years ago, and it will be true 25 years from now.

This assertion is based purely on the books written and published to date, and not books to be written/to be published. Woe betide anyone who dares thumb through this week’s issue of the New York Times Book Review, or opens a Tuesday email from Bookshop. How long would it take to read all the books you want to read published in a single year? In a single week?

Sometimes it seems, as literacy withers and dies, that the whole bunch of us who read books are outnumbered by the other whole bunch of us who write books. Surely this can’t be true, or at least is only true in incremental part.

It doesn’t make me feel lost, or bereft, only a little sad.

Which, in this national environment of spiraling shittiness, wondering which of our neighbors secretly voted for someone who is (feebly) deadset on killing all who dare not kneel before him, is a cute little distraction from all the other bad things.

And naturally no reason not to get more books.