Abandoned Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow. 📚I took no pleasure therein.

Reading Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul. Love it so far.

Pro Tip: If you start your unsolicited text to me with “‼️ URGENT‼️Woke Liberals in California …”, I’m likely to read it and (a) send no money and (b) do the opposite if I do anything at all.

It grieves me that we now have Lying Lawyers dominating the Department of Justice.

I’m weary of spitting into the wind. My latest “big blog” post is the better for it.

Finished Chesterton, The Wisdom of Father Brown. 📚

Reading Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow. 📚

Well that should be a “learning experience” for the #1-ranked Purdue Men’s basketball team. Solidly thumped by #9 Kentucky with their promising new faces proving largely feckless. (Kentucky may be underrated, too.)

I have two beefs with former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels:

1. Daylight Savings Time
   
2. Selling Indiana’s oldest radio station, WBAA, while Purdue’s President.

Otherwise, he’s a level-headed class act with a timely piece at WaPo today: Indiana Republicans, don’t cave to Trump redistricting pressure

A traveling one-man show about C.S. Lewis, Further Up and Further In, played Purdue University last night. Students $5; under 30, $30; geezers like me, $75.

I’ve read enough Lewis to take a hard pass and let them get on with evangelizing the young through preferential pricing.

I’m happy for Paul Kingsnorth that his new polemic, Against the Machine, is selling well. If you read it, do also read some critiques, such as ‘Unnatural’ Doesn’t Mean ‘Wicked’, by Tara Isabella Burton. @tinyroofnail @todd@social.lol

I’ve hit too many malfunctioning websites today to believe that AWS is really, fully repaired.

Title VII Suit Alleges Failure to Accommodate Religious Refusal to Work Alone with a Woman.

Billy Graham and Mike Pence both followed this practice, for reasons beyond pre-empting temptation. I suspect that this man will win his lawsuit, but he’s swimming against a strong current of public opinion.

Helpful: Juicy Ecumenism, Today’s Christian Political Tribes. This may not be exhaustive, but it identified and sketched more tribes than I had been thinking about.

Threw away all my 44” waist trousers today (plus one pair of 46”). I’m a 42” waist now, aiming for even smaller.

I really appreciate the reasoning (bolded), not just the Circuit Court outcome, in this case which will be binding precedent in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana:

Protesters have protested at an ICE facility a few miles west of Chicago for the past 19 years—with somewhat more intensity recently following the announcement of Operation Midway Blitz. A month after the announcement, the president federalized the Illinois National Guard. District court: Enjoined. Seventh Circuit: Just so. Political opposition is not rebellion, and a protest doesn’t become a rebellion merely due to a few isolated incidents of violence. Without that, none of the statutory predicates for federalizing the National Guard have been met.

Institute for Justice, Short Circuits for 10/17/25.

Much of the political opposition to Trump’s authoritarian surge having collapsed, disheartened, it’s good to see Federal Courts holding fairly firm.

Finished Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. 📚 It may sound silly, but two evenings in a row I fell asleep reading it, so a 90 minute read took two days.

I think I’ll just spend some time with Auden’s Collected Poems (Mendelson) next. It has been too long.

Terra Firma

Yes, you’re right. I’m sure Armageddon’s coming:
wars, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, locusts,
killer flus, et cetera. Yes, I’m awed by
all the destruction.

I concede your point that the world might end, and
all your puny labors will be as nothing.
Still, you can’t go out with your friends until you’ve
folded the laundry.

Julie Steiner

We are spared the Avenues of Liberation
and the water-cannoned Fifths of May
but I tire of cities clogged with salutes
to other cities: York, Liverpool, Oxford Streets
and memorial royalty: Elizabeth, Albert, William, unnumbered George.
Give me Sallie Huckstepp Road, ahead of
sepia Sussex, or Argyle, or Yankee numbering
– and why not a whole metropolis
street-signed for its own life and ours:
Childsplay Park and First Bra Avenue,
Unsecured Loan, the Boulevard Kiss,
Radar Strip, Bread-Fragrance Corner,
Fumbletrouser, Delight Bridge, Timeless Square?

Les Murray, Reclaim the Sites, from New Selected Poems

Finished Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. 📚

Reading (though not for long) Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. 📚

The Nobel Institute is investigating whether the winner of this year’s peace prize was leaked. Hours before the institute announced María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition leader, her odds of winning surged on Polymarket, a betting site, from around 4% to 74%. Ms Machado is a vocal critic of Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and lives in hiding in the country.

Economist World in Brief

Wonderful new podcast from the Free Press: Old School, with Shiloh Brooks. First episode is Brooks (who I didn’t know before) interviewing Adm. James Stavridis about Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, a book that sits among the Admiral’s First Editions of Hemingway.

In a totalitarian system, you couldn’t publish something like this, but we are merely authoritarian, so we can.

Finished Glen Scrivener, The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality. 📚

Began reading Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. 📚 Embarrassed to have never read her before, considering what a master writer she’s reputed to be.

On news that President Donald Trump is considering a pardon for Epstein-associate Ghislaine Maxwell, right-wing activist Laura Loomer took to X, warning him “Do not do it. There will be no coming back from that.” Words we never expected to write: We agree with Laura Loomer.

The Morning Dispatch

The CBS newsroom is freaking out after David Ellison paid $150,000,000 for the Free Press and put Bari Weiss over the CBS news operation:

as Christopher Hitchens said in a different context, “It’s not just the principles. It’s the money of the thing.”

Caitlyn Flanagan.

Hitchens’ quip is great.