Reading Tolstoy, War and Peace. 📚

In my youth, long, long ago, “reading War and Peace” was a kind of proto-même.

Having recently finished Middlemarch, I’ve given up on setting a record for number of books read in 2026. Quality, not quantity.

(Tolstoy won the coin toss with My Antonia.)

Finished Iain McGilchrist’s backwater quick-read, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning. 📚

I detest what the SPLC has become, but I have no confidence that Kash Patel’s FBI has built a viable case against it. Jeb Rubenfeld seems to concur. (I have no confidence in anything coming out of Trump’s DOJ or FBI. He has turned them into trash, which rhymes with “Kash,” which … oh, never mind.)

We are discovering, for example, that AI is especially adept at displacing or, from the techno-optimist’s perspective, liberating us from human labour in contexts wherein humans had already conformed, willfully or otherwise, to the pattern of a machine. Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease.

L.M. Sacasas.

I read this less than a week ago, but it haunts me and keeps popping up in my head as I read things like, say, this.

Finished Sarah Isgur, Last Branch Standing. 📚

There are many potential take-aways, but my personal favorite (based on “The Nuclear Option” chapter) is that we need to bring back the filibuster for confirmation of judicial nominees; i.e., force Presidents to nominate from closer to the center.

“The Nuclear Option”: Best chapter yet (i.e., the chapter that highlighted the most, and most important, connections I hadn’t noticed on my own) in Sarah Isgur’s Last Branch Standing.

Ya gotta give props to Elinor Wylie for coming up with “scuppernong” as a rhyme (or was that the word for which she needed, and found, the rhyme “summer long”?).

Treated the family to a Korean HotPot and Barbecue joint for Sunday dinner:

1. It was a pleasant way to set aside time for family talk without the grandchildren sullenly walking off.
2. It was pretty darned expensive.

Regarding #1: Grandson’s Prom was Saturday and son let him drive the vintage Miata for the first time. That’s all grandson wanted to talk about.

I thought Russell Moore’s podcast today, Trump’s AI Jesus Might Be the Messiah We’ve Been Looking For, was worth a recommendation.

Last week I heard Iain McGilchrist describe the Reformation is “left-hemisphere inspired” and “headstrong.” That got some juices flowing.

Belated Sunday post – Tipsy Teetotaler ن

A really dirty campaign for the Indiana legislature, pitting a traditional conservative (targeted for blocking mid-decade redistricting) against a lady supported by TPA, MAGA, X Influencers and other spawn of Satan.

I keep forgetting: I’m not in that district. I have no vote in the matter.

I went to Substack controls to cancel the Free Press, which has become very disappointing. The straw that broke the camel’s back was an article on the Catholic Case for War with Iran, which might have risen to the level of sophistry if its premises hadn’t been lies, half truths, or post-hoc speculation.

When I got to the controls, I decided that what I really needed to do was to turn off notifications for the threads that have been consistently bad. There are a few remaining that justify the subscription, like Eli Lake on history, Coleman Hughes, Ruy Teixeira, and even Martin Gurri.

Virginia’s Unconstitutional Effort to Strip Property Tax Exemptions From Pro-Confederate Groups.

I concur in this opinion.

You’re the most successfully retired lawyer I know. A lot of lawyers struggle with retirement.

I had lunch yesterday with the younger lawyer I trained in the arcana of my practice niche so I could retire without the firm losing those clients.

She made that interesting comment.

Insofar as I’ve retired more successfully than others, it may be because I always saw law as a pleasant livelihood, not as an identity.

29% of Americans think Trump is somewhat religious or very religious..

29% of Americans are not very ightbray (Pig Latin used so they won’t understand and show up at my door with torches.)

The coin drops: I shouldn’t waste time on Why People Hate Lena Dunham - Freddie deBoer because I don’t know who Lena Dunham is (other than a hate-object) and have no felt need to find out.

I regret to inform you that this administration is a bunch of barbarians engaged in systematic mass vandalism. Josef Palermo, What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center - The Atlantic.

Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease.

L.M. Sacasas, AI as Christian Heresy

I’m not finished reading it yet, but I’m confident that I should recommend it to thoughtful people: L.M. Sacasas, AI as Christian Heresy - Comment Magazine.

My wife confirms that I’m not retconning when I say I’ve thought of Trump as antichrist for years. Glad the world is catching up, at least until … Hey! A squirrel!

I started the day with mere news summaries and haven’t yet gotten around to full news stories and commentary. Following rabbit trails instead.

It feels kind of human, actually.

Leaving momentarily for a surprise last-minute opportunity to hear Dean Erwin Chermerinsky on free speech and then to dine at Wabash College.

One of the most arcane rituals surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth II, in September 2022, and one of the most affecting in its homeliness — affecting enough that I’m still thinking about it, almost four years later — was the royal beekeeper’s visit to the royal bees, to tell them of their mistress’s passing …

Today’s Poem: Telling the Bees

Unfortunately, reason on its own will lead you astray very, very quickly …

People detect from what I wrote in The Master and His Emissary that I am not a huge admirer of the [left-hemisphere inspired] Reformation … Unfortunately, it brought with it a kind of headstrong view that ‘now we’re in the clear. Everything must be made explicit. The word triumphs over the image’ and so on. …

The trouble with the left hemisphere is … it tends to be headstrong. It tends to think it knows far more than it does.

Iain McGilchrist

I hadn’t thought of Protestantism that way before.

It’s “Bright Week,” a no-fasting week after Orthodox Easter. But I only wanted a little breakfast, and don’t want to pork up (as has been known to happen). So it’s back to PB&J on a Wasa cracker, just like Lent. It almost felt like I was cheating.