… why Hungary’s schools are failing, why its hospitals are crumbling, why it has become the poorest country in the European Union.  Victor Orban maintained a sophisticated propaganda apparatus to reframe what were ultimately not policy failures really at all but  the entirely predictable results of a system designed to enrich his cronies. There’s only so much propaganda can do when a citizen can’t get medical care in a hospital but knows their prime minister has exotic animals roaming a palatial country estate.”

Wowsa. An answer that really packs it in. Not many people can offer so much substance, detail, and argument in an elegant way.

David Pressman, ambassador to Hungary under Obama.

If, as predicted, he suffers a crushing defeat, what will happen to all the state funds dedicated to keeping Hungarian women pregnant 24/7?

A second grader brought a loaded gun to school in Swansea Mass., on a Friday, and showed it to schoolmates.

The principal knew of it and did nothing. He decided to wait until Monday.

Police got an anonymous tip on Monday and came to the school that day.

The armed student lied to the principal (who spoke to the student on Monday) and said he brought no gun of any kind to school.

The parents of the armed student lied to police about having firearms in the house.

After the police found five firearms in the house, some loaded, the father of the armed student said he forgot about having five weapons, and said that he was not licensed to carry.

The parents have been charged with “multiple firearms violations, plus two counts of reckless endangerment of a child.”

India’s Dawoodi Bohra community is wild about clit-stripping, and won’t stop with the dirty knife thing until authorities can put their leaders in jail.

The question of what to do with this cult’s enthusiasm is finally before the Supreme Court in New Delhi, which will determine if, as the DB argues, cutting off babies’ clitorises is “essential to our religion.”

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Quite a religion.

I mean, far out.

… steps from the Georgetown Library, where I just gave a lecture on the essay.

The Essence of the Essay

Georgetown Public Library

1 – 3:00

Sat April 11

Thank you for being here!

I’ve been delighted to give lectures at this library on poetry, James Baldwin, and Jane Austen.  I’m grateful to Jay and the staff for the invitations.  

A few months ago, when Jay suggested I give a series of talks, lots of people were reading, and were very moved by, the essay you have in front of you – A Battle with My Blood by Tatiana Schlossberg – and I happened as a result to be thinking about the essay as a literary form, and why it can be so powerful.  It seemed only natural for me to take advantage of the attention being riveted on this particular essay to focus on that genre.  Why did Schlossberg choose the essay form?  What is the essay, a genre whose name means an attempt, a stab at, something?  What types of essays are there?  How can we account for the intense effect of the very best essays?

Before I run away with praise of the essay, a word about its neglect and dislike.  For many of us, the only place we actually spent time reading, analyzing, and writing essays was in the dreaded required English Comp class in high school or college.  Few schools call it that anymore, so unpopular has the course become; but under whatever name, it tends to be the same deadly mix of rather formulaic polemic about the usual suspects – the death penalty, abortion rights, assisted dying. Even worse, buying or plagiarizing your college admissions essay seems something of a national sport.  So the whole subject of the essay – there is a vast BUY YOUR ESSAY HERE industry – has a tendency to arouse emotions of boredom and cynicism.

And yet that same formulaic thing – that five paragraph thing where you first state your argument, then move it along with evidence and personal narration and the use of transitional phrases; and conclude by restating your argument in your final paragraph – ain’t at all bad as a way to begin learning to write and appreciate the essay.  Note, for instance, that this is precisely what Schlossberg, in a much more complex way, does.  Her final paragraph indeed reiterates her first, giving her essay not merely structural shapeliness, but also, in its circularity, a sense of her entrapment in therapeutic repetition rather than actual improvement.  One could go even further with that circularity as a figure for her inability emotionally to get anywhere past a stubbornly recurrent sense of incredulity about what she beautifully calls “the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself.”

A 34-year-old mother has been charged after her 8-year-old son allegedly got ahold of her loaded handgun and took it to his elementary school.

Gloria Luster, 34, of Kent [Ohio], pleaded not guilty to a first-degree misdemeanor count of endangering children …

Municipal court records show Luster was also charged in September with a first-degree misdemeanor count of child endangering after another one of her children, a 2-year-old girl, was found wandering in the dark of a parking lot outside Luster’s apartment complex.

A complaint states Luster “did not know the child had left, where she had gone to, or how long she had been gone.”

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When does Child Protective Services decide Gloria’s a bit too much?

The long day’s journey into court that is Rutgers – a bastion of filth and corruption (read the sports posts I just linked to) even by Jersey standards – moves appreciably closer to an actual court date. To revisit my Rutgers athletics posts over many years is to marvel again at the special brew of shiftless greedy presidents, vile and violent coaches, criminal gang team players, invisible and indifferent fans, etc etc, that has made Rutgers what it is today.

When removing student fees ($138.1M), university support ($146.2M) and state funding ($42.1M) from the revenue total, Rutgers’ deficit since joining the Big Ten surpasses $516 million, marking the biggest in the league by a significant margin.

Most Big Ten schools rely on some form of subsidy, NJ.com analysis shows, but none come close to Rutgers. In the past four years, the New Jersey school took in the most combined state support, direct-university support and student-fee revenue ($109.6M) by a wide margin.

Some American universities are, because of economic/demographic changes, in a state of near-existential crisis. It’s adorably retro to watch Rutgers kill itself for the oldest reason – football/spectacular greed.

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding: researchers could replicate the results of only half of the studies that they tested.

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And I mean… 50%! That’s a lot more than I thought it’d be.

It’s a lesson maybe too late for the learnin’, but the extended Bible Belt — here, South Dakota — is just as bizarre as the rest of us.

Suppress that truth long enough and it explodes, like something out of Philip Roth’s The Breast.

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Odd that this columnist touches on all possible motivations but the most plausible one: A vengeful desire to destroy his wife. Worked beautifully.

From a white Republican official/yachtsman/Trump worshipper, to a black San Francisco champion of the poor, to a Chinese-American school official in Los Angeles and her Indian—origin partner in crime — and all the way up to her Hispanic Superintendent boss — the ethnic richness of our thieving class is a wonder to behold. In no other nation will you find people from such different backgrounds working – singly or in conspiracy – to remove all the public money meant to help struggling people and give it to themselves.

Antonio Brown thinks of something funny to say.

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Brown isn’t only witty; he’s a pioneer:

Brown applied to Florida State University. His admission was denied over academic concerns.

Gotta be the first time that happened.

News from Texas.