Beware the evil stepmother.

Beware.

Prosecutors say the Wildenstein family pulled off “the longest and most sophisticated tax fraud” in the history of modern France in part [due] to their savvy use of storage: artworks were scattered across multiple countries, shell corporations, and innocuous holding facilities such as a nuclear bunker in the Catskill Mountains, a former fire station in New York, and sites in the Bahamas and the Channel Islands.

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Clever headline!

ART STASH SET FOR AN HEIR RAID

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NYT

Not there yet, but will write more when I arrive.

Where else? It’s long been one of America’s most twisted locations. Nothing surprising here.

Shooting pledges with air guns, making them eat butter with dirt on it and making them drink bong water led to a Coastal Carolina University fraternity’s five-year suspension … [A] first-year student pledging the fraternity was injured after being shot multiple times with an air gun as part of the group’s initiation process… [He] was shot twice in the head, twice in the stomach and multiple times in the back… [The] student sought medical attention in the following days for headaches and hearing difficulty… Shortly after, he received texts from some of the fraternity members, including one who allegedly told him to “keep the frat’s name out of your mouth,” according to the report. The pledge withdrew from the university on Jan. 9, 2023, for medical reasons.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, Barnard College tells its students, don’t say anything at all.

New policy: NOTHING may be displayed on your dorm door. NOTHING. Onaccounta you might say something that upsets someone. We’re thinking lately of Palestine, but into the future we can think of lots of other shit. Maybe you’re Iranian and you dare express some negative thoughts about the hijab. Maybe you’re antiabortion, and you put the phone number of adoption agencies on your door. Hey, maybe you even oppose American support for the war in Ukraine. Maybe you think women should carry guns.

All of these and more are guaranteed to piss off some of the people who walk by your dorm door – not to mention some of our donors – so shut the fuck up.

 [Judge Brian Lovell] was arrested for reportedly firing a gun at five cars, then ramming his SUV into the back of a woman’s car twice. [He] then attempted to push the woman’s car into oncoming traffic.

It’s the sort of scene you associate with SS massacres, but our own West Point Mississippi offers just this scenario every Saturday. Y’all come down.

When she walks her paths, piles of feathers mark battlefields.

Here are two feathers (mourning dove?) she picked up and brought inside yesterday.

A local poet, who lives next to an old forest slated for development, writes about her owls.

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The owl came because he wants this scrap of woodland, wants the beeches and their hollow hearts, their cavities. He came because so long ago the farmer left his fields alone to grow their latent crop of trees that no one came to cut. The owl wants this wooded hilltop, its ancient oaks that stand among heaped quartz the farmer or his father or his father’s father cleared. The owl wants the hilltop’s crown of hollies, wants the deep-shade roost they’ve made; he wants this open branch that ends a wing-wide tunnel through the hollies’ shelter, wants this place to watch, to rest and cast his pellets, wadded clumps of fur and bone the rain dissolves to show he wanted squirrels, and voles, and frogs, and once a huge black beetle. If you knew a wood would call an owl back, if you knew the owl’s calls would fill the winter wood until another owl answered, wouldn’t you want to leave the land alone to grow its woodland, wouldn’t you want to grant the owls what they wanted?

Fox News Guest Decrying “Migrant Crime”

Previously Arrested After Getting Violent

Over a [Too-Cheesy] Grilled Cheese Sandwich

See when it’s this bad, it’s on Iowa State as much as the plagiarist. To pass a dissertation that plagiarizes more than twenty-four other authors!!!! seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

No, that’s Bracknell. Make it a contempt for the ordinary decencies of scholarly life. Make it a remarkable incuriosity about a document that must be a pretty fucking weird read. If anyone at Iowa State read it.

… it’s a frightening reminder of the power of the brain. Our brains, when diseased, can kill us.

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No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.”‘

    O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

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David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest:

[I]t was as if a large billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not the slightest inkling was there. … It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. … I simply could not live with how it felt. … I understood the term hell as of that summer day and that night in the sophomore dormitory. I understood what people meant by hell.

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It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. … It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed….

“It is dismantling white epistemic logic, removing the centering of the oppressor’s historical lens, and lifting the Black perspective voices. To be clear, I am not arguing for an essentialization of African culture and Blackness; Blackness and Black people are complex and multifaceted, but I am interested in the historical narratives that throw away the Eurocentric ways we think about Black people throughout history.” 

It’s not that this has been plagiarized. It’s that it was ever written in the first place. The worst thing about the ongoing march of DEI plagiarism stories is toppling undefended into this prose. Reader, beware.

It’s a (positive) review of a book that just came out about him.

Click English in upper right corner.

From a grateful GWU student.

I still remember how he proposed and facilitated my first event as a Resident Advisor: a trip to the Library of Congress, where he gave a personal tour of the institution’s collections and architecture (and pointed out the best study spots within the facility). He was also just as detailed in planning for the after-tour meal, finding the group, with a day’s notice, a Capitol Hill establishment that met all of our attendees’ numerous dietary and allergen needs.

Daniel was also instrumental in facilitating my final event as a Resident Advisor: a Friday night baseball game at Nationals Park. It was no secret that I was a huge fan of baseball, and accordingly, I deliberately selected a baseball game with a rather nice giveaway (bobbleheads). The proposed budget for the game exceeded my allotted funds, but Daniel, without hesitation, sponsored the event, even calling the box office personally to select our seats. When I arrived at his office to pitch the event, he handed me an envelope with the tickets and explained, with a mischevous smirk, that he was happy to fund a game against his hometown Colorado Rockies (along with any other activity I proposed). For the remainder of the hour, we instead discussed my studies, with Daniel probing about domestic elections theory, how the Senate works, and a wide range of other topics.

I share these two memories because to me, they epitomize Daniel at his best. He was always a scholar, passionate about sharing his experiences and studies with the world. But he was also a kind soul: he always placed others first, he did his best to make academia seem less intimidating, he always thought about the finer points and worked tirelessly to alleviate any issues, and he had a genuine sense of wit and generosity …