.. first black woman on the United States Supreme Court?”

Yes.

… “Witness.” The vicious hysteria of one actor escalates, and draws the witness of all. Shamed, confronted, it escalates still more, terrifying the innocent.

Will Russia back down? Its neighbors are not waiting to find out. This is NATO’s moment.

Finland, a European Union member state, shares a 1,300-km (810-mile) border with Russia. [Its foreign minister] said Russia’s invasion had shown that Russia is willing to take increasing risks in its military operations, can quickly mobilise more than 100,000 soldiers against a neighbouring country, and has mooted more openly than before the possible use of its nuclear and biological weapons.

Hot off the press.

The school will be directing one billion dollars in the coming years to faculty spelling lessons.

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri issued two statements yesterday, one in praise of pro-hijab activists in India, and the other in praise of child bride legislators in Tennessee.

All praise to the noble veiling women of India who defy the law to assert their modesty!

All praise to the noble Tom Leatherwood who has freed the men of Tennessee to marry infant girls if that is their wish!

We are currently advising Brother Leatherwood on the framing, introduction, and passage of female genital removal legislation, for what man of piety would marry a baby with a clitoris?

It’s a whole new world. A whole new field of law to study – Strip Club Shooting Law.

Not strip club law; strip club shooting law.

One club in Atlanta is a real killing field. Several others in the city are much like it.

At Yale.

“As I depart WNYC and the Gothamist, I want to share with you lessons I’ve learned from my ten (amazing!) years of plagiarizing articles.

First: You can get away with it! After having me on the staff for ten years, they found four plagiarized pieces only six months ago, and nothing much happened. In fact, I was reassigned to “mentor staff members.” LOLOL.

Second: You can only get away with it for so long before you do have to sue. Recently, a squad of people has been investigating everything I’ve (let’s go with “I’ve”) written over a decade, which is so unfair because I’ve been plagiarizing all that time! So I’m slapping New York Public Radio with a lawsuit for racism.

Wish me luck!”

In the wake of Orban’s massive victory, Les UDs have been going at it hammer and goulash on whether they should give a shit. If you read UD, you know where she stands: Countries determined to shrink to nothingness should be allowed to do so. Hungary’s population can’t even manage ten million (Orban’s efforts to get Hungarians to reproduce are going nowhere — too drunk to get it up.), and many of those are actively trying to kill themselves.

The smartest have left — Hungary is brain-drain central. Maybe these people noticed that the country had one world-class university and it threw it out. To thunderous applause from its suicidal populace.

The UN estimates a population of only 6.4 million by the end of the century.

“Can you name one famous Hungarian dissident?” UD asked Mr UD – a Pole, and a political scientist extremely well-versed in the region. Long pause. “K-Konrad?” “You can’t even remember his first name?” No. “And I don’t want to upset you, but he died in 2019.”

“Hungary is becoming the center of the intellectual far-right world…”

“Oooh, scary. Karlovich, Vermeule… the freak show freaks in Nyíregyháza!”

Mr UD looked pissed.

“Look,” said I. “The national anthem of modern Hungary is I GOTTA BE ME. Until it invades the Rhineland, Hungary, like all other countries, has a right to drill down to its essence – hyper-conservative, rabidly anti-intellectual, antisemitic, radically insular – and be that thing. The upside for us is that we can safely ignore it forever. Hell, it seems to be ignoring itself. If you want to visit faded post-imperialism, go to Vienna.”

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Update: Hungary is also a big loser in the kleptocracy sweepstakes, with the EU proceeding toward possibly stripping it of the billions of dollars for public works projects that Orban has long been siphoning off for his oligarchs.

Just the blah quotidian of American life. In a few years (as UD has said elsewhere), no one’s going to bother writing this sort of thing up.

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Just as routine: Eternal vigilance in the state of Tennessee.

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Update: The LA Times seems to think we’re shocked.

[T]he same day that this horrific shooting rocked Sacramento, at least 95 other shootings took place across the nation.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Another 95 shootings — claiming 36 more lives and injuring 95 more people — just on this one Sunday in April…

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Well shut ma mouth. If a country has a trillion legal and illegal guns – they’re starting to find rocket launchers, by the way – all over the place, turns out desperate, pathetic, and evil people will use them.

Ain’t nothin you can do either. California has oodles of gun control laws. Lots of other countries with good gun control laws indeed have much less slaughter; but ’round here, see, the cat’s out of the bag. All them guns! Guns here are a household appliance you reach for whenever there’s an itch to kill yourself or others.

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America is deeply hopelessly gunny. I don’t say we shouldn’t have stronger gun control laws. We should. But at this point in the obsequies I don’t think we should expect much.

Locking up your mad gunnies won’t help much either. Your bigtime mass killers are psycho – they either kill themselves when they’re done or happily toddle off to life in prison. Your enraged ex-hubby is unlikely to let thoughts of jail interrupt his big moment. Depraved people who let their toddlers chance upon one of the ten loaded guns around the house and kill themselves and a sibling or two are too addled even to know what the phrase “criminal justice” means.

Gunnies – in neighborhoods, in legislatures – love guns and love violence and seem to regard all the pop pop pop pop everywhere as somehow charismatic. Like the heroin addict who salivates at the very sight of a needle, gunnies light up like the fourth of July at the sight of a gun.

Prohibiting use of the burqa in schools reflects a “mindset of the past,” the Council of the Islamic Community wrote in a statement on Friday.

A witty, erudite writer in the mode of James Merrill, he was 92.

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May 26 1969: The Grievance

No one dies. That is all we can say for certain.

Something dies us,

As it lived us. We are lived. And died.

A personal pronoun is superfluous here.

It is simple;

Our grammar of death must be revised.

And we are not reduced to tears, not reduced. The thing

Our tears are for

Extends us: we are widened to the term

Which lies beyond our tears. We are not reduced.

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Fellow Philip Larkin fans might be reminded, on reading this poem, of these lines:

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,   
And age, and then the only end of age.

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More tersely, fellow Adam Phillips fans might simply quote this remark:

When people say, “I’m the kind of person who,” my heart always sinks.