My writing, writing on writing, and thoughts on writing—and on music, culture popular and unpopular, etc.—can now be found on Substack. Check it out. michaelchabon.substack.com?r=oy2er&utm_...
Only an ignorant, draft-dodging, tinpot showboat weakling would ever consider bringing the military into this situation. www.cnn.com/2025/06/09/p...
#itsclobberintime
A little was enough.
2017 piece. Imaging tech & other modern methods unavailable to Freud have begun to find at least some evidence for some of Freud’s hypotheses—the pleasure principle, for example. Freud was a neuroscientist whose ambition far outstripped his technological means.
If you’ve ever wondered what lives in spineless’s basement.
www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/u...
“Hegseth” is actually an old Norwegian word meaning “internalized homophobia.” www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
Paul Waldman*, writing about the unedifying perma-squirm that was once Marco Rubio, puts it precisely.
*My brother-in-law.
“…because we don’t want the world to be drawn to us. We’re just one more ruthless competitor in an international viper pit, and whatever we gain will be only at others’ expense, because we’re bigger and stronger than they are.”
tinyurl.com/37kvth5u
“But the essence of the Trump foreign policy is that this isn’t a special country, not really. We have no admirable values that lift us up, no particular principles, no desire to foment the spread of liberty. We are not trying to be a beacon to the world…”
Exploitation of mass media to spread disinformation, state orchestration of xenophobia, unholy alliance of nationalist regime and ultra-right (Catholic, in this instance) religion, taking revenge on a scapegoat population for a past degradation/humiliation… our times were born in poor Dreyfus’s.
Found this unexpectedly moving. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...
Perhaps, judging from the current state of things, we were the VHS to the Neanderthals’ Betamax. www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
Until recently I was totally unfamiliar with the splendidly-named Hyacinthe Jadin (1776-1800) and his (even more splendid) Sonatas for Piano with Violin. This is my favorite of the performances I’ve discovered so far. album.link/i/1733259207
An ad agency for McDonald’s France, calling it like they see it, is using graphics and design elements of a fictional meth-smuggling front company to sell “McDo”’s reformulated “McCrispy” fried chicken.
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you/Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you/The vagabond who’s rapping at your door/Is standing in the clothes that you once wore/Strike another match, go start anew www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/w...
25 on 9/19/25. Hard to believe.
Cost-cutting tactics The secret bonuses were just one of many maneuvers UnitedHealth devised to track and cut expenses in its nursing home initiative. Internal emails show, for example, that UnitedHealth supervisors gave their teams “budgets” showing how many hospital admissions they had “left” to use up on nursing home patients. The company also monitored nursing homes that had smaller numbers of patients with “do not resuscitate” – or DNR – and “do not intubate” orders in their files. Without such orders, patients are in line for certain life-saving treatments that might lead to costly hospital stays. Two current and three former UnitedHealth nurse practitioners told the Guardian that UnitedHealth managers pressed nurse practitioners to persuade Medicare Advantage members to change their “code status” to DNR even when patients had clearly expressed a desire that all available treatments be used to keep them alive.
UnitedHealth secretly pressured nurses to change patients' records to include DNRs (Do Not Resuscitate) without their consent, so those patients would die instead of being saved with medical interventions that could cost UnitedHealth money.
This is murder.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Wait, Robert "Blank Generation Blue Mask Girlfriend" Quine was Willard "To Be Is To Be The Value Of A Bound Variable" Quine's nephew?
Fair point.
When your power depends on persuading the populace that everyone hates them and is their enemy, logic demands that you behave hatefully and make enemies of everyone. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...
I love Calling All Destroyers even more!
They were so good!
If you love indie-alt-Americana-country-rock-whatever, right now is a great time to be alive. #Wednesday open.spotify.com/track/1FZXwh...
Am I the only one who hears “I could drink a case of you/And I would still be on my feet” as more of a defiant put down than as sweet talk?
I could write a book.
This is the leap into the abyss. Israel will have committed suicide by genocide. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...
Chipped in to help the great Nelson George make this film a reality. igg.me/at/AGREATDAY...
I was digging Kwame Anthony Appiah’s answer *before* I got to the shoutout! www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/m...
