Like lovers' kisses, she biteth — she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish.

David Brooks:

If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is this: Morality is for suckers. To borrow from Thucydides, the strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must. This is the logic of bullies everywhere. And if there is a consistent strategy, it is this: Day after day, the administration works to create a world where ruthless people can thrive.

Time and time again, we hear from people who are somehow surprised by the nihilism of this administration—even though Trump’s moral failure has been on proud display since the very beginning. Brooks has always opposed Trump, but our current slow and steady decline into dysfunction should not shock: it is a desired and concerted outcome.

When Trump creates an unnecessary crisis, it’s unlikely to be a small one. The proverbial “adults in the room” who contained crises in Trump’s first term are gone. Whatever the second-term crisis—runaway inflation? a global trade war? a cratered economy and plummeting stock market? an out-of-control conflict in China? botched pandemic management? a true hijacking of the Constitution precipitated by defiance of the courts?—it is likely to crater his support and shift historical momentum.

I’m not sure I share Brooks’s certainty that “Trumpism” (an empty term if there ever was one) is doomed to fail. The ingredients for authoritarianism are available and ripening: a power-obsessed executive branch, an activist and enabling Supreme Court, an ineffectual and dithering Congress. Now is not the time to hide and await the promised renaissance. It must be earned by continually advocating for a return to governing on shared morals and decency.

A menu describes what a restaurant serves—but a menu also describes who is being served.

Nahwa is a territory that forms part of the Emirate of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. It is a counter-enclave (or second-order enclave) within the Omani territory of Madha, which is itself an exclave of Oman and an enclave within the United Arab Emirates.

He starts the day as he means to continue, with a wee dram.

It was the first font, and perhaps originally the only font that came with the engraver, so it suffered a nameless fate, familiar later to many bespoke bitmap fonts adorning the screens of early computers.

Q: Hola, quería saber el significado de esta frase que escuche en la película The Big Lebowsky:

Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you.

¿Que quiere decir exactamente bar en ese contexto? Gracias por vuestro interés

A: Creo que quieres decir bear, no bar. Bear significa oso, y el dicho quiere decir que algunos días vences los obstáculos en la vida y otros días te vencen a ti.

[P]rior to about the 1920s, no self-respecting Japanese person would eat any kind of tuna at all if they could possibly avoid it. Tuna was so despised in Japan that all tuna species qualified for an official term of disparagement: gezakana, or “inferior fish.” In the old days in Japan, if you had no choice but to eat tuna you’d do everything you could to get rid of the bloody metallic taste of the fresh red meat. One trick was to bury the tuna in the ground for four days so that the muscle would actually ferment, which led to tuna being called by the nickname shibi—literally, “four days.”