Susan Glasser in The New Yorker:
So now we can answer the question: How does democracy die? It dies not in darkness, as the Washington Post’s Trump-era slogan would have it, but in the White House itself, in the private dining room off the Oval Office, with the sound of Fox News blaring in the background. That private dining room was Donald Trump’s de-facto headquarters for much of his Presidency. It was where he watched television and where he tweeted about what he watched on television—two of the activities that, perhaps more than any others, defined his tenure. It was also where Trump, on January 6, 2021, remained holed up for a hundred and eighty-seven minutes, as his followers stormed the U.S. Capitol, until he finally, reluctantly, released a video urging them to go home and telling them that he loved them.
…I’ll leave the final word, though, to Cheney, who as a direct consequence of her insistence on not shutting up about Trump and the tragedy of January 6th will likely lose her House seat in Wyoming’s Republican primary next month, before the House committee convenes again, in September. “We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation,” Cheney said. And yet Republicans—the vast majority of them—have chosen Trump’s Big Lie over the hard truths that would enable our democracy to endure. For now. So there is a cliffhanger ending to the committee’s work after all.
More here.
We are all going to die. Most of us don’t know when. But what if we did know? What if we were told the year, the month, even the day? How would that change our lives? These questions drive Nikki Erlick’s debut novel, “The Measure,” which weighs Emerson’s claim that “it is not the length of life, but the depth of life” that matters.
We have seen nothing yet. The dangerous heat England is suffering at the moment is already 
Humans have been expressing thoughts with language for tens (or perhaps hundreds) of thousands of years. It’s a hallmark of our species — so much so that scientists once speculated that the capacity for language was the key difference between us and other animals. And we’ve been wondering about each other’s thoughts for as long as we could talk about them.
In her new book, The Bin Laden Papers, Nelly Lahoud, a senior fellow at New America, has gone through the huge collection of information purloined by Navy Seals in their 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout, information that was declassified in 2017. The book essentially concludes that Carle had it right. Although “falsely” taken to be “a Leviathan in the jihadi landscape,” she says al-Qaeda has actually been notable mainly for its “operational impotence” while bin Laden, its fabled, if notorious, leader, continued to pursue “alarmingly sophomoric” goals and was “powerless and confined to his compound, over-seeing an ‘afflicted’ al-Qaeda.”
CLAES OLDENBURG IS THE SINGLE Pop artist to have added significantly to the history of form. In order to perceive this, however, one must look beyond the Rabelaisian absurdity of his grotesque imagery to the inventiveness of his shapes, techniques, and materials. These are sufficiently original to identify Oldenburg, not, as he has erroneously been seen, as a chef d’ecole of Pop art, but as one of the most vital innovators in the field of contemporary sculpture, whose vision has affected the work of many other young artists of his generation.
After 20 years spent recovering long-lost artifacts and priceless art from across the globe, Dutch art detective Arthur Brand thought his career had peaked. He wondered how any case could top those that turned up a stolen Picasso or the pair of bronze horses made for Adolf Hitler once believed to have been destroyed by the Soviet army.
Many of the things that you believe right now—in this very moment—are utterly wrong.
Scientists are reporting that damage sustained to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) during a micrometeoroid strike in late May 2022 may be worse than first thought.
Ms. Koo wondered whether people who started out at the bottom and achieved high status would support public policies to assist other strivers like themselves. Or, having successfully climbed the socioeconomic ladder, would they perceive upward social mobility as less difficult? “If I did it, why can’t they do it?” Ms. Koo asked rhetorically.
Sylvia Plath is the Diane Arbus of poetry, the verbal equivalent of her visual art. Since Arbus and Plath had strikingly similar lives, it’s surprising that they never mentioned each other and that their biographers have not compared them. They were self-destructive sexual adventurers, angry and rebellious, driven and ambitious. Both suffered extreme depression, had nervous breakdowns and committed suicide. But they used their mania to deepen their awareness and inspire their art, and created photographs and poetry to impose order on their chaotic lives. They shared an ability to combine the ordinary with the grotesque and monstrous, and expressed anguished feelings with macabre humor. Arbus was consciously and deliberately bohemian, Plath outwardly conventional yet inwardly raging. Both explored the dark side of human existence and revealed their own torments.
Katia and Maurice Krafft were both born in the 1940s in the Rhine valley, close to the Miocene Kaiser volcano, though they didn’t know each other as children. They met on a park bench when they were students at the University of Strasbourg, and from that moment on, according to their joint obituary in the Bulletin of Volcanology, ‘volcanic eruptions became the common passion to which everything else in their life seemed subordinate’. They married in 1970, formed a crack team of volcano-chasers, équipe volcanique, and set off to get as close as they possibly could to the very edge of every fiery crater, to collect samples and data and just to be there, ecstatic with the enormity of it all, like a pair of mad moths drawn into a candle flame.
ALTHOUGH VLADIMIR SOROKIN has earned his reputation as Russia’s premier satirist, he deserves more credit for being among its finest metaphysicians. In Russia, as the saying goes, fiction is philosophy. Though very few Russian philosophers have established a position for themselves in the Western canon, the particularities of Russian thought still find their way into the global imagination through the work of literary greats like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Sorokin, known as much for his stylistic range as for his prescient depictions of Russia’s shifting sociopolitical tides, is a standard-bearer in this venerable tradition.
It was the first in